I, killer robot

The film: I, Robot, made in 2004, supposedly an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic I, Robot anthology of short stories.
What happened: Detective Spooner (Will Smith) has a strong distrust of robots, so when renowned robot scientist Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) turns up dead in the lobby of U. S. Robotics, the lawman immediately suspects a robot is the killer. Everyone else considers Spooner irrational in his dislike of robots, because the Three Laws of Robotics form "a perfect circle of protection" against robots killing or harming their human masters. But Spooner stays on the case and discovers that the newest robots have the ability to temporarily disregard the Three Laws. With the help of Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), Spooner destroys the misguided VIKI robot and discovers the mitigating circumstances behind the Sonny robot's murder of Lanning.
What bothers me about this film: Before we can proceedd any further with this, it is necessary to review the Three Laws of Robotics, which, in the stories of Isaac Asimov, all robots must follow:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The First Law is meant to calm fears that a robot would decide to kill a human for the pure hell of it. But the inaction clause is troublesome, as this film shows, though well-intentioned, as it is meant to insure that a robot will actually do something if it sees a human in danger. The Second Law insures the subservience of robots to humans. And the Third Law insures that the robot will be around to take orders from humans in most cases.
Most of Asimov's stories derive their tension from the robots' black-and-white application of these rules to an essentially gray world. So it feels like a huge cheat in this film to have robots that can disregard the Three Laws even though the justification ultimately turns out to come from the Three Laws (namely, from VIKI's misunderstanding of the inaction clause of the First Law).
From the very first trailers I feared that this 'adaptation' would be completely unfaithful to the spirit of Asimov's stories. On the one hand I understand the need to make one feature-length film as opposed to a miniseries of episodes taking one short story at a time. But on the other hand, I find it insulting to Asimov's memory that none of his stories, nor the screenplay he actually co-wrote a long time ago, were considered worthy of putting on the big screen.
Something that doesn't quite make sense: I can't recall if this phrase occurred at all in the book, but in the film the three Laws of Robotics are referred to as a "perfect circle of protection." To me, that phrase makes sense only as a marketing slogan, yet in the film it is uttered by both Lanning and Spooner. The way I understand the three laws, a column would be a much more appropriate metaphor than a circle. The First Law is the base without which the Second Law could not stand, and the Second Law is in turn a base for the Third Law. The circle metaphor implies that the First Law is as dependent on the Third Law as the Third Law is on the Second Law, and perhaps also that the dependencies apply in both directions with equal force.
To further examine the circle metaphor, and test the idea that the dependencies apply in both directions, let's go the opposite of the usual order and start with the Third Law. The point of the Third Law is the self-preservation of a robot. A robot will not deliberately step on an exposed land mine just for the fun of it. However, a human could order the robot to step on the land mine and the robot would have to do it; thus, the Second Law can be seen as a check or balance on the Third Law. A human could order a robot to hurt other humans, but the robot would have to refuse to obey that order; thus, the First Law is definitely a check or balance on the Second Law. So, how is the Third Law a check or balance on the First Law? The only thing I can think of is that the Third Law ensures that the robot exists so that it may obey the First Law. But since the robot's self-preservation may be overridden by danger to humans or even humans' orders, there is no guarantee that the robot will always be around. Let's say that the only robot in a large area sacrifices himself to save humans from a fire. But then some wild animals show up to menace the humans. The robot is no longer around to protect the humans from the wild animals. Therefore, the Three Laws hardly make a perfect circle.
Tacky product placement: Detective Spooner (Will Smith) laces up vintage 2004 Converse shoes. It makes sense for Spooner to prefer old-fashioned (e.g., early 2000s) music playback devices over the newer voice-activated players, but the Converse shoes serve practically no purpose in the story. Do trendier shoes in the movie's time frame incorporate robotic components? I even looked in the deleted scenes and couldn't find any such story justification.

You have a face for radio

The show: Ally McBeal
The episode: "They Eat Horses, Don't They?" First aired in 1998 and now available on DVD (second season, first disc).
What happened: Ling (Lucy Liu) sues on-air personality Harold Wick (Wayne Newton as a thinly veiled Howard Stern) for contributing to sexual harrassment at a plant she manages. After a judge refuses to dismiss the case, Nelle (Portia de Rossi) convinces Ling to drop the charge and issue a statement at a press conference explaining that she's dropping the case because she's just become aware of an unspecified physical or psychological deficiency Harold Wick has. Soon after, Harold invites Ally to appear on his show. To everyone's surprise, Ally agrees. As she's being made up, Ally expresses surprise at that the show is not just on the radio.
Meanwhile, John defends a restaurateur sued for serving horse to a diner who enjoyed the meat before knowing what it was.
Why it doesn't quite make sense: So Ally is sometimes quite disconnected from reality. But even she should know that Harold Wick's show is not just a radio show. She was watching it on TV with Renee in their apartment earlier in the episode! It's probably the director who's to blame for this one; the script probably did not call for any image of Harold Wick as Ally and Renee listened to his show. Or maybe Ally was just making small talk.

