In NFL football, when a team takes a scheduled week off from the season, it’s called a bye week. I know this because my boyfriend, a diehard Denver Broncos fan, was yelling at the TV calmly explaining to me this past Sunday that the rather lackluster performance of his beloved, and heretofore undefeated, team against the Baltimore Ravens was due in large part to the fact the Broncos took five days off during their bye week, derailing their machine-like momentum and causing them to play like, well, I can’t really reprint what he said next on a family website. But you get the idea: Bye weeks = Serious trouble.
I kept thinking about all this during last night’s Big Bang Theory, which was both about a boyfriend’s struggle to understand the cult of the pigskin (ahem), and the show’s first new episode back after its bye week, i.e. last week’s repeat episode. And much like the Broncos last Sunday, the Big Bang team only managed to hit a single last week instead of their usual string of three-point-nothin’-but-net shots from the double-fault wicket posts. Or, um, something. After two episodes of solid jokes about Penny and Leonard’s odd-couple relationship, it was like the writers were back at square one with these two, scratching their noggins over how to make them interesting — something they all but conceded in the cold open, when Sheldon admitted to drifting off during Penny and Leonard’s talk about watching football and kite fighting on each other’s respective Saturday afternoons.
As writer-director Troy Duffy recalls it, the cast and crew of The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day were more than a tad nervous when they began work on their Boston-set, vigilante-action sequel. “Everybody was terrified to be the guy that screwed it up,” he says of the Toronto shoot for his movie, which is released October 30. “They knew the fans would find out where they lived and burn their f—-ing house to the ground.”
It’s hard to believe that the last time we had a big-screen feature from Peter Jackson was his masterful take on the classic King Kong in 2005. Now, thankfully, mercifully, he’s back, this time as producer for what could be this summer’s biggest hit, the alien flick District 9.
For me, every San Diego Comic-Con I attend brings with it a different agenda — be it covering panels and events for Entertainment Weekly, flacking my second career as a 
