"Gilligan's Island"

Maybe this is rose-colored glasses on the part of someone as yellow as me but the passengers aboard the Minnow had to have been seeing red or been pretty blue about being marooned. And on gray days green with envy for the comforts of home while things grew increasingly black.

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When I'm Governor...

… I will ask the State Assembly to enact legislation mandating that anyone marrying for the third time respond to all questions pertaining to wedding vows using these words: “Well, for what it’s worth, sure, I guess.”

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This is, like... crazy!

The smoking gun of our nation’s mounting illiteracy is the ever-increasing use of the word “like.”

Now I’m not saying I don’t use it from time to time, but some folks - yes, you small fry mostly - can’t get through a sentence without it.

Why “like” as opposed to, say, “defoliant?” It’s because one is trying to express oneself but is incapable of doing so, so they instead describe not what something “is” but rather what it is “like.”

Kinda scary. (Yes, “kinda” is a word….)

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"Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice A Day"

I simply do not “get” this oft-quoted expression. And I’ll have you know I even own a broken clock, both hands of which fell completely off some time ago.

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Your Guide to Better Movies

Few aspects of filmmaking are as critically important as casting. Think “Braveheart” starring Gilbert Gottfried.

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My Favorite Stupid Moment From a Movie

In the film “Jurassic Park,” when the T-Rex attacks the car, one of the two children trapped alone inside frantically – and I mean frantically – searches about for a flashlight, yes, a flashlight, because it goes without saying that, when attacked by a T-Rex, it most certainly helps to have one handy.

Upon finding it, the girl hurriedly turns it on and points it directly into the ornery beast’s massive eye, surely filmdom’s equivalent of clanging the triangle on a cattle drive and yelling “Come and get yer grub, fellas!!!” As it dawns upon their feeble minds that they are in fact drawing attention to themselves, the boy – lesser idiot of the two – repeatedly implores her to turn the light off, an act which, while involving the same simple flicking of a switch, is evidently rendered infinitely more difficult than was turning it on, as the girl simply cannot turn the flashlight off.

It is with only the wispiest guilt that I confess: Never have I wanted to see two children devoured whole as I did in that moment. Alas, only the lawyer was downed like a toothpick-skewered olive, ignominiously perched as he was atop the porcelain throne.

BILL

"Monday, Monday"

It’s a little known fact that record producer Lou Adler fought long and hard with songwriter John Phillips over the lyrics to The Mamas and The Papas hit “Monday, Monday,” insisting that the words “Monday, Monday, so good to me” be changed to “Monday, Monday, boy that day sucks” on the basis of, in Adler’s words, “if we don’t they’ll think you’re a bunch of idiots.”

In the end, as in so many cases, a compromise was reached with the addition of the line: “Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day.”

BILL