Jumping Jiminy

The show: The Big Bang Theory
The episode: "The Jiminy Conjecture," first aired September of last year and reran this past Monday.
What happened: While eating dinner in Sheldon's apartment, Sheldon, Howard and Raj hear a chirping cricket, which Sheldon immediately identifies as a snowy tree cricket. Howard is convinced that it's a common field cricket that they're hearing. Sheldon and Howard wager special items in their respective comic book collections and proceed to trap the cricket. However, visual inspection of the specimen fails to resolve the issue. They take the cricket to Prof. Crawley (Lewis Black), the university's appropriately named bug expert. Unbeknownst to the three friends, the university funding to Crawley's lab has been cut and now the old professor is more interested in venting about his personal and professional frustrations than in identifying the cricket that has been brought in. Crawley snaps that the specimen is just a common field cricket. Dejected, Sheldon goes to the bank to retrieve the comic book he put up for the wager from his safe deposit box.
Meanwhile, Leonard and Penny deal with their lackluster sexual encounter. Penny actually takes Sheldon's advice in the matter.
What doesn't quite make sense: Given how obnoxious Sheldon is about always being right (amply demonstrated in the episode's first scene, in which Sheldon proves Wolverine once had retractable bone claws), I think he gives up rather easily at Crawley's identification. For one thing, the cricket did not chirp at all while in Crawley's lab, and an earlier scene suggests that visual inspection is insufficient to distinguish the snowy tree cricket from the common field cricket (whether or not that's the case in real life I don't care to find out). Sheldon doesn't bring this up. Nor does he protest that Crawley is way too emotionally distraught to be able to render his expertise with the necessary due consideration.
Granted that there's little time left in the half hour episode to allow Sheldon to fully cross-examine Crawley, much less find another bug expert to bug about the cricket, but the nit could have been avoided altogether by just putting in some chirps into that scene and having Crawley say something to the effect of "Those chirps don't fit Dauber's correlation." (Sheldon mentioned Dauber's correlation earlier in the episode, so no time would be needed to explain it again, and if time is short, Raj's unfunny parting remark to Crawley could have been deleted with no problem whatsoever).

The invisible secretaries

In the real world, much of what happens in the business world wouldn't occur without the hard work of the secretaries. In the legal profession, for example, it is sometimes joked that it is the clerks, couriers and secretaries who actually make justice happen. Yet, in the legal dramas on television, secretaries are conspicuously absent.

Sure, on Ally McBeal there is Elaine Vassal (Jane Krakowski), but from my understanding of the pilot episode, she's a secretary only for the title character, who is a new associate at the firm. Since she's a busybody, it is easy to get the impression that she's the secretary for all the lawyers in the firm. But with all the different people milling about the offices of Cage & Fish, surely John and Richard each have their own secretaries, too.

On The Practice it made sense for Donnell & Associates to only have one secretary in the first season: Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who later turned out to be a law student going to school at night who then gets to try cases, and whose secretarial duties are taken over by Lucy Hatcher (Marla Sokoloff). Perhaps it is Boston Legal which has come closest to showing how vital legal secretaries are to the success of the lawyers they work for. For Alan Shore (James Spader), his secretary's desk practically had a revolving door through which went several people, including a young woman who accused him of sexual harassment, golden girl Catherine Piper (Betty White) and Clarence (Gary Anthony Williams), a cross-dressing black man. The latter turned out to also become a lawyer, as if perhaps to suggest that only as attorneys do legal professionals reach their fullest potential.

JAG is not a David E. Kelley production, but even there we see only one true secretary: Lt. Harriet Sims (Karri Turner). I know about Chegwidden's yeoman (first the Smithersly Tiner, then Coates), but that was more like a receptionist than a secretary; it was Sims who had the real secretarial duties.

