On what planet is “Hot Wheels” a “sports” theme for a child’s birthday party, but soccer is not? Thanks for zip.

ABC has picked up five pilots, including Nathan Fillion’s (and director Rob Bowman’s) Castle and Rob Thomas’s Cupid.

That latter one sound familiar? It’s a remake of Rob Thomas’s one-season Cupid from 1998, with Bobby Cannavale and Sarah Paulson in the Jeremy Piven/Paula Marshall roles. I caught maybe all of one episode when it was on before, but I understand it had a reasonably rabid cult following. Will they like the new cast? If nothing else I’ll be able to compare the Sorkin/Thomas chops of Paulson to Marshall–Paula went from playing a porn actress on Sorkin’s Sports Night to playing a guidance counselor who falls for Veronica’s dad in Veronica Mars, and now Paulson goes from Sorkin’s West Wing right on to Cupid. I guess all we need now is for Paula Marshall to guest on a Whedon show, as Sarah Paulson had her bit as a doomed hologram in Serenity. Trifecta.

And if you are still so benighted as to never have seen Veronica Mars, get thee to a Netflix envelope. She is in serious running for my favorite show of all time, people. Does that make me a nostalgic nerd bemoaning my unbrilliant teenage years? Maybe! Do I care? No. For that matter, I know there are still some deprived souls among you who haven’t even watched my Fillion in Firefly. And to that I can only say, can the Veronica, shame on me, ditch the Firefly, shame on you.

Is there much worse, in things sleep-related, to wake up at six, decide there’s nothing really to get up for and you can stay in bed, and wander back into slumber only to have a nightmare?

… even though it is. It’s that it’s wrinkly. Good grief. That fabric wrinkles if you look at it wrong, and it looks like it just took her hair and face down with it.

Me, hunting for the particular book the Bean wanted to read at bedtime: “Let’s see, if I were Jeremy Fisher, where would I be?”

Son: “You’d be wherever Jeremy Fisher is right now.”

***

Woman arrested after stalking a guy who was her “boyfriend” in “Second Life” … and who broke it off after he met her in person.

They’re only about fifteen years behind the times. We were doing that stuff in college.

Getting involved online, and breaking it off when we met in person, I mean.

Not stalking outside people’s houses with stun guns and duct tape.

At least, not me.

I swear.

Via Ace’s headlines.

And the number of the counting shall be 82 … Cloris Leachman, 82 years old. Yowza. Paired with Mark Ballas’s dad, Corky, which is just awesome.

Here’s the full lineup. The other big news seems to be that 1) Mercifully, Lance Bass will be paired with a woman. It’s not about homosexuality, it’s about dancing, which in a ballroom pairing requires the complementary movements of man v. woman. Period. and 2) Misty May-Treanor and Maksim Chmerkovskiy! He’s back! I’m dubious as to how many moves she’s got, and Maks will have to go far to find a partner more likely to win than Mel B, but Misty May has earned a lot of goodwill from me by the sheer awesomeness of inviting the President of the United States to slap her rump. She and Kerri Walsh were class all the way.

Cheers: Anna Trebunskaya is not back. Jeers: Karina Sneeroff is. But she’s paired with a celebrity chef I know nothing about, so here’s hoping she’ll dance her way off fairly early.

I’m home. And tired. Which I shouldn’t be, so much, because I slept on the plane–determinedly, so that I wouldn’t watch too much of the soundless miniature Prince Caspian playing on the video monitor above my head. I tried listening through the earphones–”Maybe it won’t be so bad to watch it on the plane!”–but the tiny sound still managed to be screamingly shrill, so I ripped off the earphones and shut my eyes. By the time I woke up, Caspian was conqueror and king and, on the DVD player in the next seat over, JFK was dead but not buried, and we were flying over eastern Oregon. Mission accomplished.

Hey, didn’t you just come back from spending a ridiculously long time in the Midwest?

Yes. Yes I did.

Well, where do you think you’re going now, missy?

Back to the Midwest.

Why?

Family birthday party; thanks for asking. Just a quick trip this time. May blog, may not, as I’ll have a laptop with me … nobody’s ever tried to scientifically verify what would happen if I were disconnected from the web for 24 contiguous hours. It wouldn’t be pretty.

