I have tons o' Splendid reviews to work on, so this will be short.

I'm not the first to complain how boring and predictable this year's Oscars telecast was. LOTR won everything. My predictions in the acting categories were correct. Billy Crystal did another friggin' song medley. The only real highlights were Blake Edwards crashing into a wall to accept his honorary Oscar, and Mitch and Mickey performing their lovely, faithful version of "A Kiss At The End of The Rainbow". Of course, the latter lost to Annie Lennox's LOTR song, but I love Annie Lennox, and she was nearly as moving.

Ten Thousand Words has been finally revived. Look for more new posts later in the week.

I'm struggling with Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky for my book group. It's well written, expertly researched, and I can't read more than 15 pages in one setting. It's just too exhaustive--while there are a lot of interesting things about salt, after awhile, they all run together and the book seems like the laborious work of that kid who couldn't hand in enough extra credit.

Saw The Battle of Algiers last night. Exceptionally great. More about it later, hopefully.