One was considered among the biggest flops in motion picture history. The other may well become the top-grossing feature film of all time before it's through.

In so doing, "Avatar" is well on its way to at last snuffing out the nightmarish memory of "Ishtar" to reclaim the glory of "'tar" films from the scrap heap of moviedom following a 22-year siege on their good name.

"Ishtar" director Elaine May clearly owes a debt of gratitude to "Avatar" maestro James Cameron for so generously removing the taint of flop from her resume. So do "Ishtar" stars Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, who have spent a large portion of the past two decades struggling to emerge from the dark shadow of a flick whose very name grew to...

Vampires leave me cold. I guess that’s sort of supposed to be the idea, right? I mean, they’re dead, or undead, or deading.

But cold as they may be to the touch, you may have noticed that vampires have never been hotter. And I don’t get it. “Twilight.” “True Blood.” “The Vampire Diaries.” Enough already! Fangs, but no fangs.

I think I get why young people are into it. Creatures who come out only at night and drink only red stuff (blood, Red Bull, whatever) could describe half the teen and early 20s population in the United States. It’s a wildly romantic notion to be so dead and yet so alive. I guess.

Maybe it’s the idea that life goes on even after it’s over, so long as you got a nice artery to suck on or a steady supply of blood oranges (probably not...

So it’s started to occur to me that I’m spending way too much time on Facebook, and that there appears to be a correlation between my present workload and the propensity to justify the hours spent in the throes of Status Update Fixation and Commentary Mania.

It becomes a sort of social network-as-syringe, addiction through monitor-driven camaraderie.

With me, it started innocently enough, as these things so often do. Oh, I’ll just accept a couple of friend requests, I said to myself, just to balance out my otherwise active face-to-face social existence. Pretty soon it builds to 50, then 100, then 200.

Finally, like a cancer, it explodes, overtaking everything in its path. My friend list now stands at an insufferable 534.

I can’t say I’ve ever so much as spoken to at least...