One of my favorite television shows is Futurama, an animated sci-fi farce full of subtle and gross (really gross) references to the entire history of the short-story, novel, comic-book, animated, and film genre.

In a neat coincidence, the show was co-created and is co-produced by David X Cohen, the brother of my dear friend Sarah. The show has gone through ups and downs, having seen four seasons on Fox TV, where the network jerked around the schedule so much that even fans had trouble finding it. Re-runs found their way to cable (Adult Swim on Cartoon Network), where they were incredibly popular, and DVDs sold quite well, from what I've read. A smarter sister of Fox's broadcast network (20th Century Fox Television) commissioned four Futurama movies, which were then aired on Comedy Central (which secured the rights) as four 4-parters.

This, then, helped lead to

An American (horrors) tripped at MoMA and tore a hole in Picasso's The Actor, possibly because of a raised floor barrier.

This reminded me of a couple museum stories of my own. Back at Yale (pause for Gaudeamus Igitur to play), I took the introduction to art history course taught by the marvelous and rightly legendary teacher and art thinker Vincent Scully. He has taught several decades of Elis how to understand art from a classical perspective that informs even the most post-modern of post-modern works. (Everything is a reaction to everything else.)

I recall him telling a story once about a painting that was so compelling that he said you were compelled to lean farther and farther into the painting, until you tripped the alarm, and large Samoan guards came and beat you to death. Surprised uproarious laughter. "It happened to me more than once," he said, to additional

When Twitter is down, how can you tell anyone! We need Twitter2, a backup Twitter that only activates when Twitter fails.

Twitter is down.So I'd better blog. Otherwise the critically important things I have to say will be left unsaid or delayed. Like this.

In this Outward Bound program, you will construct and launch a spacecraft capable of reaching our sun, Sol, 93 million miles away. On arrival, your group will land on the sun, construct an efficient shelter, and figure out the best way to make a sundial with a stick.Or is that just how Seattle feels this week?

Ow! For some reason, this preference appears every year on this date. Ow! But I still don't turn it off.

The Seattle Times ran the most delicious correction yesterday:"A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a mannequin of a saint holding a statement wishing atheists a merry Christmas was among the pending display requests. The request is for a mannequin of Satan holding a statement against atheists and wishing them a merry Christmas." Correction appended to the original story.

Lynn and I are watching last week's SNL, and there's a bit about a secret agent named 420--of course, he's a stoner. I had just learned about this bit of slang not that long ago, and Lynn had never heard of it.She said, You're from Eugene. If you've never heard of it, how much of a term for marijuana is it? I said, "In Eugene, we called marijuana 'marijuana.'" Then we laughed for 3 minutes.