Apparently Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens will reprise their writing duties from Lord of the Rings for the two Hobbit movies. Good for the consistency of the films–consistency that’s been worrying me, given that they’re going to have to swap out actors for primary characters; bad for the general writing quality, which I was willing to largely forgive during Rings for the stunning visuals. Notably, though, I have not felt any urge to go back and re-watch them since the last time I wrote about them. This is a laugh, though:

While looking for another writer, however, Jackson and Del Toro found openings in their schdules, realized how much they loved the material, and decided there was no time to bring in someone unfamiliar with Middle Earth.

Wow. They realized, after Jackson had previously made three gazillion-dollar movies off it, that they love the material? Does anybody really believe that anybody on that production was seriously considering bringing in a writer unfamiliar with Middle-earth, no matter how much time was or was not available? If that really was the case I’d have to say taking it on themselves dodged them a few bullets, cornball writing or no.

I have a new show. The time has come to write about it. I watched another episode of it last night and it’s just fun. It’s not terribly witty. It’s not terribly fresh. It’s not heavy on a good love story. It’s not clever and very proud of itself for being clever. It’s just a straight-ahead action/drama hourlong with cute actors, stories that drive fast and sharp through the whole hour, and fun. It’s Burn Notice, on USA, and it’s like a combination of Magnum, P.I., a laid-back Miami version of Mission Impossible, and a tiny touch of Veronica Mars thrown in, in the sense that nothing ever seems to throw these characters.

Jeffrey Donovan (who should definitely play my brother-in-law in the family life story) plays Michael Westen, “a spy” (I didn’t watch first season, so I don’t know if it was ever made clear what agency he was with, but they don’t bother tagging it specifically this season) who was “burned”–somebody blew his cover and reported as much to his bosses, which is the “burn notice” that means they will not protect or acknowledge him. He’s on his own in Miami with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar–much, much more on her in a minute), a buddy named Sam (Bruce Campbell), and his mother, Madeleine (the Cagney half of Cagney and Lacey). The plots are dual: On one side, he’s being recruited for questionable jobs by the people who burned him. He goes along and tries to gather as much information as possible about them while reluctantly working for them. On the other side, he’s doing jobs for people in trouble–a loan shark here, an embezzling frame-up there.

It’s the focus on the Magnum-like plots that makes it work–we’re not supposed to worry too much about what agency Michael was with, what his always-available, always-competent friends do for day jobs. Westen narrates, detailing choice bits of M.I.-style maneuvers and high-tech equipment here and there, and Fiona is his all-around no-need-to-hire-a gun. Guns of every make, shape and size that she doesn’t hesitate to whip out on the least provocation.

Okay, I’ve always loved Gabrielle Anwar, had a soft spot for her ever since Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken. I keep going back and forth as to whether she was miscast in this show. She is long and lean, a little too thin and spray-tanned for comfort (the Fug Girls would call her orange), and her accent (she’s English) is wobbly, to say the least, while Donovan (he was born in New England; I already know he does a creditable Southern) takes on and puts off the patois of every area of the country in his dealings with baddies. She’s supposed to be the firecracker siren, but she really strikes me as just cute under all her bad-ass cool. Maybe that’s my aforementioned soft spot for her talking, but whatever–she works in this line-up. In a show that took itself more seriously, she simply would not have enough weight, and I’m hoping they do a little more with her as time goes on. Of the four primary characters, we know hers the least–but of course I’ve come in at the second season and maybe they probed her a bit more in the first. She’s a little brittle right now–the strain of playing a vixen is showing a bit. More Gabrielle!

It’s a fun show, cute and cool, and somebody at USA is smart to run it in the summer.

We come from cities
Near and far.

We’ve got Canadians,
Irish ones, and Swedes
We’re all for one,
We’re one for all,
We’re All-American.

Dottie Collins, a mainstay pitcher of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, has died of a stroke, at age 84, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, home of the Daisies.

How’d you like to play baseball in a miniskirt? R.I.P., Mrs. Collins.

Hat-tip J.

I know of nobody who can get more mileage out of a good rant than she does. And this after more or less giving up politics/news blogging. At the risk of propelling Anne the LifePundit into a flame war over the relative value of cats and dogs:

Can your asshole cat bite the nuts off a burglar? I think not.

Hey. At least I found something I wanted to blog today.