Patrick Enright

For the third time in as many days, Democratic senators failed to garner enough votes to bring a financial-regulator-reform bill to the floor of the Senate for debate (UPDATE: GOP senators have just decided to allow the bill to move to the floor and will attempt to change it in open debate).

Torn jeans. Long underwear worn under cargo shorts with combat boots. Remember the early '90s? OK, so maybe it wasn't the best time of our lives fashionwise, but musically, it rocked.

To paraphrase a well-worn bumper sticker: Alan Moore, protect me from your followers.  A couple of weeks ago, a Time magazine blogger named Matt Selman bestowed upon the online world the gift of his impressions of the new "Watchmen" movie. "Sitting in that screening room and watching the visual world of the Watchmen movie unfold," he wrote, "was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had.

   Am I alone in finding the annual self-indulgent, self-congratulatory spectacle that is the Academy Awards simultaneously repellent and unmissable? When I settle into my wingback chair with a snifter of brandy at around the crack of dawn on Oscar Sunday for the red carpet pre-pre-pre-pre-show, watching F-list Hollywood Pretty People foam at the mouth as they express inhuman delight about dress styles I couldn't tell apart with a pattern book, am I the only one measuring the length of my...

All right, so it's not breaking news that Hollywood is making a sequel to classic '80s flick "Tron"; it's been rumored and/or in the works for several years.

The horror-meister minced no words in an interview with USA Today: "Both ['Harry Potter' author J.K.] Rowling and ['Twilight' author Stephenie] Meyer, they're speaking directly to young people. ...

If you haven't yet heard, serious (really serious) actor Christian Bale has been caught on tape, totally spazzing on the set of "Terminator Salvation." Apparently, the director of photography was walking around in the background while Bale was trying to do a scene, which completely threw the intense thespian into a furious, furious rage.

Under the headline "Community losing its role in music?" Variety's Phil Gallo inveighs against Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Working on a Dream," blaming what he sees as the songs' weakness on The Boss's desire to cater to "the MP3 world that digests music one song at a time" rather than constructing a cohesive album.  It's a muddled piece of writing that finds Gallo going off on airy tangents about how music is "a communicative art" that becomes "flat or uninspiring" when artists don't try...

Phew. Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox have settled their lawsuit over the hotly anticipated movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' legendary graphic novel "Watchmen." Fox will reportedly get a payout from WB, but, and this is key, the March 6 release date won't be affected.

The surprising correlation between payday lenders and conservative Christians.