Help Arthur reclaim his heritage!

So Marc Brown's Arthur is looking for a new friend. How about . . . an aardvark?

What's with all the flashbacks?

I wish I could find this great example Florence King gave of a sentence filled with clauses and "had"s and "had had"s that indicated that an author "had failed to begin her story far enough back in time." Flashbacks are ruining my prime-time experience. Lost, Heroes, Damages, even Without a Trace--it seems like they can't go ten minutes without the words "seven years earlier" appearing as a title card on the screen. I think what bothers me the most is that it's supposed to look like fancy sleight-of-hand po-mo storytelling when it only increases my suspicion that they are making it up as they go along, and going back to patch up inconvenient inconsistencies. Thank God for 24.

Listen to the children, one more time

Scholastic gets out the vote. And so does Hayden Panettiere (sound NSFW, but I was grateful to learn how she pronounces her name). Personally, I wish she spent less time on electioneering and more on making Heroes stop sucking so hard.

I'll have to remember this argument come January.

From the NYT report on the Emmy Awards, interviewing David Shore, executive producer of House:

“There are awards for [popularity]; they’re called ratings,” Mr. Shore said. “There are really good shows on cable, and even if only 10 people are watching them, if they’re good they should be recognized.”

That Marilyn McCoo Thing

Editors, have you ever come across something in a manuscript that seems like a wild left turn, an odd fact or digression whose relevance is completely indiscernible and whose presence is clearly only made accountable by the perverse willfulness of the author?

I had to explain this phenomenon to another editor today. (Don't ask why.) I call it That Marilyn McCoo Thing. Back when "One Less Bell to Answer" was the number one song in America, the Fifth Dimension made a guest appearance, as themselves, on It Takes a Thief. On the show, they were recording "One Less Bell to Answer," and lead singer Marilyn McCoo was insisting on finishing the song with an odd sequence of four dissonant chords. She would not be moved, even though everyone around her--Billy, Lamont, Ron, Florence and the recording engineers--said it was a bad idea. Well. It turned out that Marilyn's brother had been kidnapped by bad guys who threatened to kill him unless the song was recorded with this ending--because the sound waves of the chord sequence, when played over the radio, would cause a bomb, secreted in a ship-in-a-bottle that sat on the desk of someone the bad guys wanted dead, to go off.

So when you ask someone to murder their darlings, be careful.

Holding Out for a Hero?

Claire's got a whole bunch of them for you.

And speaking of which, was that show (Heroes) canceled or what?

But I Play One on TV

Elissa told me that Parker Posey's character in the new Fox sitcom The Return of Jezebel James is a HarperCollins children's book editor. Any reports?

Then He Can Paint My Bathroom Blue

I'm told that Eric Carle provides the inspiration for this Sunday's edition of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC at 8:00PM EST. I do like his colors.

Now may we please see Babymouse as the guest judge on Project Runway?

Vote for Claire!

cuz she's got a new booklist up about politics.

And speaking of which, did anyone catch Al Gore on 30 Rock last night? He's huge.

Book TV

I've never watched it. Is it really this bad?

Uh-oh

So Baby Einstein is actually bad for babies? While this study will probably only provoke more rounds of the coffee-hurts-you-coffee-helps-you kinds of further studies, I'd love to let the Freakonomics guys loose on this one. There are so many other correlations: if the Baby Einstein videos don't do what they promise, it could be because the parents don't use them as instructed (be warned, that link plays plastic classical music over and over again, trying to make you as smart as El Divo) or because dumb parents who think TV is good for babies pass their dumb genes on to their children (harsh, but that's Freakonomics for ya). Always nice to see Disney get a little grief, though.