samhexum

I am pretty sure the last time I watched the Oscars was during the Roosevelt administration but I don't remember if it was Franklin or Teddy.

This show has been a steaming pile of shit recently.

Sorry, but I continue to watch a lot on YouTube and want to hurl every time I see one of the approximately 753,839 ads they show for this every hour.

Ya gotta like a 6'5 gay former rugby player who posts videos and shorts whilst taking bubble baths.

The scene: ShopRite. 4AM. A devilishly handsome shopper, in the prime of his life, drives his handicap cart past four cops talking to a man, and as the devilishly handsome shopper puts his 16 bottles of assorted Pepsi flavors, free matzoh, and various items that barely added up to the minimum of $75 for the free matzoh in his trunk, he hears "I don't want to press charges" and the devilishly handsome shopper wonders "what is this world coming to if supermarkets are no longer considered sacred places?" Then after he drives home in 15 minutes because nobody is on the road at that hour, he pulls into his driveway and finds a car sitting in front of the door. Surmising that her remote isn't working, the devilishly handsome shopper uses his to open the door and after they park and he begins to unload his trunk, she asks what building he's in. He tells her and she says she's in the other but can't find her key, so can he open the garage door again so she can walk around to the front and use the intercom. Rather than tell her that the keys work for both buildings (because his leg was acting up and he didn't want to add another step to his night) the devilishly handsome shopper used his remote to open the door for her then continued unloading, knowing that he had earned some major good karma for his heroism.

She'll play Connie Francis in the B'way musical starting April 1. The role marks a return to Broadway for The Pitt star, who made her debut in Hadestown in March 2024. She begins her limited run starting April 1, opposite Matthew Morrison as the crooner Bobby Darrin, and will later play opposite Jeremy Jordan, when he takes over April 21. In addition to her role as Dr. Trinity Santos on The Pitt, Briones has often appeared on stage, including in the Hamilton national tour and East West Players’ Next to Normal. Briones said she was drawn to play Francis, a famed 1950s and ‘60s ballad singer, because it allows her to imitate the vocal style of that era. It also balances well with the more serious content of The Pitt.

