So today while I was sitting at the kitchen table working on writing this story, it occurred to me why I never get large chunks of stuff like that done. Allow me to walk you down this tangent.

Gary and Leonard are eating a late lunch somewhere around Los Angeles, CA. I get to a point where it would be appropriate to reveal Leonard’s last name, so I ALT-Tab over to the synopsis I wrote up about three weeks ago to remember what it was.

There was no last name. This got me to wondering if any of these characters had last names, and they didn’t. For some reason, I decided that I really wanted Rod, a small film director, to get a last name first. I turned to the internet for inspiration.

I pop up IMDB and search “people” for the totally random “Rod.” I get oodles of results, and the first Rod that I click on was a 2nd unit director on some soft porn flick called “Babes 2: Lost in Beaver Creek,” which is a hilarious title for any movie, but slightly less so when it’s a Skinemax flick.

I decide to toss up another search, this time under titles, just for the word “Babes,” certain that I’ll hit a large number of silly soft porn movies, which, as it has already been pointed out, are all ridiculous.

I find one title particularly interesting: “Babes and Boobs.” It’s interesting not because “Babes and Boobs” is hilarious, or because it stars some 21st-century TV star in their career’s infancy or something like that, nonono. “Babes and Boobs” is hilarious because it’s a silent movie; IMDB says it came out in 1918. That’s right, 1918. I can only imagine what it’s about. I e-mail a link for this listing to Wordy.

I return to the list of hits for “babes,” which is about 50 deep, and find two TV shows, both named “Babes,” one from 1990 and the other from 1998. The former seems to have been on the Fox network, I see someone actually commented on it, and apparently this person liked the show and wondered why Fox canceled it so fast.

This leads me to wonder why Fox cancels a lot of shows so fast, and my favorite short-lived show that was on Fox in recent memory, “Andy Richter Controls the Universe.” If you had the good sense to watch the show while it was on, you would know that, even if you didn’t find it that amusing, I would think it was gut-tearingly hilarious, which I did. I look this show up and find that it has been officially canceled; they only aired like 19 episodes all together.

I’m so dismayed at the fate of Andy and his friends (two of which were pretty hot) that I can’t seem to continue working with the same vigor that made me sit down to begin with.

Rod, Gary, and Leonard all continue to exist without last names.