It is understandable that we don't see secretaries much on the various incarnations of Law & Order. Maybe New York's court system can afford secretaries for the district attorneys, but likely not for the public defenders. When the cops barge in on private defense attorneys, the writers and/or directors choose not to show us the cops bypassing the receptionists and secretaries. In the episode in which former Will & Grace star Eric McCormack appeared as a 'sugar daddy' suspected of killing his 'sugar baby,' however, we did see the rich man's secretary running interference between the cops and her boss.

Disappointing choice for Yoda, Carl is

I was very disappointed by the choice of Carl as Yoda in "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side," the Family Guy parody/homage to Empire Strikes Back. Even with the choice of many characters fixed by "Blue Harvest" (the parody/homage of A New Hope), there was still plenty of Family Guy characters left to choose from (contrary to what Seth MacFarlane says on the DVD commentary). Now, if the characters have to be fixed in relation to Chris as Luke, then Darth Vader should be Peter and not Stewie. Besides, some of the mappings were chosen in relation to Peter rather than Chris: Lois as Leia and the Giant Chicken as Boba Fett, rather than Meg as Leia and perhaps the Evil Monkey as Boba Fett. Heck, they even felt free to remap some characters, most notably Meg went from being the trash compactor monster to being the asteroid monster.

What do I have against Carl anyway? I can believe the character as a convenience store manager, but as a sage old Jedi master, the mapping is incongruous, but not enough to be funny.

Another time I will go over nits in this installment uncovered by the IMDb staff, and maybe some of my own.

A note about spoilers in this blog

Just in case anyone is wondering, this blog has no policy on spoilers. Nits may occur at the end of a movie or episode, and in such cases nitpickers need not walk on eggshells. If they want to give a spoiler alert for such nits, it's entirely up to them how exactly to do it and what level of prominence to give to the alert. But for the most part, contributors here will assume that readers who recognize the movie or episode under discussion is one they have not seen and want to see will stop reading at that point, but will hopefully come back after they've seen it for themselves and then there is thus nothing to spoil.

Our valued friendship

The show: The Big Bang Theory
The episode: "The Bozeman Reaction," first aired on CBS a couple of days ago.
What happened: I can pretty much repeat what Bill said in a post yesterday: "Thieves break into the apartment where Sheldon and Leonard live and steal computers, external hard drives, some video game consoles and several video games. Predictably, Sheldon and Leonard get a ridiculously elaborate security system installed in their apartment." After "getting trapped and electrocuted by the security system he had [Howard] Wolowitz install," Sheldon gets the "idea to move to Bozeman, Montana," where his bags are stolen immediately upon arrival, quickly convincing him to return to Pasadena.
What has me wondering: After deciding on Bozeman, Montana as his new home, Sheldon records a farewell video message for his four friends, or, to be exact, three friends and one acquaintance. Upon returning, his friends are actually happy to see him, and all jokes about wanting Sheldon gone or killed are duly forgotten. Howard is the first to greet Sheldon, prompting Sheldon to tactlessly remark that "the acquaintance" was the first to greet him.
This made me laugh, as that line sounds like vintage Sheldon. But now it gets me to wondering if Sheldon forgot how differently he valued his friends in the episode "The Friendship Algorithm." In that episode, eager to have Barry Kripke as a friend so he can have more time on a supercomputer, Sheldon decided that having five friends would be too much for him, so he decided to 'defriend' Raj. He carefully explained his decision, and even though Howard does not have a PhD, his "cologne is an assault on the senses," and he's "not available for video games during the Jewish high holidays," Sheldon decides to keep Howard as a friend.
At some point between "The Friendship Algorithm" and this episode, Howard was demoted from "friend" to "acquaintance" while Raj was promoted from expendable friend to valued friend. Apparently Penny was also promoted in Sheldon's estimation. I do remember I spent a whole blog post on Monday reminding nitpickers that humans often behave illogically. But that caveat almost seems to not apply to Sheldon. Could Sheldon's friendship revaluation have taken place as he lay twitching on the floor on account of Howard's security system?

They had to do the episode in which they get robbed

With last night's episode titled "The Bozeman Reaction," the shark gets ever closer to The Big Bang Theory. Thieves break into the apartment where Sheldon and Leonard live and steal computers, external hard drives, some video game consoles and several video games. Predictably, Sheldon and Leonard get a ridiculously elaborate security system installed in their apartment. When I read the episode description on TV Guide, I immediately thought, "Oh, they're doing one of those."

In theory, there is a small, finite amount of basic plots writers can draw upon for their stories. This means that the best that writers can hope for is that they've put enough ornaments on the basic plot so that the story's familiarity does not bother readers too much. But when a sitcom starts falling back on overused plots like the overreaction to a home robbery, it is a clear sign of trouble for the show's quality.

