After the Candelabra.

“The setting: downtown New York in 1900, a tumultuous time of massive change and great progress. The series centers around the groundbreaking surgeons, nurses and staff at Knickerbocker Hospital, who are pushing the bounds of medicine in a time of astonishingly high mortality rates and zero antibiotics.”

Speaking of the Knicks: On the eve of Behind the Candelabra (this Sunday on HBO), Steven Soderbergh — still ostensibly retired from feature filmmaking — is set to direct 10-hours of a period hospital drama, The Knick, for Cinemax, with Clive Owen.

As a hobby, apparently, he’s also gotten into the film cognoscenti hipster t-shirt business. “While designing the shirts, Soderbergh told Reuters, ‘I would test them out by wearing them to the set to see if people knew the movie references.'” Citizen Kane aside, most of them are pretty esoteric. (Second link via The Late Adopter.)

Not the NBA’s long suit.

“If you look at NBA players. White, black, brown, yellow, whatever color or nationality, regardless of how they dress, and think thug. You are an idiot.” As seen at Caught in Between, Mavs owner Mark Cuban eloquently dissects the reasons for the NBA dress code (with additional comments) over at Blog Maverick: “‘Unfortunately we have gotten to the point where some, but not all, owners, or which ever executive is in charge of the team, have lost the ability to communicate with their players. In a nutshell, they dont talk to their players… I explained that a couple corporate customers of the league…were uncomfortable with the appearance of some players. That unfortunately, in those cities, they didnt feel comfortable having a discussion like this and that their ownership didnt feel comfortable asking those players to work with the teams for the best of the league. Since the teams couldnt deal with it, they had asked the league to step in and deal with it.”

Wardrobe Malfunction.

“Auschwitz, great…are the Packers playing?” By all that is good and holy, what was Dick Cheney thinking? It’s the 60th anniversary of liberation from that Hell on Earth, and our veep, as the Post wryly put it, “was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.” Even at occasions where it seems well nigh impossible to make the US role in world affairs look bad, this administration plays the Ugly American to the hilt. For shame.

The Doctor Meets the Grid (and the Matrix).

Filming on the new Doctor Who runs afoul of British anti-terrorism forces. The article also has one of the first pics up of Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor. Between this and the Batman post above, I know I’m starting to sound like the fanboy Joan Rivers…but what’s up with the lousy costume? Surely, any Time Lord worth his salt would wear something a mite more quirky.

Mutant Joan Rivers.

By way of Neilalien and Triptych Cryptic, the worst superhero costumes of all time. I dunno…these seem kinda arbitrary to me. What about Luthor in the green armor? Black Condor of the JLS? Or poor old Puck of Alpha Flight? The guy had beer-mascot dwarf-tossee written all over him in that suit.