He wasn't a great pitcher, at least not for long, but he was popular and unforgettable. (A certain baseball fan named Sandberg was so impressed with Ryne Duren that he named his son, a future Hall of Famer, after him!)

Why do people remember Duren so vividly, when better players have been forgotten? He was unique. Duren's heater traveled about 100 MPH, his vision was terrible, and he was usually drunk or hung over. As if that potentially lethal combination were not intimidating enough, he would exaggerate both his speed and his bad eyesight when he threw his warm-up pitches. He'd mosey in from the pen and throw his first pitch into the screen, far over the catcher's head. He'd then fire in a few more at top speed, but nowhere near the plate, the message to the hitters being "It's probably not wise to dig in." I guess you could think of him as the right-handed Dalkowski.

Early in his minor league career, Duren had a year when he walked one guy per inning but still managed to go 17-8 with an ERA under three, which demonstrated to everyone that his potential was extremely high if he could gain control. He did eventually find the plate, but it took almost a decade. In his first year in pro ball, way back in 1949, he had walked 114 in 85 innings, but he gradually gained enough control and poise to post a spectacular season in 1957 with Denver, the Yankees' farm club in the AAA American Association. He walked only 33 in 114 innings that year, while posting a 13-2 record with ten complete games in 14 starts and a K/BB ratio of 3.65. That was enough to get him to the big show for good. In 1958 the Yankees were impressed enough to make him their closer, and he pitched so well that he finished second in the Rookie of the Year competition (and really should have won). In that year and the next, he posted glittering ERAs of 2.02 and 1.88 while striking out more than one per inning, with an acceptable number of walks. But those two years represented just about all the gas he had in the tank. Because he had spent so many years in the minors, Duren was nearly 30 in his rookie year. In those days, 30 was the age of a fading veteran, not a rookie. He was also one of Mickey Mantle's favorite drinking buddies, and that was ultimately his downfall. The combination of aging, drinking, and recklessness soon took its toll on Duren's effectiveness. After those two great years at the beginning of his career, his ERA shot up to five and stayed there. The Yankees soon let him go to the expansion Angels, who tried him out both as a starter and a reliever, each with minimal success. He spent five or six more years kicking around the bigs, basically with a different team each year, until there was nobody left who was convinced he could ever regain his rookie form.

His lifetime record was an uninspiring 27-44, but no true fan ever forgot him.

(She is Thora Birch's mom)

And, let's face it, that ain't easy to achieve, considering that Cage was in Wicker Man.

Bottom line: both new films are terrible. Country Strong has pulled only 17% positive reviews, but it seems like Wizard of Oz compared to the Nic Cage movie, which is already establishing itself as a Razzie favorite.

There are two new movies this week, but neither is expected to have much effect on the box office.

Nic Cage's latest misbegotten project is Season of the Witch, which will find its way into nearly 3000 theaters, but is still expected to take in less than $10 million.

Country Strong will be in about half as many theaters, and is expected to gross about half as much. Damn you, math, you unforgiving bitch.

(Actually, standard arithmetic does not apply to theater roll-outs. For one thing I lied to begin with, in that Country Strong's average per theater is a little better: it is supposed to take in about 65% as much as Big Nic, in about 50% as many theaters. For another thing, the real math of the situation involves the rule of diminishing returns. Assuming that the demand for any given film is not infinite, the graph of the "average gross per theater" will decline at almost all points as the number of theaters increases, although the relationship between the variables is not necessarily either linear or predictable.)

The British Medical Journal BMJ reports that an influential and now-retracted study linking autism to childhood vaccinations wasn't just flawed or mistaken, it was an "elaborate fraud" that deliberately misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all the patients it was based on. They found that the doctor behind it, who's been stripped of his British medical license, was paid $674,000 by lawyers who wanted to sue vaccine makers.

The study sparked a big jump in measles and other preventable childhood diseases and has done long-lasting damage that is still ongoing.

Here is CNN's take on the story.

The courts are slowly but surely reining in the out-of-control FCC.