To be fair, Sheldon's idea to move to Bozeman, Montana, is a fresh idea, at least compared to his getting trapped and electrocuted by the security system he had Wolowitz install. After the interview with the policeman, Leonard seems somewhat nonchalant about the fact that his apartment was just broken into. Though I suppose that getting regular sex with an attractive blonde is for a guy like Leonard a much greater priority than worrying that the thieves might return for a second helping. And of course, as a character, Leonard has to act as a balance to Sheldon and his hysteria.

Jealousy: illogical, yet boring and predictable

Nitpickers occasionally need to be reminded that humans don't always act logically and that characters in a story sometimes say things that don't really advance the story.

A perfect example of this came up last week when my girlfriends and I were watching Lie With Me, from Jamaican-born director Clément Virgo, who makes movies as boring as those of some French directors. In the movie, Leila (Lauren Lee Smith) seduces David (Eric Balfour) by having sex with a nervous guy (Michael Facciolo) as he watches from his car, where he gets serviced by a woman who thinks she's his girlfriend. After being a tease for a good majority of the film's first act, Leila and David finally get together and have sex several times. Then they go to a club where Leila dances provocatively with two men she does not know. Back home, David questions Leila about the way she dances. Surprise, surprise, he's jealous. At that point in the movie, my friend who's also named Lisa, says to me: "I've got a nit for you."

I had to tell her that's not a nit. I would not tolerate that kind of crap from my boyfriend, but there are lots of men who get jealous when their woman dances with another man, so it's not unrealistic in any story when men get like that. In the case of the characters in the movie, it's absolutely ridiculous because the way Leila got David interested in her was by doing more than dancing with another man. But like your typical Neanderthal, David gets all jealous about the dancing just the same.

Maybe you can't get nits from jealous outbursts, but you can mine them for comedy, as Ellen DeGeneres realizes. She had Jake, from The Bachelor as a guest on her show yesterday morning, and asked him about the incident with Rozlyn. It seems that soon after the Bachelor gave Rozlyn a rose, the show's producers became aware that Rozlyn had slept with one of the show's staffers. Apparently, what Rozlyn should've done is wait to be chosen the Bachelorette so she could sleep with several different men. By the show's rules, the title single person is the only one allowed to sleep around. But where Ellen got the comedy from was Rozlyn's assertion that her personal life is none of anyone's business, forgetting for a moment that she's being confronted about her personal life precisely because she has allowed her personal life to become the business of a TV show's producers. Jake on Ellen didn't express any jealousy towards the staffer who slept with Rozlyn, but I won't be one bit surprised when on The Bachelor he complains of feeling betrayed.

Let old Admirals retire

I was watching a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation and it got me to thinking about a potential nit. As a rule, I don't want to post nits to this blog about Star Trek episodes or films completed prior to this blog's inception. But I couldn't find any mention of my nit in the standard nitpicking texts.

It was about the first season episode "Too Short a Season," in which Admiral Mark Jameson (Clayton Rohner), old, frail and weak from the effects of Iverson's disease, came aboard the Enterprise on a mission to solve a hostage crisis on a planet he'd been to decades before. Picard is obviously concerned that the wheelchair-bound old Admiral might not be up to the mission, but at the same time gives him all due military courtesy. Picard doesn't know that Jameson obtains a rejuvenating drug untested for humans. By the time of the final confrontation, the old Admiral looks more like a teenager than a seasoned flag officer.

As far as I can tell from this episode, Jameson continued to serve in Starfleet after being diagnosed with Iverson's disease, which, to Dr. Crusher's knowledge, is incurable. My question is: how come Jameson didn't retire from Starfleet after his diagnosis? Or get some kind of medical discharge? In today's military, a serious and incurable ailment like Iverson's would be a completely understandable reason to be released from duty.

In the 24th Century we imagine that the monetary aspect of retirement would become irrelevant; Jameson would get medical care, and food and shelter, regardless of the facts of his service record. But the reason for retirement would still exist, even more so than today: when people live long enough, they will inevitably reach a point when they are no longer able to do their jobs.

Phil Farrand does point out in the Nitpicker's Guide for Next Generation Trekkers that the transporter pad does not have a wheelchair ramp, and yet Jameson came aboard the Enterprise with a wheelchair. Clearly there are many varied obstacles to Jameson's continued service. But I don't see anything in either the Nitpicker's Guide nor at NitCentral suggesting that Jameson ought to have retired from Starfleet. Sure he can be recalled for one last mission, but his wearing of the uniform suggests that he continued to serve. When Admiral McCoy showed up the first episode, he was wearing civilian clothes. And though much older in years, he was in better shape than Jameson at the beginning of this episode!

