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From Nathan Rabin’s review of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the movie, not the album):

The Beatles explored a sonic and emotional template unprecedented in the history of pop music. There’s infinite variety and unparalleled sophistication just in the band’s humor alone. There was McCartney’s cornball dance-hall baggy pants broadness, but also his love for Monty Python and goofball absurdism, as well as John Lennon’s vitriolic black humor, Peter Sellers worship, and stinging social satire.

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Just because something works spectacularly in one context doesn’t mean it will succeed equally well in a wildly different form. James Brown may have been a spectacular entertainer, but that doesn’t mean he should have hit cleanup for the Yankees or been the Secretary of Agriculture.

Yes. Clearly, Brown would have been head of the Department of Health & Human Services.

Kudos to everyone who managed to get through all of the new Harry Potter book this weekend. I’m still only about halfway done, so it looks like at least a few more days of treading carefully on the internet to avoid spoilers. I’m liking it at least as much as the last one, so that’s good.

How is that I never heard of suicide checkers before now? I actually find it a lot more fun than the regular version. If I was at all familiar with misere games as a concept, it wasn’t anything I could have put a name to.

My computer has a bunch of Internet games, including checkers, which are hosted through MSN. There’s a pre-set chat there — things like “Good luck,” “yes,” and “no” — so there’s no way to tell anyone you’re playing not to win, but to lose. They may just think you’re a bad player. Which is what I thought when I first started playing somebody yesterday. It took me at least one game to catch on. But then I was hooked.

Luckily MSN’s game website offers the variant, so everybody knows going in what the object of the game is. It can be tough to find players, though.

I thought I heard this listed among the side-effects in the television commercial the other day, but it’s still bizarre — Medical Therapy For Restless Legs Syndrome May Trigger Compulsive Gambling:

Compulsive gambling with extreme losses — in two cases, greater than $100,000 — by people without a prior history of gambling problems has been linked to a class of drugs commonly used to treat the neurological disorder restless legs syndrome (RLS). A new Mayo Clinic study is the first to describe this compulsive gambling in RLS patients who are being treated with medications that stimulate dopamine receptors in the brain. The Mayo Clinic report appeared in the Jan. 23 issue of Neurology.