* Another fan of HOMICIDE. (Via)

* How to write a more sensible e-mail.

* Lists of Top Ten OS X applications.

* Ice-T to produce rap album by — David Hasslehoff. I don’t think this is a gag story, but I’m still not sure.

* For my fellow Perl programmers: Larry Wall’s 9th Annual State of the Onion speech. This time, it comes with lotsa graphics, and a spy theme.

* The Linus Torvalds roast.

* 4 Non Blondes had a big hit. Now, He-Man is singing it. Hilarity ensues.

NUMBERS returns to CBS tonight for its second season. This is the most interesting police procedural in the post-CSI era of television. Using mathematics to solve crimes can sometimes feel a bit forced, but there’s always interesting applications and theories being floated. The hand-waving of magical-looking formulas should be toned down and Rob Morrow sometimes overplays his serious card, but I like it otherwise. Let’s hope the new later time slot (10 p.m. Eastern) doesn’t hurt it too badly.

GHOST WHISPERER premieres tonight. As mentioned earlier today, we’re all surprised to discover that it’s not the first cancellation of the season.

FOX will continue its history of killing shows in the Friday night slot with KILLER INSTINCT. It won’t be the first show cancelled, but it won’t make it past December. Trust me on this. Think VR.5, BRISCO COUNTY, M.A.N.T.I.S., THE LONE GUNMEN, FIREFLY, HARSH REALM, JOHN DOE, SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND MILLENNIUM, etc. The only show to ever thrive was X-FILES, and it moved to Sundays.

Also, the Yankees play the Blue Jays.

Welcome back to Donald Trump’s reality, in which men and women compete for his love and affection, but never get it.

This time around, we have an exotic dancer who’s made her fortune as a “spa chain owner,” an inventor who doesn’t know when to shut up, a man with so many degrees from so many colleges that he can’t have worked more than two days in his life, a gay guy who wants to use his gayness to win, a Hispanic woman who uses her ethnicity to lose, and a lot of other people who didn’t stick out a whole lot. This isn’t a melting pot; it’s a tossed salad.

What did we learn this week? This is as much a social game as it is a hard-nosed business game. You need to shut up once in a while. The boss doesn’t need to know every detail. Three “X”es on a flier has pornographic implications. Women in stillettos will cause more damage to a golf green than the cameras will show. The ugliest woman on a team of women can feel that she’s the most beautiful — a tough assertion to make when she’s seated next to the cutest one on the team in the boardroom — and not work with other women, but STILL think she has a chance at the job. The more she talked, the closer to China her hole got. It was a fascinating breakdown.

This is hardly a coherent post, I realize. But what did you all think?

Many thought Jennifer Love Hewitt’s drama would be the first to get axed. That show hasn’t premiered yet, and FOX has already killed HEAD CASES. Always beware of any show whose description includes the adjective “quirky.” Those shows never get ratings.

This is so cool that it gets a special entry. I won’t even hide it in the weekend’s link list.

Fraggle Rock Makes a Come Back!

Henson says that the project will find the Fraggles having to come out into “outer space” (a.k.a. the human world). The group will have a wild adventure as they find themselves in this weird and wild new world, far away from Fraggle Rock.

For those of you coming into the game late, there’s a DVD set out now for the first season.

* Here’s a really cool computer idea: Moving away from hard drives and towards flash memory. End result? Thinner, lighter laptops with much longer battery life. That’s just the beginning. Is Apple moving that way? It’s all speculation, but it makes a lot of sense.

* Interesting blog from someone inside Microsoft, who wants to see the company pared down to something leaner, meaner, more efficient, and more agile. Lots of inside dirt here.

* This is what the internet is for: The Mona Lisa done up with Rubik’s Cubes.

* Turn your hamster into a fighting machine. Bizarre little comic, but very funny.

* The guide to Japanese castles. Sure to be a favorite of comic artists everywhere soon. . .

I don’t want to hear any more complaints that ROLLING STONE isn’t a great magazine.

You just can’t say that. You’d be wrong.

I present to you now the proof in LOST’s Evangeline Lilly:

It was a last minute booking. I guess Trisha Yearwood had to back out. But I was happy to see O.A.R. on Jay Leno’s show last night. Click the link for the video in Windows Media format.