Just now getting around to it

I put off watching I, Robot for a long time because it didn't strike me as being at all faithful to Isaac Asimov's classic stories. It seemed to me that instead of the carefully nuanced, thoughtful stories of robots making sense of their clear-cut programmed morality in a world full of gray areas, the movie was just going to be a high-octane, no holds barred us vs. the evil killer robots shoot-'em-up with bullets flying everywhere.

My mind was somewhat put at ease when I saw that the film begins with a statement of the three Laws of Robotics, which form the core of the morality programmed into robots in Asimov's vision. Look here in two weeks for my detailed critique of the film.

A note about nitpicking Medium

We've gotten a number of comments, both publicly and privately, that psychics are not real and that that is a major nit for the show. But we can't count that as a nit because Allison DuBois being psychic is the fundamental premise of the show. If you can find an episode that flatly contradicts the basic premise of the show, that would be different. In fact, that would be nitpicker's gold.

When you watch a show, you have to accept its fundamental premise, at least while you're watching. Otherwise, why watch that show? So with Star Trek we accept that humans can (or will be able to) travel faster than light without suffering the relativistic side effects predicted by Einstein, with Knight Rider you accept that a car can drive itself and do all this other cool stuff, with Xena you accept... well, you get the idea.

For things that are not part of the basic premise of the show, it is fair game to nitpick them based on real life knowledge, provided that previous episodes have not established anything in the matter. That's why it's valid for Lisa to nitpick the cryptography in last week's Medium rerun based on her real-life knowledge of cryptography. Unless one of you can come up with something from a previous episode to render her nits moot.

Important warning about lottery in your local news!

Yesterday, your local news might have carried an important warning for those of you who play the Mega Millions: Because more states will join the Mega Millions madness, it is predicted that the jackpots will get smaller! Oh, my God! Has the President been alerted? What a cataclysmic event! Players will go from not winning $300 million to not winning $100 million! What a disaster! Heaven help us! Heaven help us all!

Don't know much 'bout cryptography

The show: Medium
The episode: "The Medium is the Message," first aired on CBS on October 16, 2009, and reran last week in a different time slot (there was a new episode on Friday).
What happened: Allison starts seeing strange symbols everywhere. Her visions and dreams lead her to the infamous Libra Slayer, a serial killer who long ago murdered young women and left coded messages disclosing his next victim, and who has just now resurfaced. The strange symbols are so pervasive for Allison that she even writes a note for one of her daughter's teachers using the symbols instead of the English alphabet. Davalos is predictably skeptical when Allison tells him the Libra has resurfaced, but must take her seriously when a new victim shows up with a coded message.
Scanlon in this episode is less skeptical of Allison, and when he finds a bookshelf filled with books on cryptography in the house of Neal (Fisher Stevens), the man Allison says is the Libra, he sounds convinced that they're on the right track. However, the clock is ticking as it takes the police hours to decode the Libra's messages and they know the Libra will strike again soon because they have a new message that needs decoding. Just in the nick of time, Allison digs up the weird note she wrote for her daughter and creates the key with which to decode the message and figure out the Libra's next victim.
What has me wondering: Both times I've watched this episode, the scene of Scanlon and the bookshelf bothered me, and I wasn't sure why. Now that I've thought about it more, it was the scene of Allison creating the key to decode the message that should've bothered me. At first I was like, well, I have a bookshelf of Bibles and books about the Bible, but it doesn't make me a theologian. A bookshelf of books about cryptography doesn't make Neal a cryptologist. However, for his purposes as a serial killer, Neal doesn't want to create unbreakable codes. He wants to create codes that can be solved but only after he has committed the crime. I don't know much about cryptography, but I do know that there are encryption schemes that would be suitable for Neal's purpose. And I also know that a simple substitution cypher is not one of them!
See, in a substitution cypher, all you're doing is replacing each instance of a symbol with another. Take for example the message "I will kill Bill." Replace each letter with the next letter in the alphabet, make them all uppercase, remove spaces, and you get "JXJMMLJMMCJMM." Notice that the letter M occurs a lot in the coded message, because L occurred a lot in the plaintext. A short message like that might not be as susceptible to frequency analysis, especially if the author contrives it to have a higher than normal proportion of certain letters, but it's short enough that you can try every possibility until you hit the one that makes sense. That might take ten minutes by hand. A longer message in English will have a greater frequency of E than of L. (Try it with my previous blog post).
That means that a longer message, like the ones the Libra Slayer writes, should also be susceptible to frequency analysis if they are coded with simple substitution cyphers. The fact that Allison was able to create a key for the message proves that the Libra's message, at least his latest one, was in fact a substitution cypher. It's true that he used strange symbols instead of English letters. That can slow down computer entry. But here's what I would do: I would just sequentially assign letters to the symbols as I go over the message. Let's say the first symbol of the message looks like a half moon with a horizontal slash. All the half moons with slashes in the message are now As. Say the second symbol is a square divided into nine smaller squares. Guess what? All the squares with nine squares inside them just became Bs. And so on and so forth. That might take ten minutes, doing it slowly so as to be sure to do it correctly.
With that done, I can transcribe the message into English letters. It still looks like gibberish, but now I can feed that gibberish into a computer and have it do a frequency analysis, and if that fails (if the author was clever enough to avoid the letter E in the plaintext), I can just have the computer try all 25 possibilities and see if any of them make sense. Why does that take the police 10 hours to do? No wonder the police have a reputation for incompetence.

