MST3KGB

"Tolstoy would have us believe that every happy family is happy in the same way. I for one don't buy that. It's impossible to imagine a family happy having learned their father will be released from his ten-year imprisonment in a gulag sharing the identical emotion with the family that has just won a meal for six at Pearson's Big Steer Restaurant. Tolstoy's an idiot for even suggesting it. Does he really expect us to believe that the happiness shared by the Marx Brothers, having just pummeled Margaret Dumont with body blows, is the same as that shared by the Howard brothers, Moe, Curly, and Shemp, having just extracted their dear friend Larry's head from a tight mine shaft? Tolstoy's starting to look like more and more of a jackass with each fresh example."

-- Mike Nelson, late of MST3K, on Anna Karenina and, improbably, the Baldwins.

When he's not dispensing pithy literary criticism, these days he's got a new DVD series out wherein he mocks old films, only this time somewhere in the Midwest instead of on the Satellite of Love. Mary and I checked one out the other night - Hollywood After Dark - and despite the fact that it features a prematurely-craggy Rue "Golden Girls" McClanahan as a stripper - we quite enjoyed it.

And thus concludes today's installment of "Gizmotronics Book Club".