They played the single off the new album, “Love and Memories.” They all looked a little nervous, but I did enjoy it. The song has really grown on me, even if it isn’t terribly representative of their usual “sound.”

And Jay Leno looked really bored introducing the band. Pity.

Thursdays are still busy nights of TV, even if Must See TV migrated from NBC to CBS. Still, here’s my breakdown:

* CBS has SURVIVOR and the new season of CSI.
* NBC has the return of JOEY. I know it’s not fashionable to like it, but I enjoy 22 minutes of brainless laughs every now and then. That’s right — I think JOEY is funny.
* That’s followed by the season premiere of Donald Trump’s THE APPRENTICE, which is destined to get better ratings than the awful Martha Stewart version that premiered to an empty stadium last night.
* FOX has the second episode of REUNION, which I’m not watching.
* ABC continues to milk this whole Dancing thing with DANCING WITH THE STARS. At 8, I guess they’re repeating an edited version of Tuesday’s episode. At 9, you get the results show.
* BRAVO has the season finale of CELEBRITY Card Game That Cannot Be Mentioned SHOWDOWN.

My poor TiVos might overheat tonight.

During LOST last night, the local news station had a brief tease for their 11 o’clock broadcast. It featured video of that JetBlue plane’s emergency landing at LAX last night.

The next commercial was for JetBlue.

Ouch.

* The Opera web browser sans ads. The free version no longer carries the ad that it used to.

* FAWLTY TOWERS at 30.

* Li’l Kim only has 362 days left in prison, if I don’t miss my count. Martha Stewart continues to film her TV shows.

* Quoting the on-set doctor from SURVIVOR: “More people die of coconut injuries every year than parachute injuries. You don’t see local people sitting under coconut trees for a reason.”

* Video of the new Nintendo game controller. It’s cool enough that I might have to buy that system, if it works well. The only drawback I can see from it is that you’re going to have to sit dead straight in front of the TV for it to work well. (Via)

* SPOOKS has begun its fourth season on the BBC, leading me to ask, “When do we get our third season of MI5 on DVD in The States?!?” Probably January, I know, but I’m still impatient. (Be careful if you click on that link. Cast changes and whatnot might be considered spoilers for those of us who haven’t seen Season Three yet.)

Tonight is the return of LOST.

There’s also the new cycle of AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL, which will be TiVo’ed, but not watched for several days.

Ditto for SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE.

CSI is repeating the Quentin Tarantino-directed season finale from last season, since I think the new season will include repercussions from that.

INVASION and E-RING premiere, but run into the all-too-familiar “I have no time” conundrum.

And I don’t care about Martha Stewart in any of her incarnations.

Again, I point out that this post and the comments which follow it will necessarily include SPOILERS for the series as a whole. Be warned.

There are SPOILERS among us.

I might have missed BIG BROTHER 6’s finale by a vote, but I got this one right, at least, as J.D. beat out Marty. MiG got cut first, which I also predicted as I watched it. Still, MiG’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was kind of cool. He had his own style for it, though it’s clear that some of the moves were choreographed on stage a long time back. And was he wearing some kind of eye shadow last night? Weird. His pants were also painfully low, but enough of that. . .

J.D. was definitely the safer choice, though I still want to hear Marty’s “Trees” get a single, dagnabit. “Pretty Vegas” is already available to radio stations that might want it, and will be available exclusively through iTunes for a couple of weeks. (Ouch to MSN.com, who’s been carrying all the songs from the series so far.)

I also want to hear the song Marty was writing with the band on Sunday’s VH1 episode, because that sounded interesting. J.D. failed to prep for that songwriting exercise, but he thinks quickly enough, I guess, to overcome that.

I didn’t start watching the show until a couple or three weeks in, so seeing the original cast of contestants was all new to me. I still hope VH1 throws a marathon on the air for us sometime soon, because it’s clear that Marty and J.D. both had to change game plans fairly early on. Some of their early competition must have been very weak.

It’s going to take a lot of adjustment to get back into the AMERICAN IDOL mindset after this series.

Final thoughts on the series? Post below.

Keira Knightley is running through boyfriends like Kleenex.

She’s still the sexiest tomboy beanpole on the planet.