...and opt out from giving them this kind of advice. Why? Well, in the case of Friend #1, no matter how well you think you know people, you don't know everything about them--_especially_ when it comes to love and how they behave therein. How can you really know that Friend #1 "scares" away "every" man because she's "too acerbic?" What's acerbic to you may be a hoot to someone else. As well, people who are smart/make cracks usually have had people give them grief since the cradle about how "smart-mouthed" they are. This could very well be a sensitive subject for Friend #2, and your saying this could easily be interpreted as all-too-personal criticism.

In the case of Friend #2, she's too self-absorbed and rigid to listen to you. As others have noted, people like this really don't want advice, they want ego-stroking. You'd be wasting your time telling the truth, and, again, you'd be running the risk of dropping poison in the friendship well that would eventually come back to get you. (Which might be a good thing, given how she sounds like the kind of woman who will drop her single friends the moment the ring is on her finger. :))

So, when this subject comes up for both friends, gracefully distract them or change it. Contrary to what bad chick-lit declares, there are a lot of female friendships in which the subject of boyfriends/romantic relationships seldom if ever comes up. If you don't want to talk about this...don't.

"What next, The Avengers?"

Been there, done that--annoyed every moviegoer stupid...:)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118661/

"I will say that it seemed like McGoohan tried to imagine what might happen to valuable spies during the cold war if they tried to resign."

So the right way to have done the remake was to imagine what might happen to Jack Bauer if he decided to never again have a bad day? Makes sense to me...:)

"(I still say, "Be seeing you" with the circle finger gesture to friends in the know)."

I did come away from THE PRISONER seriously wanting a penny-farthing bike. It's still on my "List Of Things To Get," though I just found out those suckers have no brakes. ;)

"According to one account, when his young daughters wanted to make a movie, he forced them to do it the professional way - making out a budget and do all the paperwork, before even picking up the home movie camera."

Yeesh. That's a classic insecure-artist move: if your kids show interest or talent in "your" profession, make their pursuit of it so miserable that they give up and walk away with their dreams crushed. That'll teach the little bastards to upstage you. :P

"Do escapees in the new Prisoner series get clobbered by a big, bouncy white ball?"

Ya--but in accordance to the Michael Bay "Bigger Uber Allies--Or Else!" edict, Rover is the size of a frickin' McMansion. ;)

...are shrinking--and aren't showing any hope of catching up, much less expanding.

"Traditionally people shift rightward as their bank accounts expand and their flesh wrinkles, but my generation is seemingly the first to move leftward with age."

"And like all paranoiacs, he was very full of himself - not only was he the most besieged man in his world, he was the most important person in his world."

I was a kid when the original THE PRISONER aired. It was the first TV show that I couldn't follow--and my dad couldn't answer a single question about (Me: "Dad, is Number Six dreaming this?" Dad: "I don't know." Me: "Is he pretending to dream this?" Dad: "I'm not sure?" Me: "Is this happening inside Number 2's dream machine." Dad: "I think so." Me: "So, Number Six is pretending to dream this while trapped in the machine? But if the machine makes him dream, how can he pretend to dream?" Dad: "Popcorn's ready.") Upon seeing it recently, I remember the other most annoying thing about it, though I couldn't articulate that at the time--it was smug and self-indulgent as hell. And often overacted off the scale. Now I know why. Thanks, tom!

His ill-considered inchoate columns are bad enough. But his smug, ignorant, "objective," suck-up-to-the-rich inability to see beyond the needs of his neo-con elite class makes him particularly heinous. He's long ceased to make sense--or to matter--so why is he still wasting NYT space?

...but this "click to enlarge" crap is a pain. Does SALON need clicks this badly they have to put readers through these kinds of hoops?

Yeah, Betty has a lot of "pretty princess" conditioning to overcome--and it looks like she's going to need more than one lesson to start learning how.

"I think it's extremely tragic, one of the classic American tragedies...and Havrilesky just skips over "the housekeeper" (the character's name is Carla CARLA, "with CARLA the housekeeper perched between them"

It will be interesting to see just how long Carla sticks around once the 60's progress and real job opportunities open up. My grandmother was a maid for one or two well-off families, and although she remembered the children fondly, she was not at all nostalgic about the grueling workload, the forced lack of opportunity across the economic spectrum--or the time the job took away from her six kids. :P