Read more HERE.

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"I'm devastated," Tori tells People, revealing that Mimi had suffered from medical problems relating to her hips and neck for years. "I'm convinced she waited around to make sure I had the daughter I always dreamt about before she left us."

As a reminder that dogs can present collisions between pop culture and law, enjoy these prior Popsquire posts: (1) Popsquire on Puppy Mills; (2) Oprah And Dogs; and (3) Janice Dickinson Missing Puppy.

It didn't dawn on me until a little while ago that I started watching Beverly Hills 90210 at a really young age. When I say young, we're talking probably six. I'd call my friend Marissa at 9:00 o'clock sharp and we'd talk about the episode, fight over who Dylan was going to pick. She was a Brenda girl, I was Team Kelly. And then she'd get to watch Melrose Place and I was then probably tucked in, bedtime story included, and went to sleep dreaming of a world where Luke Perry and I could be within the same zip code, and age range. 

The CW is planning on airing a spinoff of the generational phenomenon, 90210 and I can't say I'm excited. You don't touch classics. There. I said it. I know it has been done before, and don't get me wrong, some remakes are well received. Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween was completely on point for one reason. And I don't say this lightly, because the original is by far my favorite horror film of all time. He kept it classic, he kept the traditions there and this has large part to do with that classic, simplistic musical score. (I'll expand on this in a future blog, I'm sure.) I'm wondering what the new, hip 90210 will have to offer. I have to say, I don't know who can pull off the Jason Priestley thrust-punch in the opening credits. And, with all of the other teen drama sitcoms on television these days, how will this show stand out from the rest? Back in the day when the zip code first aired on TV, there was nothing else quite like it. There is something truly iconic and nostalgic about the West Beverly class of '93, shoulder pads and Corvettes included. 

We've got quite the mix of new characters though. Aunt Becky from Full House, that chick from the Canadian hit, Degrassi. I don't know, kids. Time will tell. I'm anxious, nervous, and little curious to see what they bring to the table. Maybe since NKOTB (New Kids On The Block) has reunited now, they can guest star on the show. It would only be fitting. (And I say this whole heartedly. Because I am still obsessed with those guys.)

Kelsey Grammer had what is being described as a mild heart attack in Hawaii over the weekend.  We hear he is resting comfortably.  The 53 year old actor was upset a few weeks ago as his Fox show "Back To You" was cancelled.  They had two cast changes in the first season which goes against Aaron Spelling's logic of not making changes til after the 2nd year to give the audience a time to know you.

Kelsey lives in Hawaii with his wife Camille.  We hope you feel better Kelsey and enjoy your summer.-Dr.FB

"Of course Nebraska is a storehouse for literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for work. The only need is the eye to see."
                                                                                                        Willa Cather
                                                                                                        My Antonia

In other posts we’ve looked at screenwriters from Iowa and some surrounding states- Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Minnesota, but today let’s head to the west and take a look at Nebraska. 

Before we get to the screenwriting part of that state let me say that Nebraska has produced four giants of cinema on the performing end of feature films; Henry Ford, Fred Astaire, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando.

Toss in producer Darryle F. Zanuck, TV personalities Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett as well as other actors James Coburn, Nick Nolte, Janine Turner and most recently Hilary Swank and you have a nice roster of entertainment talent  from this Midwest state.

But no list of creatives from Nebraska is complete without mentioning Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Willa Cather whose novels O Pioneers! & My Antonia have had lasting success.

As we look at screenwriting from Nebraska there is one name that stands out in bold, Alexander Payne. The Academy-Award winning writer of Sideways grew up just over the Iowa border in Omaha, reportedly on the same street as Warren Buffett. His films Election, About Schmidt, and Citizen Ruth were all shot in Nebraska.

Payne earned his master’s degree at the UCLA where one of his teachers was Lew Hunter. Lew’s also from Nebraska and his resume is more of a creative journey. He earned two master’s degrees, worked as a radio DJ, an NBC page, story executive and wrote the Emmy-nominated script Fallen Angel, before going on to be the co-founder of the M.F.A. screenwriting program at UCLA. His book Screenwriting 434 flowed out of that class. 

A couple years ago I was reading a screenwriting book by Skip Press and saw that Lew Hunter now lived part of the year in Superior, Nebraska. Since I was heading from Cedar Falls, Iowa in a few days for a shoot in Colorado Springs I found Superior on a map and decided I could make a slight detour and pass through there. (Superior, by the way,  is called the "Victorian Capital of the Midwest.")