Daniel Radcliffe Makes ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ Shine The actor’s fondness for the audience radiates outward in this delightful interactive play about naming and noticing the good in the world. Review By Helen Shaw March 12, 2026. Before I went to “Every Brilliant Thing,” now open on Broadway at the Hudson Theater, a friend who had already seen it braced me. “Look,” she said, working her way up to it. “It’s going to make you love your fellow man.” That news didn’t exactly come as a surprise; I saw Duncan Macmillan’s interactive solo show 12 years ago, when it still starred its co-writer, the comedian Jonny Donahoe. Back in 2014, it charmed my socks right off my body. (Socks are kind of a theme.) Surely with the star Daniel Radcliffe, it would again? Yes — but yes in a new way, too. When you enter the Hudson Theater, it looks almost as if we’ve turned up for rehearsal. Instead of a set, the seating includes several risers onstage, and the front of the stage itself has been replaced with a broad set of stairs down into the orchestra. The usual preshow scrum has an extra, agitating element in it. Dashing up and down the stairs, collaring theatergoers in the aisles, then rushing back to consult with various assistant director or stage manager types is a guy in sneakers and a violet sweatshirt, his short beard pointing vigorously and persuasively at anyone he waylays. This is Radcliffe in hyperactive choreographer mode: As the narrator of the frequently participatory “Every Brilliant Thing,” he must cast, and often physically arrange, his audience. He murmurs in one guy’s ear; that man will need to speak a few lines an hour from now. He coaxes a couple into highly visible corner seats, and you know they’ll feature too. Radcliffe is deep into crowd-work by the time the lights dim, so that once he starts the show proper, all of us — from the giddy volunteers to the participation-averse — are already over being star-struck. We’re not fans; we’ve become collaborators instead, a useful attitude to have in an openhearted show about naming and noticing the good. “The List began after her first attempt,” Radcliffe says. “A list of everything brilliant about the world. Everything worth living for.” The List is a child’s response to a parent’s suicidality, a desperate but also sweet and silly gesture meant to tether his mother to the Earth. (“His” mother does not, of course, refer to Radcliffe’s mother. The play is fiction, and dozens of actors, including Minnie Driver and Lenny Henry, have played the narrator, changing details to suit themselves.) As the narrator counts off, voices from the audience shout out their assigned brilliant thing: The first item, which we hear several times, is “ice cream” because the boy started making his list when he was 7. As a message to the narrator’s fragile mother, the List doesn’t work, or at least she won’t talk to him about it, even after she returns from the hospital the first time — or after subsequent hospitalizations. (He mails her an expanded version of the List from university, “anonymously,” he says.) As cheery as Radcliffe seems, we do notice that the shocked boy is himself offered help only intermittently, primarily from a kind school counselor, Mrs. Patterson, played by a member of the audience, who gamely turns her sock into a joke-telling sock puppet to draw out the frightened child. The narrator’s dad has less to say about the family’s crisis, and the night I saw the show, Radcliffe cast a magnificently taciturn theatergoer in the role. As happened again and again, the vicissitudes of audience participation created some spectacularly funny effects. When, during a wedding scene, the dad was called on to make a toast, he stared the “bride” (yet another audience member) dead in the eyes and improvised, terrifyingly, “When I first met you, I didn’t get it.” The narrator grows up and into his own depression — he tells us that he and his partner have a black dog, named Metaphor, who follows him everywhere — and so the List becomes a crutch and an anchor and a blanket. As the story unfolds, he calls out 24 (“Spaghetti Bolognese”) and 320 (“Making up after an argument”) and 518 (“When idioms coincide with real-life occurrences, for instance: waking up, realizing something and simultaneously smelling coffee”). The List changes purpose and even authorship, but the numbers keep climbing, moving on toward a million by the show’s end. “Every Brilliant Thing” is itself an accretive artwork: it started as a short Macmillan monologue, was expanded into a collaborative project — people were invited to contribute on Facebook — and then blossomed into this crowd-work-heavy performance, informed by Donahoe’s experience as a comic. Since 2014, it has became a juggernaut, performed in at least 80 countries, and still gathering speed. This particular iteration, directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, has moved to Broadway from the West End, and it does not, strictly speaking, need Radcliffe and his sunflower openness. The play’s instruction to notice what’s beautiful about the world has real motive power, and the interactive components have been machined to perfection. But the production does have Radcliffe, and he is himself a brilliant thing. Perhaps it’s because he has a quality of perennial boyhood. Not that Radcliffe isn’t fully adult in affect — the gentleness with which he asks his audience to pretend along with him, plus the beard, mark him as a Peak Dad. But he hasn’t lost his inbuilt spring. (When Radcliffe is excited, he boings straight up into the air, like a pop star being launched out of a stage cannon.) Radcliffe’s fully a theater creature now; he won a Tony Award in 2024 for his performance in “Merrily We Roll Along.” And yet we loved him first on film as Harry Potter, or “the boy who lived.” In “Every Brilliant Thing,” the narrator grows up over the course of the show; Radcliffe grew up in front of everyone. As wonderful as other actors might be in the part, it’s key that we knew this one as a little kid, plucky in the face of fear. And something more is happening here, too. Radcliffe makes himself extraordinarily available to us — his fondness for the audience radiates outward from wherever he is onstage. When participants make tiny errors (say, Mrs. Patterson’s joke is a dud), he laughs with unguarded delight. He thanks those yelling out their brilliant things with a courtly nod. Radcliffe doesn’t just do away with the fourth wall, he manages to expand his magical aren’t-people-wonderful optimism to include the whole orchestra, mezzanine and balcony. (His “Merrily” co-star and friend Jonathan Groff achieves a similar area-of-effect spell in “Just in Time.”) The same day that I saw “Every Brilliant Thing,” I read about a Pew survey which found that Americans don’t trust their neighbors. Out of 25 countries polled, the United States logged the highest proportion of respondents — 53 percent! — who had described their fellow citizens’ “morality and ethics” as bad. By the time I reached the theater, I had managed to get pretty despondent about it, and I was well on my way to a panicky spiral. As the show began, and we all started to laugh, I felt relieved that the production was going to let me escape that chilling portrait of our body politic. But as “Every Brilliant Thing” went on, I started thinking about it all over again. Come to this theater, I thought at those 53 percent. I bet I know what might help. Every Brilliant Thing NYT Critic’s Pick Through May 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/theater/every-brilliant-thing-review-daniel-radcliffe.html

https://www.tvline.com/2122811/access-hollywood-karamo-steve-wilkos-canceled-nbcuniversal/ "Access Hollywood" will continue to produce new episodes through September.

https://www.tvline.com/2121738/family-guy-spin-off-stewie-series-order-fox/ Family Guy Spin-Off Centered On Stewie Gets Two-Season Order At Fox this latest extension of the "Family Guy" universe will not interfere with Stewie's continued presence on the main show — unlike Cleveland Brown, who was written off "Family Guy" for the duration of "The Cleveland Show," which ran for four seasons between 2009 and 2013 before the character returned to "Family Guy." "Stewie" will pick up after Peter and Lois' son gets the boot from his old preschool, and "is forced to enroll in a new one that's not exactly top-of-the-line," per the official logline. "It's attended by a handful of kids he doesn't know, and a 75-year-old class turtle with a half-cocked theory on just about every subject. Stewie's miserable, the other kids are miserable, and even the turtle is miserable... until Stewie begins rolling out his trusty array of devices to take them anywhere in space and time, turning every boring day at school into an insane and surreal adventure."

