There are some actors that have their role, the character actors who play the same character in every movie and TV show they appear on. We chose 14 of our favorite character actors. See if you can match each actor to their typical role with just their name and face.

Take the quiz.

Big plans for Clinton-Obama III?

The two remaining Democratic candidates take the stage tonight for one final debate before the March 4th primaries. People everywhere are talking about this race – and by ‘everywhere,’ I mean my barbershop, selected friends’ Facebook profiles and on MSNBC. But where will tonight’s contest rank historically?

Last week’s Austin debate drew roughly 7.7 million viewers, while last month’s showdown in Hollywood was seen by 8.3 million. These numbers understandably pale in comparison to viewership for general election debates. According to Nielsen Media Research data provided to the Commission on Presidential Debates, the largest debate audience came in 1980, when 80.6 million people watched Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Here’s the top ten:
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When most people go on vacation, they take pictures of their friends and family. Beautiful vistas. Old buildings. I like all that stuff as much as the next guy, but for some reason when I get out my camera, I take pictures of strangers. Strangers don’t pose. They do funny things without realizing they’re being watched. And when you get the pictures back, they’re never around to complain about how they look.

During a semester abroad in Ireland, I began spending free afternoons on the streets, camera in hand, taking pictures of people I didn’t know. (I tried to be as discreet as possible, eventually developing a from-the-hip technique where I could shoot without looking through the viewfinder; since I was never beaten or chased, I have to assume it worked.) Eventually I realized that there was a whole movement devoted to doing what I was doing, called street photography, and that I probably wasn’t some voyeuristic maniac after all (or at least, not the socially unacceptable kind). Below: kid in a piazza, Florence.

Since then, I’ve stopped hitting the streets with my camera (L.A. isn’t a walking town, they keep telling me) but have fallen in love with the great street photographers: Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Elliot Erwitt, and many more. In this series of blogs, I want to post and talk about my favorites, but I figured the best way to start was to post some of my own first (may as well put ‘em to use; they’re just moldering away in my Flickr account), which also saves me the embarrassment of trying to follow Arbus or Winogrand! So here goes. (To see larger versions of these, by the way, just click on them.)

Digg it!
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This article has nothing to do with the supernatural; it’s about real bodies that just can’t seem to rest in peace, or at least had to wait for their chance.

A couple of recent cases raise the question of how much respect a dead body should be given. The mummy of King Tut was taken from his tomb in 1922 after 3,000 years. Since then, it’s been robbed, dismembered, scanned, and finally displayed to the public last year. Padre Pio was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Now, the church wants to exhume his body 40 years after his death for a display this spring. His family is prepared to sue the local bishop to prevent this action. And you are of course familiar with the corpse of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, still on display at the Kremlin as it has been since his death in 1924. There was a movement to remove the body from public display after the fall of the Soviet Union, but that idea never came to fruition. Tourists still visit him at the Lenin Mausoleum at Red Square in Moscow.

There are quite a few other cases of corpses that were left above ground, open to the public eye. Some images may be disturbing to the sensitive.
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To recap, every day this week, I’m presenting a specific challenge. Your job: come up with the answers and hold onto them! Why? Because on Friday, you’ll need those answers to solve a short puzzle. The first person to email in the correct answers and successfully show how you arrived at them (thus the title: How Did You Know?) wins a choice of any t-shirt or book from our store.

In case you missed Day 1 of this feature, check out yesterday’s challenge here.

Today, after the jump, you’ll be asked to solve a riddle. As with yesterday’s challenge, I definitely encourage you to work in teams. Email your friends, send around each daily challenge, conspire, work together, whatever it takes to make sure you’re armed with the right answers going into Friday’s puzzle.

Now on with the hunt!

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The greenest car in America is not the Prius. It’s a Honda that runs on “compressed natural gas“, which makes my inner child giggle.
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Where to get the best breakfasts in America. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, none of the 15 are in my hometown.
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How to Manage Your Online Reputation. That is, if you are brave enough to find out what your online reputation is… I’m not sure that I am.
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On his post-Oscar show, Jimmy Kimmel responded to Sarah Silverman’s “affair” with Matt Damon. Everyone in southern California helped out.
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A Star Wars movie review by a three-year-old. She’s not only adorable, she convinces you that she knows what she’s talking about.
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The Religious History of Beer. Includes a handy beer blessing.
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Medical Confessions. Five doctors spill the beans about annoying patients, malpractice, how much they drink, and other subjects.
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They say you should throw fish out when they start to smell, after about three days. This one is 380 million years old!