I tracked down Lew’s email and sent him a note. He was in town and welcomed me to not only stop by but to stay the night in his writer's house that he uses for workshops. So I was able to not only spend some time talking with him about his various experiences in the industry but stayed up at night watching old tapes from his UCLA classes of various people like Billy Wilder talking to his class. 

I later interviewed him for this article that appeared in Create Magazine.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up on a farm outside the small, 392-person village of Guide Rock, Nebraska.

How did growing up on a farm prepare you for a career in Hollywood?
I was given a sense of a work ethic when I was five years old. I did all the things kids do on a farm.

Was there any expression of the arts or creativity in your home?
My mother was quite a different farmwomen. She was a graduate of the University of Nebraska, in music generally and violin specifically.And she went to the New England Conservatory of Music. My mother had me doing piano lessons when I was 3 years old. And she read Shakespere, “Beowulf” and Greek legends with me on her knee. My father was sort of a Will Rogers character in terms of humor and style.

What lead to your Hollywood writing career?
I went over to the story department at Disney Studios. After two years of reading scripts and books trying to get the material into the studio, I was having lunch with Ray Bradbury about doing the “Martin Chronicles,” and we were talking and I said, Ray I’m really thinking about being a writer, and I’ve read about 2,000 scripts and about 90 % are feces. And I think I can be in that top 10 percent of feces. And he gave me two books to read, One was “The Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts and the other was Dorothea Brande, “Becoming a Writer.”

So how did you actually make that transition to becoming a writer?
I had saved up enough money to focus on writing for a year and wrote six feature-length scripts. The more ponies you pick in the race, the greater your chances of winning. After the year was up my money had run out and I needed a job. My agent called and said that ABC and Aaron Spelling wanted my script, “If Tomorrow Comes” (about Japanese/Americans held captive in California during WWll) and that started my writing career.

The American Screenwriters Association awarded you with a Lifetime Achievment Award a few years ago. But you paid your dues. That’s a valuable lesson for young writers.
Everyone pays their dues to become successful. I’ll give you a perfect example. Screenwriter Brian Price is sitting in my UCLA graduate 434 class and I hold up a Variety (magazine). And on the front page it says first-time writer sells script to Universal. And I said to Brian, “How many scripts did you write before you became a first-time screenwriter?” and he says, “Ten.” I joined WGA (Writers Guild of America) in 1969 and came to Hollywood in 1956.

It seems like more people than ever are writing screenplays. What is your advice anyone wanting to be a screenwriter?
The most important thing I would tell anyone in terms of writing of any kind is when I was at Northwestern, John Steinbeck came and gave a talk and afterwards I went up to him and asked, “What must I do to become a wonderful writer?” Mr. Steinbeck twitched his beard a little with his thumb and forefinger and he said, “Write.” And turned and walked away.

Graduates in the UCLA M.F.A. program are required to write between six and eight screenplays before they graduate. That’s a lot of writing.
It astonishes me when someone telling me they’re a writer and I ask how many screenplays they’ve written and they say, “One.” You’ve got to do the process. Somewhere between four and six scripts is the equivalent of getting up on water skies.

Is it simply talent that separates UCLA Alumni writers David Ward, Francis Ford Coppola, Eric Roth, Alan Ball, David Capthem and former student of yours Alexander Payne from other writers?
It’s three things. Tenacity, focus, and there is an element of luck involved. Of course, there is the street phrase, “The harder I work the luckier I get.” I don’t think they’re smarter than anyone reading this transcript. I believe everyone has the opportunity to be a wonderful screenwriter.

Do you think with the digital technology there is going to be a new style of writing emerging or a revolution in storytelling outside of New York and LA?
I don’t think there will be a new style of writing, but I think it will be easier opportunities for people to knock people off their socks if they have a good story. It will always come doen to story and character and character and story. With a computer editing bay, a DV camera, very little money, and some talented friends and a good script, you’re going to be able to come up with something that’s going to knock people’s socks off. It’s very exciting to think of some boy or girl in some ghetto around the world will get ahold of a computer and tell a story like “Salaam Bombay.” 

Twice a year (June & September) Lew hosts 14-day workshops patterned after the UCLA M.F.A. screenwriting program.  Learn more about Lew and his workshop at lewhunter.com. Lew and his wife Pamela are gracious hosts and I think any screenwriter would benefit from spending a couple weeks in Nebraska learning from Lew.  

