The concept that there has to be an end to everything is depressing, especially to Americans. Many TV series that were good were run to death in an effort to prevent an end - or maybe recover the joy of discovering how good they were. The smart shows like Mary Tyler Moore and The Prisoner knew when to call it quits.

That said, I don't think it can be the end for these characters who have become mythic. I can't speak for Tony Soprano; since the Reagan administration I have never warmed to vindictive criminals. But even if Rowling ends up burying Harry Potter in an unmarked grave in the Hogsmeade cemetary, he will continue. He will be the template for many imitators, and the starting point for a few authors that will take characters very similar to Potter in new directions.

And that is the point of the end times. For a myth to live, it has to reach a conclusion. Without that, it's just another run-on sentence.

...'cause she has no soul. And that's about all the plagiarism of Disney songs that should be done. (At least I kept to the meter of the song.)

The one item that came to the top of this bunch of random updates was Friday Night Lights, which will undoubtedly join Freaks and Geeks and My So Called Life as shows some people adore, even though they're about awful, dim, irritating people. Those earlier shows romanticized the losers of high school life, who were practically begging for someone to kill them. By comparison, Lights was about brutal, stupid high school thugs that Texans idolize. Calling Lights a "compelling drama" is like putting lipstick on a pig, to use one of President Bush's favorite descriptions of his mother.

That's why no one watched and why the series won't be renewed, unless NBC needs to have a cheap backup hour series to sling in the schedule when one of their new recruits for the fall dies in action. Renewing a loser is cheaper than trying to create a whole new show destined to be killed, like a recruit given ten days of training, then shipped to Iraq.(That's the reason the inferior Sledge Hammer! was renewed for a second season, and run against competition ABC had no chance to beat.)

It was obvious that Havrilesky didn't have any big thing to write about, but didn't have the integrity to say "Here's some random notes about various shows, just to keep you informed." Trying to link these unrelated bits with a catch-phrase, one of her favorite gambits, just didn't work. If a column is just floor sweepings, and honestly sometimes such a column is necessary, writers should just be open about it. After all, the universe doesn't always fall into logical patterns, and quite often it can't even be forced into patterns no matter how hard you try.

And may I say, I can understand how you would do an ad hominem attack on me for trying to point out Havrilesky's failures. Your post rambled a hell of a lot. You didn't really have a point, so you chewed on this caricature of me as a gay basher quite a bit. I'm surprised you didn't call me Don Imus in disguise.

So tell me; why do you defend the Cappucino Queen? Is it because you don't really have any knowledge or love for television, but you want to look stylish while saying nothing?

If you want MY image of myself (although I hate the egotism of having to say it) I'm the guy who stands outside the pure-white castle of the imperious, heartless Countess Bathory, sucking the blood out of the deluded and the hoodwinked. Since this is a medieval metaphor, I don't have dynamite to blow her to the inferno she deserves to inhabit. So I just drag up my catapult and fling over the alabaster walls the bodies of the people she killed and left out in the forest to rot. (I.E., critiques of her articles.) With enough of the bodies stacked up, somebody's bound to notice, and even if they don't, she'll eventually lose her Good Castlekeeping Award of Excellence.

(See? I'm an unpaid amateur, and even I can turn a better metaphor than she can. And more to the point, better than you can.)