The Week in Review

I'm pleased that my alma mater won the NCAA basketball tournament, but I'm even more pleased that I didn't hear a single commentator use the phrase "score the ball" this year, as in, "He's a great player. He can score the ball!" Perhaps Robert Hartwell Fiske's ghost taunted Clark Kellogg with visions of the hell reserved for people who abuse intransitive verbs, I don't know, but I didn't once feel the temptation to hurl my remote at the TV and yell, "Intransitive verbs don't take an object!" * * * * * * * Is This Thing On? is the cinematic flipside of Schindler's List if Spielberg had made it a comedy. The movie is about a man in a mid-life crisis who starts doing stand-up comedy. It features the hilarious Will Arnett. It should've been funnier than a feather in the armpits but watching it was more like having my armpit hair yanked out in clumps. I turned it off after about 45 minutes, befuddled at what kind of self-loathing director would intentionally make a depressing movie about comedy. * * * * * * * Andrew Cusack laments the decline of the mass market paperback. I would, too, but I've never bought one. Not once. I've long been gathering used mass market paperbacks like a homeless man gathering rags as the next blizzard rolls in, but I never bought one of those gluey contraptions new. Twenty-five cents was my limit at Ann Arbor bookstores in the late 1980s. Now I'll spend a buck or two. * * * * * * * The feel-good fact of the week comes from the New York Times, explaining why drive-by shootings aren't so bad. “Among shootings in New York City in which a person is struck by a stray bullet, babies are rarely the victims.” Rarely, as in, "Prison isn't so bad. I haven't been raped for a few weeks now."