Copyright 2008 Scott W. Smith

The original often explored issues facing teens in the 90s, so Popsquire has compiled a shot list of issues for the spinoff. Of course, they just happen to represent collisions between pop culture and law...

1. Drunk driving.
2. Statutory rape.
3. Gossip blogs.
4. Foreign adoptions.
5. The reality of reality tv.

This is just a short list. Please feel free to supplement as desired!

(I'm pretty sure I've added Kojak to the reject list, but I will offer a parting, backhanded recommendation for the tenth episode, "Cop in a Cage," which pits Savalas against cult movie villain John P. Ryan as an ex-con out to get Kojak for putting him away.  It's one of the most over-the-top showdowns between narcissistic ham actors that I've ever seen.  Great fun.)

The only series I tackled this weekend that was completely new to me was Banacek, one of the NBC Mystery Movie franchise shows produced by Universal.  When the NBC mystery wheel moved the three hits of its first season - Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife - to Sunday, the network launched three completely new properties in the original Wednesday time slot.  Banacek was the only one of those to limp along to a second season.  (The flops were Cool Million and Madigan, replaced the following year by Faraday and Company, The Snoop Sisters, and Tenafly - also duds.  Although I'd love to see the latter, which starred the wonderfully acerbic James McEachin as a deglamorized African American private eye.). 

I was curious about Banacek mainly because it was build around George Peppard, a downsliding sixties movie star I'd always enjoyed for the naked arrogance he radiated during his brief screen career.  Peppard was perfect for roles like the Howard Hughes figure in The Carpetbaggers or the proto-nazi World War I ace in The Blue Max, since he seemed to luxuriate in a blatant anti-social quality, an I-don't-care-if-you-like-me-because-I'm-a-big-star 'tude that most of his peers held in check until the cameras were turned off.  I was hoping Peppard would project his full-wattage movie star id as Banacek too, but in that sense the show was a bit of a disappointment.  He's still pretty aloof and superior, as befits the character, but he also turns on an unctuous charm whenever an attractive woman is around.  Somebody must have taken Peppard aside and explained to him about Q ratings.

If Columbo, the template for all the ninety-minute Universal detective series, was a howdunit that revealed the identity of the bad guy from the start, then Banacek tried to top it by being both a how- and a whodunit.  Each episode depicts a daring theft before the opening titles, without showing the culprit, and leaves Banacek to ferret out the crook and piece together the details of his or her tricky scheme (usually in an extended reconstruction sequence in the last act). 

Like Columbo, it was a format that demanded a lot of its writers.  The first couple of episodes revolve around dazzling, seemingly impossible crimes - a football player who's kidnapped in the middle of a flying tackle (in Del Reisman's "Let's Hear It For a Living Legend") or a freight car that disappears from a moving train (David Moessinger's "Project Phoenix").  As the first season progressed, the crimes got more and more pedestrian.  The show had a strong writing pedigree - it was created by Emmy nominee Anthony Wilson (the son of MGM producer/writer Carey Wilson, he died of a brain tumor a few years after Banacek) and produced by George Eckstein, a graduate of The Untouchables and The Fugitive - but it's a daunting task to come up with eight perfect heists a year.  If you could, you wouldn't be a TV producer, you'd be, well, a master criminal.

One aspect of Banacek that I like, though, is that (except in the pilot TV movie that launched the series) nobody dies.  Banacek is a "freelance insurance investigator" who solves big-ticket robberies and gleefully pockets a big fee from the insurance execs.  That meant the show could strike a breezy tone - sending Banacek to bed, for instance, with each week's female guest star - without having to find some way to desensitize us against a rising body count.  Giving Banacek corporate underwriters to work for also spared us the scene of the private eye agreeing to help some impoverished sad sack solve his grandma's or old army buddy's or pet schnauser's murder out of the goodness of his heart.  That's a cliche I'm really getting tired of as I see it used over and over again, even in dark-hearted shows that should know better, like Harry O. 

