OF JILTED BRIDES AND JAR JAR'S DADDY

MSNBC.com humor columnist and my good e-friend Mary Beth Ellis has recently published some funny pieces about "The Bachelor" finale and George Lucas (mind you, those were 2 separate columns. George Lucas was not this season's Bachelor - though that's a version of the show I might actually watch). Here are a couple of excerpts from those columns which I hope you check out:

EXCERPT 1
‘The Bachelor’s’ choice? Nobody!
What if “The Bachelor,” after an entire season of “he chooses his bride” hyping, doesn’t choose anyone?

For once, a bachelor gave “The Bachelor” a great big one-finger salute — and it wasn’t by slipping a big old diamond on the left hand of a tooth-whitened real estate agent from Tampa. Brad didn’t issue a proposal, or a promise ring, or even an “I love you — I’m just not in love with you.” He rejected both finalists.

In a show that has rarely been little more than an opportunity to knock back the womens’ movement a good 40 years one rose at a time, this season’s edition of polygamy on parade promised an “unprecedented” ending. Rumors swirled over a request to date both, an instant Vegas wedding, an “actually, I’m gay.” Not many expected that Brad would stone-cold drop the final two. Bachelors have upended the “I’d like to see where this amazing incredible journey takes us” wheelbarrow before, but to stand before each with “I have to say goodbye”? Ouch.

EXCERPT 2
Can Lucas be trusted with ‘Star Wars’ universe?
One of my readers alerted me to this story after I published yet another article agonizing over the vastly disturbing direction the Star Wars universe has taken since the release of the prequels and the much-maligned Special Apostasy Edition of the original trilogy. He was a missionary in Africa at the time, and he sat down amidst the social unrest, the poverty and the rampant malaria to type very earnestly about the horrible injustice that is the insertion of Gungan celebratory footage in the last scenes of “Return of the Jedi.”

“Personally,” he concluded, “I've decided that George Lucas underwent some sort of serious personality alteration during the 80s that adversely affected his artistic judgment, even to the point of not being the same man. Obviously, the man who invented Indiana Jones was, in some metaphysically substantive way, different from the one who thought that it was a good idea to have Anakin Skywalker use The Force to feed his girlfriend a fakey orange.”