three things

1. I just saw a commercial for Rush Hour 3 that ended with the voiceover guy saying "directed by Brett Ratner." What? Don't most people who are into movies enough to know directors other than Spielberg and Ron Howard know that Brett Ratner is cinematic poison? Didn't they see Red Dragon? Or *shudder* Money Talks? Weird.

2. I was wondering last night whether Charles Nelson Reilly was dead or not. I suspected he was, but didn't really think so. So I remembered to look it up tonight, and apparently he died in May! WHAT THE HELL! How did I not hear about that? Is my sense of how big a celebrity he was warped by all those Match Game reruns I used to watch, and therefore nobody actually covered his death? Man, that kind of sucks. I liked him.

3. Celebrity deaths come in threes, as everybody knows, but do they usually come within a day of each other? Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder, and Bill Walsh all died today or yesterday. If this had happened during the 1970s, it would have been a lot bigger news. I'm not sure most people remember who any of those guys are (or knew in the first place). I'm not looking forward to reading a bunch of obituaries that have to explain why we should care about who Ingmar Bergman was, and that he wasn't actually Ingrid Bergman (who was female, and died in 1982). Or hearing about how Bill Walsh invented the "West Coast Offense." Or seeing Philadelphia news stations pay tribute to Tom Snyder, the most famous Philly news man ever (on a short list just ahead of Larry Kane).