I was twelve when my folks took us kids to see "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". I'd seen a few promos for it on TV, and was rather mystified that Paul Newman was in it, because the promos gave me the impression (and maybe it was just me and/or the lousy picture we got) that this was some cheesy grade-C western. I knew by then that Paul Newman was a class act, so what was he doing in this thing?

I couldn't say I recognized the film as an enduring classic when I first saw it, but Newman was so plainly enjoying himself I had to go along for the ride. The really fine thing was that he put every bit of that enjoyment into the character of Butch Cassidy, burning himself indelibly into the persona of an historic figure who probably wasn't a tenth as much fun in real life.

Law, in this instance, is clearly in uncharted territory here and, as is inevitable in such situations, gone up Crap Creek without a paddle or, for that matter, the canoe. But isn't it comforting that we have the necessary morons in prosecutorial positions willing to go for it?

My first De Palma film was "Get To Know Your Rabbit", the memory of which is evergreen for two reasons: Tommy Smothers' onstage homage to Bagism, and the second set of bare female breasts I ever saw on the big screen. Next came "Phantom of the Paradise", one of the first and certainly one of the loopiest Midnight Movies ever created. And then there was "Carrie", my personal pick for De Palma's career masterpiece. I subsequently kept the faith, and De Palma largely upheld it, with "Dressed To Kill" and "Blow Out" twisting a lot of the accumulated tropes of the crime thriller cleverly, giddily, and even hauntingly out of shape.

Then, right on the heels of "Blow Out", came "Scarface". Seeing it on release, in the local Cinerama palace, was a truly singular experience, and one I will say without hesitation I wish I had avoided. At all costs. I will wish to my dying day that I had never seen the dismemberment-by-chainsaw scene, not because it was gory - the effect was conveyed far more by sound than by visuals - but because to this day I've never witnessed such a stark depiction of utter human depravity. Worse, and as some have already mentioned, it seemed to jump from Tony espousing a kind of personal code to Tony tossing it aside like the rest of the trash in his life. Where was the journey that led to the collapse of what integrity the character had? One can infer, but De Palma (and Stone, apparently) offered nothing concrete, nothing to allow any hope of connecting with the course of the remaining narrative. I was left watching this cartoon gangster wallowing in his cartoon mountain of coke as he meets his cartoon end.

When I left the theater, I just wanted to forget. The irony is, I never will. Some might say that signals De Palma's success, but I came away never wanting to see that movie again, and lost all enthusiasm for De Palma's subsequent work. If that's success, then for my part it's a very peculiar variety.

Playboy, in its very early years, was the vision of one man, Hugh Hefner, and was lifted to publishing triumph not just by the pictures of nude women but by the entire philosophy and lifestyle it propounded to a male audience hungering to have such a common, readily available window on their then-current fantasies of personal, social and economic success. Hefner himself personified and became central to the entire fantasy construct that allowed the magazine to flourish.

Playgirl, unfortunately, seemed to have no such singular vision, and stubbed its toe out of the gate by parodying the very title of the magazine - and the movement - it wished to counter in the mainstream marketplace. And since it was such a blatant counter to something else, it had to take itself far too seriously to support the fantasy of the male nudes with anything like the conviction and commitment that Playboy easily delivered with its idylls of what the "sophisticated man" craved.

Playboy, of course, has struggled as well in recent decades as the world has changed around and under it. But it at least had a mission statement that, expressed somewhat fatuously in Hefner's "Playboy Philosophy," still resides in the bedrock of the enterprise. Read that statement and you get a concrete sense of why Playboy came to be one of the defining cultural forces of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. From that standpoint Playgirl never had a prayer…though one must acknowledge that a publishing life of thirty-six years is not exactly something to sneeze at.

Let's not forget that bit of unpleasantness called The Writers Strike, which stopped "Pushing Daisies" cold just as it was getting up a head of steam last season. Sure, most every scripted show was affected (except "reality" shows which, while scripted, try very hard to pretend they aren't), but ones like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Numb3rs" had already built their audiences and could deliver proven tactical and strategic value in the programming flowcharts even after the extended hiatus.

The writers had valid reasons to strike when they did, for as long as they did, and collateral damage was inevitable. I'm just sorry part of it had to be "Pushing Daisies" and not a dreary ball of crud like "Private Practice."

Classic tilting at windmills. In this case the windmill's already been torn down, but these neo-Don Quixotes still see an apparition of it, or are at least desperately trying to conjure it up. The Sanchos in their midst be pretty baffled by this one.