"When You Grow Up Your Heart Dies"

I had quite a bit to say about Going Postal: The Most Shocking Acts of Violence on E! (which stands for "entertainment") and Monsters Inside Me , this great new show on Animal Planet about parasitic infections. I planned to cover those freaky assholes on the news who've been whipped into a frenzy by anti-health care reform corporate influences. I planned to hate Michelle Malkin a little. I planned to celebrate Paris Hilton's new BFF, the gay ex-Mormon. Not that she's less terrifying than they are. But whatever.

And then John Hughes died and all the enthusiasm for that stuff just drained right out of me.

I know that technically he had nothing to do with television. But he did for me and here's why: TBS. That basic cable channel did more to bring Hughes movies into every single last corner of American life than any movie theater ever could. So what if they were broken up by commercials, edited for language, and stripped of music they couldn't clear in the TV rights sales? Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink were always on that station. So was Ferris Bueller's Day Off , Some Kind of Wonderful , Uncle Buck, and She's Having a Baby , which all count in a tangential way. And at Thanksgiving they would show Planes, Trains, and Automobiles a lot. For all I know one of those movies is on that station right now.