Rushfield Babylon

That leaves just one more question. What’s up with Boba Fett’s lameass death in “Return of the Jedi,” when an errant swinging stick shorts out his jetpack and sends him hurtling into the Sarlacc Pit on Tatooine.

"I came up with my theory, that Boba Fett was sick that day," Logan explained. "As we all know, if you have a cold, you’re coughing. And the moisture in the helmet would have [fogged up the visor], so it would’ve been hard to see."

• The cougar vote is breaking hard for Lee. Bad news for Casey.

• Simon came into the stands at commercial breaks to sign autographs instead of going outside to smoke. Totally unprecedented. Getting nostalgic? Getting soft? Wanting to keep fans close as he begins his greatest journey?

• Post show interviews. I asked Siobhan and crystal how they felt about the tweenage monsters who won’t give the girls a chance and have cut down their friends. Can’t reveal the answers until tomorrow but pretty sure they thought I was a raving lunatic. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn

We broke the show down into two acts and a tag. Each act would have five scenes. Brief transition scenes didn’t count. But go back through some episodes. Five main scenes in the first act and five in the second. As best we could we would try to advance both of our stories in the same scenes. But each story is different and we tried to avoid being predictable.

Usually, we wrapped up the heavy story last. That’s the one you cared most about.

The tag would callback something from the body of the show, generally drawing from the funny story.

And then we had a rather major restriction: We could only shoot outside at the Malibu ranch for one day each episode. So no more than 8 pages (approximately a third of the show). And that was in the summer when there was the most light. By September and October we could devote 6 pages to exteriors. And once Daylight Savings was over that was it for the ranch for the season. All exteriors were shot on the stage. So if we wanted to do a show where the camp is overrun by oxen we better schedule it for very early in the summer. Those 20th guards never let oxen onto the lot without proper ID.

If possible we tried to do at least one O.R. scene a show. We wanted to constantly remind the audience that above all else this was a show about war.

From Ken Levine.  

It seems too charmingly quirky when Dave Eggers says he only checks his e-mail twice a day — in his car outside of a carpet store. “I did have Internet access  [at home] for four months once,” he said.

Too charmingly quirky?  Is there such a thing?

But today Figes, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, admitted “full responsibility” for the posts, saying he had been under “intense pressure”. He added: “I have made some foolish errors and apologise wholeheartedly to all concerned.”

Rival historian Robert Service, whose work on the history of communism Figes described as “awful” in the Amazon posts, said he and his wife had been through hell. “I am pleased and mightily relieved that this contaminant slime has been exposed to the light and begun to be scrubbed clean,” said Service, who is professor of Russian history at St Antony’s College Oxford. “I have been made acutely aware that a solitary malpractitioner, if he has an abundance of money and malice, can intimidate all and sundry – and that includes both scholars and journalists.”

In the world of Stalin historians, I’ve idolized Orlando Figes as the giant.  The Whisperers is as good a portrait of life under tyranny as you’re going to find.  So good that one imagined its author would be living in a world far above needing to leave nasty comments on colleagues’ Amazon pages.  But perhaps I was naive to think such a world exists, even for celebrated historians of the Stalin era.  

Let’s just pray Sebag-Montefiore doesn’t get dragged into this quagmire.