Banacek's DNA seems to come partly from Amos Burke, the preposterous millionaire homicide lieutenant who solved murders from the backseat of his Rolls in Aaron Spelling's trash classic Burke's Law.  The most obvious nod to the earlier series is the presence here of the generally insufferable Ralph Manza as Banacek's chauffeur, Jay Drury, a comic Italian stereotype; Amos Burke also had an ethnic driver, a Chinese man named Henry (Leon Lontoc), as part of his entourage.  Manza's comic relief is rarely funny, and his character makes no sense, given that Banacek travels around the country to solve his cases and would logically hire a local driver in each city rather than pay an annoying sidekick's travel expenses.  But it just goes to show that even a smart series like this one struggled to get across all its necessary exposition without building in some characters for the loner-protagonist to talk to.  (Banacek's other interlocutor was the arch, very gay rare-book dealer Felix Mulholland, played by Murray Matheson.  Banacek wore a lot of turtlenecks and the car phone in his Packard was in an unbelievable shade of pastel blue, so I suppose there's a bisexual subtext to be unpacked if anyone cares to.)

One thing that puzzles me about Banacek is why everyone keeps harping on the title character's Polish ancestry.  Herb Edelman refers to him as "Super Pole" in one episode and (my favorite) Broderick Crawford calls him Bananacek.  I mean, it's not like everybody in Columbo went around pointing out to Peter Falk that he was a greasy little wop - even though Columbo (a blue-collar guy schlumping around among blue-blooded villains) might've expected some class snobbery, whereas Banacek is awfully well assimilated into the world of generic rich white folks.  I guess it was an attempt to give a pretty bland character a little color in an era of proliferating crime shows where every hero had a gimmick.  Cannon was the fat detective, Longstreet the blind detective, Barnaby Jones the old detective.  But it comes across as totally forced, sort of like Ironside's bizarre fetish for chili in the early episodes of that series.

And finally a bit of pedantry: Something that frustrates me, as a historian, about these ninety-minute shows is that while the stories had room for more speaking parts than a typical hour-long series, the credits did not.  So you tend to see a lot of fairly prominent supporting players who didn't receive billing, and whose names have thus been lost to history.  Just in these eight Banacek episodes, I spotted a few familiar actors who, back in the day, were probably pretty apoplectic about being left off the credit roll.  In "Project Phoenix," for instance, there's Stuart Nisbet as the head train guard, and Owen Bush as an engineer.  "A Million the Hard Way" (perhaps the strongest first season segment, a casino robbery piece by Batman scribe Stanley Ralph Ross) features the reliable Irish fireplug Judson Platt, a late member of the John Ford stock company, in a sizeable speaking part as the guard in front of whose eyes the million bucks gets boosted.  Lewis Charles appears in "The Greatest Collection of Them All" as Reilly, a waiter in Banacek's favorite restaurant, a part that might've been a recurring one if the show had amassed more than a handful of episodes.  And it was a surprise and a pleasure to discover my old acquaintance Lonny Chapman, atypically sporting a mustache, turn up in a little unbilled cameo in the pilot TV movie, in a funny turn as a philosophical redneck bartender.  Here he is:

So there are a few folks you won't find mentioned in the credits, or on the IMDb or anywhere else on the internet.  But I'd sure love to dig around in Universal's production records and learn the names of the dozens of other actors who didn't make the cut.

Citing The Fugitive's original producer, Alan A. Armer, as his source, Etter wrote that the writer Jack Laird "moonlighted under his wife's name for a few scripts on The Fugitive during the Armer years."  Laird was a major talent, the author of some of the finest Ben Caseys, the primary creative force behind Night Gallery, a key contributor to Kojak, and on and on.  To confirm his uncredited creative involvement in The Fugitive would be something of a scoop, at least among classic tele-philes. 

A while ago I checked with Etter, and he had no further details.  Since then I'd been thinking now and again about the pseudonym Laird might have used.  Armer's hint about Laird's "wife's name" wasn't much help, since there were no Fugitive writers whose names related obviously to Laird's.  Whittling the list down to just the show's women writers, who were very much in the minority at that point in TV history, still left several possibilities.  Betty Langdon, who wrote the "When the Wind Blows" (a bland episode about a single mother and her troubled runaway boy), was an obvious candidate: she has no credits on any other American TV series, at least not according to any reference book or database I've come across.  Or what about Joy Dexter, the author of "Coralee," a familiar Jonah story with Antoinette Bower as the tragic girl who thinks she's the town jinx?  Dexter had a smattering of credits on The Virginian and a couple of other westerns, but few enough that her name could've been an alias someone used for a while.  But I couldn't find any information to support my guesses about either of them.

