Time for some Shark Bytes

I've been busy and too excited by the Pirates' recent success to focus on one thing for very long, so today's post consists of comments too brief to merit a dedicated post. Yet these thoughts have not appeared on Twitter, nor in the Shark Bytes section on the right side of this page, nor anywhere but inside my own mind!

*Hey, does anyone know why Encore Westerns stopped its "Have Gun Will Travel" sequence in the middle of the sixth season, then went back to the beginning of the season and ran episodes had just run a few weeks prior? I can see them all on Netflix, it appears, but it's puzzling and aggravating.

*Bono and the Edge have done it all, but on that Tony Awards broadcast a few weeks back, they displayed...humility. Who knew?

*The random selection of Chris Hardwicke as host of BBC America's new "Ministry of Laughs" program block must mean we've finally run out of British guys to come over here and class us up.

*Speaking of that, I loved the U.S. premiere of a new batch of "The Inbetweeners" and enjoyed "Come Fly With Me" more than I expected, but why is "The Graham Norton Show" included? It feels like a cheat to put a chat show in there, and considering all the sitcoms the American Beeb can presumably try to acquire, it's an annoying use of an hour of airtime.

*Whatever happened to Kristanna Loken? I saw her name attached to a DVD coming out this week and remembered that, oh, yeah, she was supposed to be a big deal when that "Terminator 3" movie featured her. OK, I see she was in "The L Word," but still, I ask, whatever happened to her?

*I caught up with it way after the fact, but "Episodes" was a pretty funny show. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed season 1 of the Showtime comedy.

*The Baseball Project's "Volume 2" CD is another winner, a great collection of songs that should please any rock fan and any baseball fan. A baseball fan who likes rock? Katie, bar the door. And while you're up, Katie, could you please get me some chips? What? Get them myself? Well, I just--Oh, OK, fine then. Oh, yeah? Well, YOU, TOO!

Whoa, that got weird.

*Jim Miller, in a podcast interview with Bill Simmons, says that in the paperback edition of the ESPN oral history he co-authored with Tom Shales, there will be a hundred pages or so of new material. This is like a DVD double-dip. I haven't bought the book yet, and now I'm wondering if I should. Of course, Miller also said that the paperback would DELETE some material from the current hardback. Why not just release it the way you want to the first time? I didn't know this, but they did the same thing with the paperback version of their "SNL" book. Is that worth reading again in softcover to get different material?

*TCM's Drive-In Thursday series this month is its best idea since, well, whenever the last awesome idea it had was, which was probably recently. Have I mentioned how great this channel is?

*The more I hear about "Cars 2," the less tempted I am to see it, at least not until it comes to Disney Channel and my kids want to watch it a hundred times.