Critics, as well as projectionists, should have savaged "The English Patient." Might have saved the rest of us a couple hours of our lives we'll never have back.

Google search for Mark Wahlberg's abs:

44,800 hits.

Google search for Jessica Simpson's breasts:

2,410,000.

Simon Cowell is compassionate to the contestants, considering the quality of shrieking, preening narcissism on display.

He's only "brutal" in contrast to the Peeps-like contributions of the other so-called judges.

to suggest name-changing of any kind should be legislated.

The names we're talking about keeping, or taking, mostly come from the paternal lineage (not discounting the Gordon-Levitts of the world); chances are it evolved as just another way of keeping score. This is mine: It has my name on it.

You will never, ever, not in this world of humans as we are, sway someone by slamming them or their demographic as ignorant, deluded, insane or unreachable.

You might, theoretically, possibly, reach some individual or another by reasonable appeal.

So all we are saying? Is give lucidity a chance.

On a tangent, I'm wondering about those who envision the South as a wasteland simply because its majority skews Repub/conversative, without understanding that greatness often emerges from the crush of repression, like a hardened muscle from stress.

Would Morris Dees would have become the Klan-dragonkiller/founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center had he not been born on a farm outside Montgomery? Would "To Kill a Mockingbird" exist if Nelle Lee had grown up in some cozy liberal enclave? Would Hank Williams, Wilson Pickett, W.C. Handy, Nat King Cole, Sun Ra, Tammy Wynette, Emmylou Harris, Erskine Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Eddie Kendricks, Dennis Edwards and Shelby Lynne sound the same if they'd been nurtured and coddled by echo chambers of like-minded folk? Dunno.

Just talking about my own Alabama here, not the South as a whole. I'm sure you can think of other examples of some non-ignorant, high-achieving worth-saving folks. You know, like my fellow Alabamians Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, Angela Davis, Ralph Abernathy, George Washington Carver, Robert J. Van de Graff, E. O. Wilson, Courtney Cox, Mia Hamm, Paula Poundstone, Lonnie Holley, Howard Finster, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Joseph Lowery, William March, Helen Keller, William Bradford Huie, Spooner Oldham, Sonny James, Tallulah Bankhead, Joe Louis, Mel Allen, Hugo Black, Percy Sledge, Rick Bragg, Richmond Flowers, Walker Percy, Zelda Fitzgerald, Cynthia Tucker. Heck, I'll even thrown in Condi Rice, because I think she's smarter than she let on all those Bushy years.

This area may reek of political garbage, but some of us - born and raised here, and yet educated to think freely - stay on to try and make a dent in the cleanup, rather than simply abandon it as irradiated landfill.

this article would be about the movie characters.

Does anyone else find it odd that these, what, 16- or 17-year-old kids (the characters) are just now discovering chaste kissing, acting like they've never had a boner before? Isn't that more like an age 10 or 12 discovery?

...is like "Gump." Glenn Close played Garp's mom, Jenny Fields, as a young woman early in the film, and was makeup-aged as the movie rolled on.

Mary Beth Close, who played Garp's girlfriend and wife Helen is (shudder) 3 YEARS OLDER than Robin Williams in real life.

Hollywood may be myopic on this issue (although Wikipedia lists about 50 examples of filmic May-December romances in which the woman is the older partner) but some of the examples listed are misleading.

The article really lost me when it segued into real life. If some 30-something wants to jump Nicholson's wrinkled ass, it actually invalidates the argument, by pointing out that such pairings do exist outside the camera.

And I notice no one's "icking" about Ashton and Demi (she's 15 years older) or "Lost" star Naveen Andrews and Barbara Hershey (21 years older) or Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon (12 years older) or Ralph Fiennes and Francesa Annis (19 years older). Geena Davis is 15 years older than her neurosurgeon husband.

(...Long before anyone had started using the pompous term "graphic novel,"....)

but it apparently sprang up a decade earlier than Moore's work on "Swamp Thing." "Graphic novel" was printed in the introduction to "Bloodstar" in 1976, and subsequently in a couple others that year. Been commonly used ever since to imply that the contents within are not Scrooge McDuck or Baby Huey.

last line was so perfectly done, it wasn't until years later that I remembered its spiritual father: William Faulkner's "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

If you're going to riff, riff off the best.

You're assuming that I or others who doubt haven't searched, and found the lack of anything like evidence of "the divine" wanting.

Tina Turner's legs aside, that is.

Humble, devoted and consistent to what? Seems you're assuming that Something Is Up There and then searching for ways to make your belief seem more tangible.

Which is also what some of us have done -- through the religions we grew up in and those we learned about later in life, through questioning our parents, our pastors, our friends, our professors and a whole heap o' books -- but come to the conclusion that, quelle surprise, many folks are tired of livin' but scared o' dyin'. So we dream up a fantasy otherworld where love is a constant and pain only a memory.

Not surprising, and mostly sweet. Just not compellingly believable.