Meanwhile, I'd always been curious about another Fugitive writer, a woman named Jeri Emmett, mostly because the four episodes on which she shared a teleplay credit during the series' fourth year were all pretty good: "The Devil's Disciples," with Diana Hyland as a sultry biker chick; "Concrete Evidence," about the paths of guilt that follow in the wake of a shoddily constructed schoolhouse's collapse; "Dossier on a Diplomat," with Kimble holing up on the foreign soil of an African embassy; and "The Savage Street," a routine juvenile delinquency story.  (Well, three out of four isn't bad.) 

Emmett's television work seemed to stop abruptly after a brief burst of productivity between 1966 and 1968.  I'd ruled out Emmett as a candidate for the Jack Laird pseudonym, though, because she was clearly a real person, listed in the Writer's Guild database and with credits on a handful of other TV shows from the same era (including Mannix and Iron Horse).  

But this week I did some more checking, and discovered that Jeri Emmett was married to Jack Laird in the late '60s and had to be the woman to whom Armer was referring.  (I had jumped to a conclusion, assuming that Laird had registered his wife's name as a pseudonym with the WGA, and that this identity would've died when he did in 1991.)  The minor error in Etter's book was that Laird (if he was in fact writing under Emmett's name) didn't work on The Fugitive during Alan Armer's stint as producer, but during the show's final season, after Armer had departed to oversee another Quinn Martin series, The Invaders. 

That made perfect sense, because the producer who succeeded Armer on The Fugitive's fourth season was a man named Wilton Schiller.  Schiller had been, until they'd split up to pursue separate careers about five years previously, Jack Laird's old writing partner on shows like M Squad and The Millionaire.  The year after The Fugitive went off the air, Schiller moved over to produce the first year of Mannix - and that's where Jeri Emmett has her final produced credit that I can find, on the episode "Turn Every Stone." 

But what became of Jeri Emmett after her brief spate of '60s writing?  Beginning in 1977, she entered into a three-decade legal battle with Aaron Spelling over the authorship of the TV series Family, which is often regarded as the only worthwhile program Spelling was ever associated with.  Emmett won a $1.69 million jury award but, through a series of complex legal setbacks, the verdict was reversed.  (The sole credited creator of Family is the distinguished screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, although in his insipid autobiography, Spelling hogs a lot of Allen's glory for himself, too.)

The most intriguing tidbit I unearthed about Jeri Emmett was what appears to be her debut as a professional writer - this tell-all account of working as a Bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club during its mid-'60s heyday:

(I'm guessing that's not really Jeri on the cover - although she does write that she was a dead ringer for Connie Stevens.)

The book is a fascinating read, the story of a smart, naive farm girl from Grant's Pass, Oregon, who drifts into working as a Bunny while at loose ends in L.A.  She's bemused by the casual vulgarity and sex she encounters at the Club and among her fellow Bunnies.  Some passages feel genuine, and have a mildly proto-feminist point of view, while others feel ghost-written or punched up, as if an editor stuck in some sleaze before the manuscript went to press. 

At the end of the book Bunny Jeri pulls off her tail and resolves to return to Grant's Pass.  In real life, within the same year of the book's publication (it covers the span of about 1964-65 and came out in 1966), Emmett apparently met and married Jack Laird and achieved her first television credit.

Aha: an ex-Bunny turned prime-time television writer?  Now that's a story!  But, the question remained: was Jeri Emmett really a television writer at all?  Did she really write those Fugitive and Mannix scripts, or was she just a front for Jack Laird, writing under the table for his old buddy Wilton Schiller?  Laird was at that time under exclusive contract to Universal, producing pilots and TV movies, so it made sense that he'd have needed to use an assumed name to do any writing on the side.  The fact that all of Emmett's Fugitive credits were shared with other writers suggests that Schiller was using Emmett as a script doctor, an unusual situation for a fledgling writer.  I'm inclined to believe the "Laird touch" is what Schiller was seeking to punch up those scripts. 

But mightn't the Lairds also have collaborated, if Emmett was an aspiring writer, and Laird wanted to help his new bride get started in the business?  And officially, of course, the credits are Emmett's alone.  It seems unfair to deprive her of any credit based on one offhand remark, especially given that Emmett had a byline of her own before she ever met Jack Laird.

It occurred to me that a certain sexist assumption common to the era may have been at work here.  In other words, the idea that since Jeri Emmett was an attractive young blonde, and married to a prominent television writer, any scripts issued under her name must surely have sprung forth from the prolific brain of Jack Laird.  Perhaps that rumor might have dogged Emmett's nascent career, and had something to do with its early demise?

