Anyone with an interest in classic horror films may want to peep out Exclamation Mark's link blog. Over the past few days, he's posted a compendium of links (here and here) to various horror film sites and other grotesqueries loosely-related. It's a maze of links that may just capture your attention for hours, especially if you're interested in the silent classics.

16-6. Sammy who? Heh heh.

In other news, I found out watching the game last night that WGN's Cubs broadcasters have set up a blog. It should make for entertaining reading. It'll also be quite useful to those of us who score, considering they listed the starting line-ups prior to the beginning of yesterday's game.

1. Two words: Mario Batali. Italian food is generally sort of sneered at in the world of haute cuisine, but Batali's so damned good, his knowledge of Italian food so deep, his food itself executed with such an intense focus on ingredients, balanced flavors, and presentation, that he's become revered.

2. Two more words: Alton Brown. He's the Mr. Science of cooking shows, and the perfect commentator for the show. He's Ota and Dr. Hattori distilled down into one guy. He knows so much about ingredients and techniques, it's rare he's stumped about what a chef is up to.

3. It's not dubbed. I'm sure there's lots of stuff lost in translation when watching the original -- especially the personalities of the chefs. The interaction between Alton Brown and the Iron Chefs and challengers, alone, adds much to the show's entertainment value.

4. They tell you the names of the Sous Chefs and treat them with the respect they deserve as highly-skilled professionals. It may be one of the things lost in translation, but it always bugged me they were treated as nameless minions on the original.

5. So far, none of the judges have been fortune tellers, giggling starlets, or dumbass pop stars. Okay, sure, they had Big Pussy or whoever from The Sopranos on "The Battle of the Masters" pilot, who made himself look like an ignoramus by griping about the rawness of Morimoto's sashimi, but since then the panels have been made up almost entirely of professional food critics and writers. You know, people qualified to tell whether what they're tasting is any good.

6 . The camp value is undermined by the fact that the new chairman doesn't dress like Liberace, but he was in Brotherhood of the Wolf. That's kinda cool.

Baseball season has begun. The Yankees beat the snot out of the World Champion Red Sox yesterday. Much as I hate them, I have a feeling the Yanks are going to be formidable this season -- they have something to prove. I'd duck and cover if I were a Sox fan.

The Cubs kick off their season tonight in Arizona with Carlos Zambrano pitching against Javier Vazquez. Statistically speaking, the Z-man should kick Javier's butt. My I'll-root-for-'em-as-long-as-they-ain't-playin'-the-Cubbies team, the Braves, get rolling on Tuesday agains the Marlins.

Summer has begun. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

If you can't trust Ms. Wheelchair, who can you trust?

Wanna know what'll make over 25 grown men look sheepishly at the floor and avoid eye-contact with one another? An 80-year-old man being aggressively, defiantly naked in a gym locker room, that's what.

I was at the gym the other day and this old bastard was padding around, shaving, brushing his teeth, weighing himself...all butt-ass nekkid. This saggy ol' Methuselah must've been working overtime to think of any mundane, body-related task he could perform in order to put off doing the one thing everybody else in the locker room wanted him to do: slip into a pair of skivvies. It was as if the molten sun itself had descended into our little health club and was moving about amongst us: look at it directly, and you're sure to suffer physical harm.

Sure, a certain amount of nudity is to be expected in a locker room. We all understood that. But Pappy Natureboy was in clear violation of the unspoken pact among heterosexual men that, as much as humanly possible, we keep our junk to ourselves.

Hey, Grandpa! Ever heard of a towel?

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against octogenarians. And anyone who knows me knows I don't mind the occasional exhibitionist. It's the combination of the two that gives me the willies. There are just certain sights to which a person who has not opted into, say, the field of medicine shouldn't be subjected against his will, you know?

Wired.com has posted Discs Are So Dead, Robert Capps's interesting essay from their latest print edition about the looming Blu-Ray and HD-DVD format wars. The money:

With Sony and other device manufacturers on one side and Toshiba and Hollywood on the other, the fight has the makings of a brutal VHS versus Betamax-style war.

Blu-ray and HD-DVD are just discs. And while discs have been a great distribution mechanism for the past few decades, as a plan for the next few they stink.

Capps goes on to catalog exactly why discs stink both for manufacturers and consumers. I've got to say, he's probably right. Despite its sweat- and heart palpitation-inducing side issue of backwards compatability, the whole Blu-ray versus HD-DVD brouhaha seems like much ado about nothing. I love DVDs enough to write about them on this web site -- for no financial compensation other than free discs. That said, I'd gladly trade all my discs for a inconspicuous but robust hard drive with enough memory to hold thousands and thousands of movies, and the ability to pump content to any TV or computer display in my house.

With the possible exception of the music for Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Robert Rodriguez's work in film up to this point hasn't done much for me. I find the Mariachi trilogy ho-hum at best, and the Spy Kids trilogy is second only to Harry Potter on my cultural-phenomenons-I-couldn't-care-less-about list (actually, The Sopranos is probably number two, followed by a plethora of reality and sci-fi TV programming, but the Spy Kids flicks would make the top ten). I dug aspects of From Dusk Till Dawn, I suppose, but I'm a sucker for vampire movies, good or bad.

I can't get a handle on Sin City, though. It looks so damned cool, but it also looks like it could be one of the biggest cinematic turds of 2005. Harry Knowles loved it, but he's the Blowfly of movie geekdom: Is there a celluloid dung heap he doesn't love?

I'm drawn to Sin City's stark, graphic look, and it could be a perfect fit for a gritty noir tale of depravity and violence. But Sky Captain looked all stylized and cool, too. The question is, will Rodriguez's film have any substance? Here's hoping it does. The fact it's being released on April Fool's Day may not bode well. You thought you were going to see a good movie?!? Joke's on you!

Hey, I'd be marginally happy if it just had a killer performance by Mickey Rourke. When was the last time we saw one of those?

On the way to work this morning, I paid $2.069 per gallon for gas. Allow me to put this in perspective. When I first moved to Georgia from Illinois in 1998, I was delighted to pay $0.899 per gallon. Gas for under a buck a gallon was unheard of to me. I thought I'd been transported backwards in time to a pure and innocent age when loaves a bread cost a nickle and candy a penny. $2.069 was a harsh jolt back to reality, a metaphysical slap in the kisser.

Question is, if gas is over 2 bucks a gallon in Georgia, what's it running now in Chicago? Yikes. I'm not sure I want to know.

the technician said. And she was right. I saw it on the display in grainy black-and-white. My wife, you see, is 20 weeks pregnant. We're having a boy.

Up to the point we found out, I didn't favor having a boy or girl. A friend of mine who has two daughters is convinced this assertion is nonsense, political correctness, or self-deception. But it's true. I'd have been as happy with a girl. Funny thing, though, is that once I learned it was a boy, the knowing produced a preference. Now that it has become he, I can't imagine circumstances any other way. So far as I can tell, that change in my perception happened the instant the "stem" was pointed out.

My house will be rough-and-tumble. Mud and bugs and Tonka will rule the day. The dog will suffer wrestling matches instead of tea parties. My wife is horribly, tragically outnumbered...but she'll still rule us.

Well, there's no telling where all this will lead.