Nicole needs a better lawyer

The show: Days of Our Lives
The episode: The one which aired yesterday, January 6, 2010, the latest in the baby-switching saga.
What happened: Nicole, sporting artificially black hair, is in trial, with a black lawyer as her defense attorney. Her lawyer begins to ask for leniency but the judge rudely cuts him off. Then, several witnesses talk about what an awful, dishonest woman Nicole is. The judge thanks the witnesses and comments that no one has said anything positive about Nicole. Then this guy bursts into court, and soon he's testifying that Nicole loved Sydney as if Sydney was her own flesh-and-blood baby, and that no sentence the judge could hand down could be worse than what Nicole is already feeling.
Why it makes no sense: Do the writers watch any legal dramas? There are still plenty to choose from these days, even as the crime scene investigation genre has caused a decrease in lawyer dramas. Apparently, the Days of Our Lives writers seem to think that in a trial, the witnesses just get on the stand and testify free-style, without any guidance from counsel for their side and without any cross-examination from opposing counsel, and that judges are in the habit of thanking witnesses for their testimony.
Worse still, Nicole's lawyer seems to be completely asleep at the wheel. Not only does he fail to cross-examine any of the witnesses for the prosecution, it doesn't occur to him to round up just one positive character witness for Nicole. He must be one of those overworked, underpaid public defenders. But why couldn't Nicole get a high-priced power lawyer? I can believe that E. J. wouldn't want to spring for such a lawyer (because it wouldn't occur to him that a guilty verdict would be more solid if there's no grounds for appeal on the basis of inadequate counsel), but why doesn't it occur to the judge that such a high-profile defendant needs a high-profile lawyer, and not some nincompoop throwing in the towel?
Of course I understand that the conventions of the soap opera are different than those of the legal drama. The one positive character witness barging into the courtroom at just the right moment is a plot device right at home in the soap opera. But by making the incompetent defense lawyer a black man, the writers or the producers have chosen the worst time to add diversity to the guest cast.

I get called a man a lot

Tonight CBS pre-empted New Adventures of Old Christine and Gary Unmarried for a special showing of I Get That a Lot, a one-note show in which celebrities impersonate common folks like dry cleaner attendants and parking valets, while trying to deny they're the celebrity they really are.

There is hardly anything to nitpick in such a predictable show, but I just had to say something about Rachael Ray being called a "culinary maestro." It's one thing to make English words gender-neutral, such as calling Halle Berry an actor rather than an actress (I'm all for that), but it still sounds a little jarring to use in a gender-neutral manner a loanword from a very gendered language such as Italian. I know Spanish and Italian are different, and that having studied Spanish in high school does not qualify me as an expert in Italian. But I do know that in Italian, just like in Spanish, most nouns ending in O are masculine. So to me it sounds a little insulting to use such a noun for a woman.

Groups of 24 hours of our lives

In today's episode of Days of Our Lives, Sammy and E. J. get a ransom note for their baby, Sydney, dated January 5, 2010. The ransom note also has geographical coordinates: 39 point something North, I don't remember what West.

So this shows that time on Days of Our Lives flows in parallel with real life time. But you wouldn't know it from most episodes, in which almost every scene ends with a character staring blankly at the character who just asked her/him a question, and many scenes begin with a confirmation that the plot thread has not really moved forward since its previous appearance in the syuzhet.