Surprise pic: His #1 film is Scott Pilgrim vs The World

I agree to some extent. I don't know if it was the best film of the year overall, but it was the best film of the year in some ways. It's heartfelt, imaginative, and surprisingly ambitious. I can't remember the last time that an entire film was an extended metaphor. (Scott Pilgrim's fights against the evil exes represent the stages we all have to get through to establish an intimate relationship with somebody who has been through many previous loves.) The film works quite well on the surface level as a surreal and visually arresting comic book story. I totally blew it off when it first came out, but somebody gave me this disc for Christmas because I had not seen it and they thought I'd love it - and they were right.

She's the replacement for Megan Fox in the Transformers franchise

"This is significant as it is the first time at this point during the season that the program has remained on top since 1993-94 when David Letterman started his late-night gig at CBS."

In retrospect, they probably shouldn't have allowed those method actors to use a real bomb.

"'The bomb should not have gone off at all,' said lead producer Michael Cohl, adding that the explosion that vaporized most of Manhattan was 'not that unusual' for a major Broadway show still in development."

... which happens to be Wilhemina Shakespeare. Who knew?

Isn't it common for great writers to be known by a nickname or pseudonym? Sam Clemens was Mark Twain. Dickens was Boz. Hemingway was Papa. Mary Anne Evans wrote as George Eliot.

Less familar to us, the great George Bernard Shaw was known to he world as "kimmi," with a lower-case "k" and a heart over the "i."

To my knowledge, there have been no other American authors known as Snooki, but there have been plenty from other lands, including both Pushkin and Cervantes.

Hey, I look at it this way: the best reason to go to rehab is to locate plenty of drinking buddies!

I'm not into booze, but I often seek group treatment for sex addiction. It's a great place to pick up slutty chicks.

"Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the 'n' word (as well as the 'in' word, 'Injun') by replacing it with the word 'slave.'"

Pat Reeder of The Comedy Wire had a funny line about this: "The publisher believes that Mark Twain intended for his book to be whitewashed; he just wanted to trick someone else into doing it for him."

Original:

Black Swan,The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, Please Give

Adapted:

127 Hours, I Love You Phillip Morris, The Social Network, The Town, True Grit

"Matt Lauer interviewed Kanye West, Bill O'Reilly caused the ladies of The View to walk off their own show, Justin Bieber doesn't know what a German is for some reason--From pissy mood swings and zoned out responses to controversial outbursts, here at the 10 most awkward talk show moments of 2010, now that the year is finally, officially over. Here's to another year of great television."

The Biebs wants Miley Cyrus as his co-star and Susan Boyle as the principal.

I don't know if I'm cool with the idea of teenagers playin the part of teenagers. Isn't Jason Priestly available?

(Mark Wahlberg's role in The Fighter.)

Only his ARM is retired. It seems that some other Jets employees intercepted his passes. He is now being sued for sexual harassment.

The one year-end list which is actually worth reading: our annual list of the best damned nude scenes of the past year, as chosen by you.

Who would have dreamed that she would write a transcendent Faulkneresque meditation on Western history's cowardly repression of the Armenian holocaust? Forget the Pulitzer. This is Nobel territory. Maybe a double Nobel: literature and the peace prize.

Oh, wait. It's actually about a plump little guidette with big hair who likes cussing and drunken screwing. My bad. Some classic lines:

Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. And bacne. They fly into a 'roid rage, it is a 'road' 'roid rage.

Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.

"Mr. Jobs, however, did offer a temporary fix to iPhone users whose alarms do not work: 'For the time being, tape your iPhone to a working alarm clock.'"

"Every year there are a couple of movies that I just can't drag my pretentious ass to go see. This year, it is Blue Valentine and Another Year. Sorry guys, I just can't bring myself to do it. I am tired of seeing all these important movies with complex characters and sad stories. My brain is tired, my heart is hardened, and my tear ducts are empty. This weekend, when I inevitably get bored and want to go the movies, I'm not going to cave and decide to cross one more prestige picture off my list."

That's one small fart for a man, one giant laugh for mankind.

Because if there's one thing rabbits need, it's additional reproductive capacity!