I watched the first two episodes. Likable cast, a bit of humor, just quirky enough to not be too clever or cutesy.

There's an ad for Kohl's that's running now in which the Kohl's mom gets weepy over Kohl's cash. She says I promised myself I wouldn't cry and in my head I finish the sentence with, but then I saw this ad and realized how vacuous and annoying I am and the waterworks began.

Both my grandfathers died in 1929. I believe they both missed the Depression. I've never missed either of them.

Nah, he was team Woodstock

BAM Adebayo had the second highest one game point total in NBA history last night (83).

I have been bitching about a lot of TV lately but I thought DOC was very good last night. Blair underwood will be joining the cast as a brilliant surgeon next season and actually makes his debut in this year's season finale. It has been renewed for a 22-episode order, after Season 1 spanned just 10 installments.

happy 119th birthday dad!

Last night, on a "very special" episode of HIGH POTENTIAL... cliched, overly simplistic dialogue...

Northwell Health has acquired a 338,000-square-foot abandoned department store at 96-05 Queens Blvd. in Rego Park for $235.5 million from Steve Roth. The retail property, known as Rego Park I, was most recently home to a Marshalls and a Burlington, before they moved out approximately one year ago. Since then, the site has been vacant. Prior to Marshalls and Burlington, the space was occupied by a Sears. It was also once housed by an Alexander’s, before the department store filed for bankruptcy and closed its 11 locations in 1992. Northwell Health has not yet gone into detail about its plans for the property, which also includes a parking garage with 1,236 spaces. While Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Forest Hills is only one mile away from the property, at 102-01 66th Rd., it is possible that they may transform this space into another hospital that may be more accessible to residents in the area. “Northwell has a long-standing commitment to ensuring our neighbors and patients across Queens can access world-class health care regardless of their ZIP code or their ability to pay,” Northwell Health said in a statement. “We’re excited to explore ways this strategic investment can serve more New Yorkers and meet the diverse health care needs of all the communities we serve.” Over the last 20 years, Northwell Health has made 20 acquisitions. These property purchases have helped it grow over this period of time into the largest private employer in New York State. Today, it has more than 100,000 employees. Northwell Health also owns properties across the street from Rego Park I, including the Rego Park Tower at 95-25 Queens Blvd. and a 1-story building adjacent to it. The property was built in 1959. It was bought by Roth’s real estate firm, Alexander’s Inc., in 1995, one year before a Sears location opened there. Roth and his partners stand to gain more than $140 million from the $235.5 million sale. Alexander’s Inc. relocated the recent occupants of this property to the adjacent Rego Park II. Both properties are part of the mixed-use Rego Park Center. The property was built in 1959. It was bought by Roth’s real estate firm, Alexander’s Inc., in 1995, one year before a Sears location opened there. Roth and his partners stand to gain more than $140 million from the $235.5 million sale. Alexander’s Inc. relocated the recent occupants of this property to the adjacent Rego Park II. Both properties are part of the mixed-use Rego Park Center.

https://apple.news/ARCFLv0cUTFa0sc7tltymUQ The Forgotten New York Burger Chain That Lost The Fast-Food Wars Though today we live in a world where fast food empires can stretch from Boston to Beijing, for much of the 20th century, few franchises could claim to have achieved national saturation, much less global. Instead, it was an age of regional restaurant chains, many of which did not survive the ensuing fast food wars between their larger competitors. One such example is Wetson's, a burger franchise probably only remembered by New Yorkers of a certain generation.

Yeah, I just checked... I have it and the Stefano book.

FBI spinoff "CIA" is a one-hour crime drama centered on two unlikely partners: a fast-talking, rule-breaking loose cannon CIA case officer and a by-the-book, seasoned and smart FBI agent who believes in the rule of law. When this odd couple are assigned to work out of CIA's New York station, they must learn to work together to investigate cases and criminals posing threats on U.S. soil, finding that their differences may actually be their strength. Stars Tom Ellis, Nick Gehlfuss, Natalee Linez Star Tom Ellis Nick Gehlfuss Natalee Linez

I don't believe you. I think it ran away and you're too ashamed to admit it.

Meh! Just another procedural. Basically FBI International without the interesting scenery.