That might sound far-fetched - impossibly patronizing - by today's standards.  But this is the same era when the executive producer of a hit Fox serial kept an apartment across the street from the lot to "audition" prospective actresses, and having an affair with Gene Roddenberry was evidently a qualification for becoming a female series regular on Star Trek.  Sexism was omnipresent in the television industry.

Ultimately, there were many talented women writers who came to be taken seriously on their own merits during the '60s.  But who's to say that there weren't just as many who got shut out?  If they couldn't get a foot in the door and gave up in frustration, then they're not around to tell their stories.  That's the peril in my kind of research.  Screen credits and production files provide a finite pool of leads, and those leads yield only a certain kind of truth.

I thought that when I made the connection between Laird and Emmett I'd solved a mystery, but instead I'd only uncovered a much knottier conundrum.  It seemed that the only way to find out who really wrote what might be to ask Jeri Emmett Laird herself.  So last week I tracked Ms. Laird down and put to her some of the questions I've been ruminating about above.

Unfortunately, Jeri wouldn't comment for the record about anything (not even whether that's her on the cover of Point Your Tail in the Right Direction), because she's working on writing her own memoir.  We chatted on the phone for a while and, off the record, Jeri gave me a partial answer to my basic question about the authorship of those Fugitive scripts.  For the time being, though, that part of the story will have to remain a mystery.

And in the meantime, I can't figure out whether I'm pleased or discouraged that, with three books in print about The Fugitive (plus that Quinn Martin bio), puzzle pieces like these still remain for the historians to fit together.

Tori is the daughter of famed TV producer Aaron Spelling and Candy Spelling. After the death of her dad, Tori was not on good terms with her mother and it was reported that Tori only received $800,000 from her father's will! But mum and daughter made up before the birth of baby Liam and Candy is said to have been in the delivery room with the happy couple to see her grandson come into the world.

Le réseau de télévision américain CW est en train de développer une série dérivée du célèbre feuilleton, qui en est encore au stade de projet pilote.

Il s’agit d’une version plus moderne du feuilleton d’Aaron Spelling.  C'est Rob Thomas, le créateur de Veronica Mars, qui écrira cette nouvelle série.

Très peu de détails sont dévoilés.

Est-ce qu’on reverra les acteurs qui ont incarné Brenda, Kelly, Brendon, Steve ou même le tombeur Dylan ?

C’est encore un mystère à être résolu.

CW devrait faire savoir si le réseau est intéressé à commander le pilote d’ici la fin du mois.

C'est CBS Paramount network TV, qui a acheté la société Spelling TV, il y a deux ans, qui produira la série.

On raconte que le  créateur de Beverly Hills 90210 Darren Star ne serait pas impliqué dans le projet.

A little while ago I was catching up on one of my Flickr photo feeds when I came across a reference to a competition with a Leica M7 as first prize. I'd love to earn one of those so of course I visited the link. Turns out it is a promo for uber.com, a new photography site, apparently started by Chris Weeks, a photographer whose work I am familiar with from Flickr.

Having been through this kind of thing once or twice I immediately checked the rules to see if I was eligible and found that I wasn't, as they say "Leica M7 Sweepstakes (the “Sweepstakes”) is open only to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are at least sixteen (16) years old at the time of entry." I don't really have a problem with this as there are physical prizes involved, and with the cost of foreign shipping and other, possibly legal factors to consider, it is not unusual for web sites to restrict competition eligibility to the country of origin. Being a sucker for photographic web sites I decided to join anyway so clicked the link and got the registration form, which has a Zip Code field. Most of the world outside the US has postal codes, not zip codes, but web sites typically accept them along with US zip codes. Not this site though; when I submitted I got back a message saying "Please enter a valid US zip code", and this is why I'm writing this post.

What is the deal with sites like this? Are the owners or designers ignorant and not realise they are excluding most of the world's population? Do they deliberately exclude those outside the US for some reason? In which case why not go that little bit further and analyse visitor's IP addresses so that they can block us from accessing the site completely, perhaps with a nice polite(?) "FOREIGNERS NOT WELCOME" message. I prefer to think that it is not malicious and in the case of uber.com, I still want to join, so thanks to Aaron Spelling for giving us Beverley Hills 90210, which not only provided us with entertainment but also provides foreigners with easy access to a US zip code that can be used to circumvent silly blocks like these.

Chris, if you should happen to read this post, I don't really live in Beverley Hills, but in Cape Town, South Africa, where foreigners are welcome.