In which our Olivier, William Shatner, advises all of us this Thanksgiving not to do what he almost did: burn down his house while deep-frying a turkey. Watch all of it so you don’t miss one moment of his holiday-hammy performance, or his Herzogian voiceover. (About turkey fryers, he intones, “But their power is unrelenting… in careless hands.”) Not to be missed (and I better make sure my friend Larry Nemecek knows about this!)

Today someone was telling me that the word she was saying is the past tense for “love” in Italian.

I immediately said, “The past tense of love is usually ‘hate.’ ”

Everyone looked up surprised. I said, “Think about it. Ever meet anyone with an ex-wife, ex-husband, ex-girlfriend?”

Sometimes you can surprise even yourself with the wisdom you accidentally stumble upon.

Here’s something that I can’t imagine I would have said when I was in graduate school:  I like writing to spec.

I do it now for a living — writing all sorts of things for clients with my firm Counterintuity — and I did it for years as a newspaper editor and freelancer. (For the LA Times and others, book reviews had to be a certain length; as an editor, headlines and captions had to be a certain size to fit.)

But for some reason, it never occurred to me how liberating it could be to write plays this way. In the past few years, though, I’ve fallen into the habit and it’s been oddly liberating. Instead of staring at a blank screen and wondering what was on my mind that I didn’t know about, the prompt has become:  “We need a play that fits these requirements, in this timeframe, and works this way. Can you do it?” The parameters in these instances direct you to solutions.

In the most recent example, I was asked to write a short play that was 50% silent and that takes place in a very constrained space. That was fun. I had numerous launching-pad ideas, drilled down into one, started writing it, then my wife called form work and actually happened to give me what I thought was a better idea. I finished it and sent it.

While in that mode of mind,  I happened to be on Facebook and responded to a comment left on my wall that “that sounds like the title of a play. I should write that.” Within minutes, I had an email from an actor friend of 15 years saying, essentially, “Seriously. You should write that. Let’s have lunch.” and linking me to a set of guidelines for a theatre series here in LA where this play might fit.

Now I just got an email about someone else looking for a short play with very specific guidelines. I’m considering writing one. Even if they don’t take it, someone will.

We talk a lot about breaking the rules and going outside the box and coloring outside the lines. I understand why that’s appealing. But many artists far greater than we are forged great work within those rules, that box, those lines.

R.E.M. broke up recently, and not a moment too soon. Now there’s a new anthology album, which I won’t be buying, but which includes this beautiful and haunting song clearly inspired by the mid-60’s, Pet Sounds and Smile era of the Beach Boys. If I can’t have any more Beach Boys sounds from then, I’m happy to have discovered this, just now.

In which Newt Gingrich almost saves us from ourselves, again and again. (And thank God someone at DC Comics finally listened.)

Here’s how I learned at an early age to be skeptical:  by ordering crap advertised in comic books. The novelties were worthless, but the disillusionment proved to be priceless.

I make a point not to buy junk, and not to buy stuff I don’t need. But ironically, I need to buy this book — because I think that just seeing it on my bookshelf every day will serve as a useful reminder.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Jobs’ genius was not as an inventor, but as a tweaker. That, plus some obvious lunacy, made him what he was:  impossible, but brilliant.

Hendrik Hertzberg on the political biopic we unfortunately didn’t get:  Alexander Hamilton, as shown by Francis Ford Coppola. I’d really like to see that.

The only portrayal of Hamilton I recall seeing in a film was of Rufus Sewell, in the HBO miniseries “John Adams.” Ron Chernow’s recent biography of Hamilton was unputdownable, largely because, as Hertzberg notes in the piece above, Hamilton’s life was filled with incident — discrimination; war; a sex scandal; a duel — and his legacy is large. (Including essentially founding American free enterprise.) But somehow Adams gets a miniseries and all Hamilton rates is one scene in that miniseries. Go figure.

My friend Bill is an actor and playwright. Here’s something he just shared:

My mother, Florence, ninety, passed away tonight after a long illness. I was in rehearsal three thousand miles away. She said she’d see us on the other side but had “to go to a summer job.” She asked where was I, her eldest son. My siblings told her that I was starring in a show. She smiled and passed away, they tell me. I loved her very much, she was my initial audience, my reader, my safe harbor, my inspiration, my teacher.

Dramatists live for good dialogue, strong images, and fitting resolutions. I love Florence’s line that she had “to go to a summer job.” (Great metaphor!) And then, when she hears that her son is starring in a show, she smiles and passes away. Great exit.

Werner Herzog’s new documentary concerns capital punishment, and specifically two men on death row. I haven’t seen it yet — and passed up an opportunity Saturday night to see a screening of it followed by a Q&A with Herzog because I’m hoping to see the film with my son this weekend while I’m in San Francisco — but I’m eager to. Patrick Goldstein gives us a profile of Herzog and this new film. Best quote from it:

Being a journalist myself, I wanted to better understand Herzog’s own very public refusal to embrace capital punishment. He has repeatedly said that, as much as he loves living in America, he will not become a U.S. citizen as long as the country puts people to death.

“It is not a statement just about America,” he reminds me. “I cannot become a Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Egyptian citizen either, since they practice capital punishment too. I am from Germany, a country, in the time of the Nazis, that conducted an enormous campaign of capital punishment against its own citizens, and on top of that, carried out genocide against 6 million Jews. So from my standpoint, no state should be allowed to kill its citizens.”