Here’s your Monday update, a little tardy today because I was finishing some of the materials.

“Snide Remarks” re: the Catholic Church’s new feelings re: limbo. Note that the column has visual aids, along with the SnideCast® audio recording (which you can listen to on the page, or here, or by subscribing to the podcast here).

I’ve recently started having a little more fun with the podcasts by including thematically appropriate songs at the beginning and end. Today edition, for example, uses a song about limbo and a song about the afterlife. Songs are fun!

By the way, there is a mailing list you can get on so you can be alerted every time a new “Snide Remarks” is posted, which is supposed to be every Monday but which sometimes is every other Monday, or every third Monday, or whatever. Or you can keep an eye here on the blog (which has an RSS feed), as I usually mention new columns here, too. The point is, I would hate for anyone to live a single day without knowing there was a new column to read.

It was a shockingly productive weekend for me, and I have reviews of three current films to offer you: “In the Land of Women” (meh), “The Invisible” (hmm), and “Kickin’ It Old Skool” (bleh). If that sounds like a lousy way to spend a weekend, well, it is. But I also watched “Reds” (1981), Warren Beatty’s excellent historical epic, and that at least partially made up for it.

Vice President Dick “Richard” Cheney’s visit to Brigham Young University’s commencement ceremony on Thursday passed smoothly and without incident, though there had been much controversy beforehand. The cantankerous, go-F-yourself-encouraging veep, known in some circles as Bush’s “attack dog,” came across as likable and pleasant in his address to graduates and their guests. He didn’t say anything controversial or political (I don’t think anyone expected him to; it wouldn’t be the right forum for that), and he even earned a couple of laughs.

You can hear his entire speech here. Note the places where he got the biggest applause: when he extended President Bush’s well wishes to the graduates, and when he mentioned BYU’s consistent ranking as No. 1 in the category of “stone-cold sober” colleges.

He cracked a few jokes at his own expense. He said that in his own college career, he nearly earned a doctorate, lacking only the dissertation. “I’ll get started as soon as I come up with a topic,” he said.

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Do you hear that? It is the calm before the storm. This is the last weekend before the start of Summer Blockbuster Season, which begins May 4 and will be about half-over by the time summer actually begins. “Spider-Man 3″ will kick off the festivities, to be quickly followed by a Shrek, and a Pirates, and an Ocean’s, and a Simpsons, and a Bourne, and a Rush Hour, and a Transformers, and a Die Hard — wow. Everyone’s predicting it will be the biggest summer in history, in terms of box office, and I don’t see how it could fail in that. These are such hotly anticipated titles that even if every single one of them sucks (and the more I think about “Spider-Man 3,” the more disappointed I am by it), they’ll still make hundreds of millions of dollars.

And so today is when the last few bits of non-summer crumbs get tossed out, movies that have only seven days to make money before “Spider-Man 3″ destroys them all. Two of them are opening without screenings. The other two are middle-of-the-road efforts unlikely to attract much attention.

The better of the two is “Next,” starring Nicolas Cage as a man who can see into the future — but only his own personal future, and only two minutes ahead. It’s not brilliant sci-fi, but it’s fun.

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Last fall, the TV networks introduced about two dozens new prime-time shows. I sampled the first episodes of nearly all of them, to see if any were worth adding to my roster. Of those that survived, here are the ones I’m still watching:

“30 Rock”
“Heroes”
“Friday Night Lights”

That’s it. Two dozen shows, and I only stuck with three. (There would be a fourth, “Help Me Help You,” but ABC canceled it.) It’s worth noting that all three are on NBC, which is currently suffering from some of its lowest ratings in history. Maybe being in last place has helped the network regain its will to live by seeking out quality programs? Or maybe it’s a coincidence.

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I really need to start keeping track of who recommends which books to me, because I no longer have any idea why I read “Apathy and Other Small Victories,” and I want to thank the person who turned me on to it. So if that person is reading this, consider yourself thanked.

“Apathy and Other Small Victories,” by Paul Neilan, is a slim, sardonic novel about a shiftless man in his late 20s who, like so many of his generation, views the world with laziness, irony, scorn, and apathy. He has a lame job at an insurance company (though he mostly just sits in the bathroom and naps all day), and he drinks constantly. He’s currently having sex with his landlord’s wife to avoid having to pay rent. (He’s as puzzled by that arrangement as you are.) And then one day the deaf woman who works at his dentist’s office is killed, and the police seem to think he did it. He didn’t, of course, but can he muster the energy to care enough to prove it?

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It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time to spotlight another “Snide Remarks” Classic as part of our year-long celebration of the column’s 10th anniversary. This week’s entry is a carnivorous item called “Meat the Press” (#143, Jan. 12, 2001). It deals with the all-you-can-eat meat restaurant Rodizio Grill, along with mall food and other tantalizing subjects. I’m pretty sure none of the specific places mentioned are still there at University Mall, where they were six years ago, but the jokes are still are fresh and tasty as ever! Yum-yum!

“Did you really let your mom write our wedding announcement?” “I didn’t have a choice! Just keep smiling!”

Our series on Bad 9-11 Poetry is over (check the archives to relive the magic), but a faithful reader named Katie sent in this gem that is just as bad. It was a wedding announcement in The (Logan, Utah) Herald Journal for Kimi Wiser and Pete Harris, and for some reason it was written in rhyme. I don’t know what they were thinking, but it demands to be read by a wider audience.

* * * * *

If you want to hear of their fortune and fame
It all started when they met at a soccer game
He thought she was hot she thought so too
But after the first date it was through
He was scared she didn’t care
Being just high school seniors they didn’t dare.
Years later he went on a mission
All the way to Korea a far away nation

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This is an item from Internet Movie Database’s film and TV news column from last Thursday. Is it wrong that the headline made me giggle?

Normally I agree with Garfield about hating Mondays, but not today! Today Garfield can stick it! We got us a new “Snide Remarks” column right here, with its accompanying podcast (which of course you can listen to directly on the page, if you wanna, thanks to futuristic SnideCast® technology). So that’s all well and good.

We do NOT have a review of “In the Land of Women,” because I failed to watch it this weekend, and that is awesome!

And finally, at 11 a.m. today I will be seeing a little movie called “Spider-Man 3″! Almost two weeks early! And it’s a press-only screening, so the usual assortment of bumpkins, hoboes, and jackasses won’t be there! Except for the ones who are members of the press! Why, it’s all enough to make one giddy, even on a Monday.

Welcome to Friday! I hope it is to your liking. Myself, I am not happy with it, for I have a stuffy nose and other cold-like symptoms, and it makes me headachy and phlegmy. You have some good movies awaiting you, though!

“Hot Fuzz,” from the guys who brought you “Shaun of the Dead,” is a loving spoof to buddy-cop action movies like “Lethal Weapon,” with a by-the-book cop and his slobbish partner investigating a series of odd “accidents” in a sleepy British village. It’s a wonderfully clever and funny movie. Go see it at once, I insist.

In the legal thriller department, there is “Fracture,” in which Anthony Hopkins shoots his wife in the head, confesses to it, hands over the gun — yet is slippery enough to still evade the grasp of the district attorney’s office (represented by Ryan Gosling). Good fun here, with a particularly clever central mystery.

If you need a horror film, there’s “Vacancy,” which has Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson stopping at a creepy old roadside motel and having to fend off dudes who want to murder them. It sounds lousy, I know, but it’s actually quite efficient, non-gimmicky, and tense. It’s barely 80 minutes without the credits and doesn’t have any downtime.

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