Bloggers love posting pictures of signs — we’ve covered misspelled signs, weird signs, and (my personal favorite) signs featuring unnecessary quotation marks. Well, in further proof that there’s a blog for literally everything, I’ve come across a blog documenting the use of the lowercase letter L among uppercase letters.

Yes, this is real — since 2005, blogger William Levin has been documenting signs in which the letter L is written in lowercase, while the other letters are uppercase. Each entry includes extensive commentary on the sign in question, and the blog has even posted psychological theories about why people use the lowercase L. Levin explains the reasoning behind his blog:

The gist of lowercase L is this: I have noticed that, when people create handwritten signs, they sometimes choose to capitalize every letter except the letter “L”. I can understand using some lowercase letters like “i” and “y”, to stylize the handwriting. But why confuse matters by using the only letter that, when lowercase, is identical to an uppercase “I”?

…But now, having lived in NYC for ten years, I have seen the lowercase L rubbing shoulders with uppercase company more often than you might imagine. So often, in fact, that I wanted to bring the case of the lowercase L to the attention of the public.

My favorite lowercase L so far (from August, 2005):

There’s a lot going on there: in one instance (“LeT”) you’ve got the uppercase L used with a lowercase E and uppercase T. But in the another cases (“PlEASE”) the L is the only lowercase letter in the word. Finally, you’ve got “SlAm” which alternates uppercase letters with lowercase letters. Oh, the humanity!

Check out the lowercase L blog in all its glory.

The short story represents a form of creative tinkering that can serve as a springboard to later elaborations and embellishments. Authors often revisit the material covered in their stories more comprehensively as they technically mature and become accomplished writers. Listed below are brief precis of short stories from four acclaimed American authors. Can you name the story being described? Take the quiz: Short & Sweet.

If your bookshelves aren’t overflowing with short story collections, perhaps you’ll fare better with the far right side of the Periodic Table. Name the Noble Gases in 1 Minute.

Every Monday, we venture into the archives of The New York Times to find the first time the paper of record covered selected topics. This week, our focus is The Oscars. If you have a suggestion for next week, leave us a comment.

Rocky

September 24, 1976

At the Movies
Not long ago, United Artists teased the public by placing ads in newspapers for a sneak preview of “a film that will open in December to qualify for the Academy Awards.” Moviegoers anticipating a star-studded extravaganza may have been taken aback when the credits flashed on Rocky, a film starring and written by Sylvester Stallone.

Sylvester Stallone himself may be taken aback if he is not proclaimed a star when the film opens, since stardom was his goal when he sat down to write the role of Rocky, an inarticulate, tender-hearted bum of a boxer who dominates virtually every scene of the drama….”It took about three and a half days to write Rocky,” said Mr. Stallone, an impressively muscled Italian-American decked out in a vivid shirt, jeans and boots. “I’m astounded by people who take 18 years to write something. That’s how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary. And was that ever on a best-seller list? No. It was a lousy book and it made a lousy movie.”

Keep reading for Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorcese, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Jon Stewart.
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In a previous gadget report, I noted that the working parts of a computer mouse are tiny, and the bulk of the tool comes from having to fit our hands. So why not use that extra space for some other useful purpose?

The Vacuum Mouse from Thanko does just that. As a computer mouse, it’s a standard three-button tool. Flick a switch on the side and it turns into a vacuum cleaner! Suck up the Cheetos dust from your desktop while you’re waiting for a video to buffer or downloading a large file. I’d like to find out if it’s powerful enough to suck up the dust bunnies from the crevices in my keyboard. There’s a itty-bitty dust bin inside. How often you’ll have to open it depends on your desktop eating habits and how many cats claim your computer as their territory. The main drawback of this item is that it will not sort and stash your clutter. When that gadget is invented, I’ll be the first in line to buy it!