"Studios sold 1.35 billion movie tickets in 2010, according to a study by Hollywood.com released Sunday. While inflation and pricey 3-D tickets drove revenues above $10 billion for only the second time, the number of tickets sold was the lowest since 1996, when 1.33 billion moviegoers clicked through turnstiles."

Quentin thought Knight and Day was one of the year's top twenty? He is a strange, strange fellow.

Geez! I thought he was 64 when I was in high school. He must hold the all-time record for most years looking 64. He was obviously not a glamorous leading man, but was a helluva good actor.

“Viral,” often used to describe the rapid spreading of videos or other content over the Internet, leads the list for 2011.

Others

2) Epic:

3) Fail

4) Wow factor

5) A-ha moment

6) Back story

7) BFF

8) Man up

9) Refudiate:

12) I’m just sayin’

13) Facebook/Google as verbs

The season is complete. In the most ridiculous development of the day, the mighty Seahawks made the playoffs with a 7-9 record, while five teams with better records will be watching the post-season on TV. Well, the wild card Saints have to like that because they will draw the Seahawks in the first round of the playoffs. This represents the first team a wild card team has drawn a bye. Kinda. The only thing that might worry the Saints is that the 7-9 Seahawks get the home field advantage over the 11-5 Saints!

Everything worked out fairly in the AFC. All the teams with ten or more wins got in and all the teams with fewer than ten will sit this one out. It works out that the Colts and Chiefs, being division champs, will play at home in the first round, despite having worse records than their opponents (two games worse in the case of the Chiefs).

The only really unfair thing in the AFC is that the Ravens got kind of a tough break. The Steelers and Ravens finished tied for their division championship, and they split in face-to-face games, with each of them earning a 3-point victory. They are as equal as two teams can be, but the Steelers get a first round bye and the poor Ravens have to play on the road. Why? The Ravens blew it a long time ago, on an 80-degree day in Cincinnati, when they lost to the Bengals in Week 2, thus giving them two losses in division play, compared to just one for the Steelers. So it goes.

The NFC was more complicated. The Packers got the last wild card slot on the tie-breakers, thus shutting out Tampa and the Giants, who will miss the playoffs despite their 10-6 records. And you already know about the freakin' Seahawks.

Little Fockers held off the True Grit challenge with a big family audience on Saturday, thus holding the #1 spot for a second week.

True Grit did pull off the normally impressive feat of producing as much revenue on its second weekend as on its first, but that seemed uninspired when compared to the performance of Yogi Bear which somehow, incomprehensibly, almost doubled last week's revenues in the same number of theaters. I think the only possible explanation for that must involve somebody's pact with Satan.

I suspect Boo-Boo.

"In central Queensland, murky brown floodwaters cover an area the size of France and Germany combined, and the crisis is far from over."

True Grit takes over as the #1 film by holding up much better than Little Fockers (and deservedly so).

The King's Speech takes the top spot in revenues per theater. I want to see that film, but it is only playing in selected cities, and my city has not been anointed.

"There have been MUCH worse years. For example, toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, the Earth was struck by an asteroid that wiped out 75 percent of all the species on the planet. Can we honestly say that we had a worse year than those species did? Yes we can, because they were not exposed to Jersey Shore.

So on second thought we see that this was, in fact, the worst year ever."

For the Big Ten, that's a moral victory!

Kidding aside, that was virtually a tie game. It all boiled down to a missed 2-point conversion with two minutes on the clock. Wisconsin actually won the battle of the stats, and convincingly so. They had more total yards of offense from scrimmage, more yardage on returns, longer punts, no turnovers, and 36 minutes of possession.

But all dat don't mean jack. It still goes in the books as an "L."

I suppose that undefeated TCU will end the season ranked #2 in the human polls, or #3 at worst, but I still don't believe that they (or Wisconsin) could hold their own with 13th-ranked 'Bama.

"We" not including "me"

Hey, Michigan State - about that Big Ten co-championship ... that must feel about like winning your local skins game for the chance to play Phil Mickelson.

I don't care if they do have three losses, there is no way I would rate those guys lower than #5 nationally. They were beating the #9 team 42-0 when they pulled the starters in the third quarter.