Well, he's a practicing Jew, but apparently that wasn't enough to keep Chuck Todd from replacing him at Press the Meat.

Fuck that, I've been trying to install FreeBSD on my Commodore 64. Crapping Commodore 1541 disk drive keeps mangling my installation CD.

That's pretty much how I remember it. There would be all those awkward asides referring to events in the films, as if anybody who hadn't seen the movies would actually be reading the book. I found it fairly distracting.

Get back in your box, Richard Stallman!

Another one of my favorite films. David Niven and Peter Falk were also a riot.

So you see nothing wrong with a professor using his status to obtain sexual favors?

I think The Empire Strikes Back still stands up very well. I agree the other two don't have the same magic they once held, but Episode V, which, ironically, had the least involvement from Lucas of the original six films, is extremely well plotted, with better dialog and much more convincing acting. The only thing that comes close to Episode V is the final confrontation between Luke, Vader and the Emperor in RotJ. Unfortunately, that's only a handful of scenes in an otherwise mediocre film.

I read just one of the Dune prequels and refused to touch another. So far as I am concerned, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson just pissed over the late great Frank Herbert's legacy.

I wish Brian Herbert had done what Christopher Tolkien did, and just simply release the unfinished stories and plotlines, rather than trying to "finish" the series with appalling novels.

Maybe I'll give the Zahn novels another try. I mainly just remember finding the prose pretty stiff.

I have no idea whether Guinness was an asshole or not, but he was a very good actor, certainly the best one on the set of Episode IV. I recently rewatched his brilliant take as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and was reminded of just how good he was. That's not even mentioning his extraordinary work with David Lean in Bridge Over The River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. A personal favorite is the original The Ladykillers.

So far as I understand it, while Guinness disliked the dialogue (who can blame him, a lot of it was pretty bad), he was grateful for the money it gave him.

I'm a white Canadian 40-50 who even owned the Princess Leia action figure back in 1978 because you needed a complete set to be cool, and dreamed at night of getting a Millennium Falcon playset. I'll throw down my money, even if I know I'm going to hate the results, because my childhood until about the age of 13 was defined by Star Wars.