Ah, Andrea Martin is American, as I learned on This American Life. ETA: And Wikipedia says she's Armenian, not Lebanese!

Interesting. If she's Armenian-American then she's got something in common with John Belushi.

Did everybody already know that Helen Mirren's mother was Russian?

Jane is always welcome--thank you.

In that case, I'm going to send you some more.

!!!

1080 and 720 refer to the lines of vertical resolution. 1080p is 1080 Progressive so it's very high resolution. It really only comes truly important on very big TVs. We have a 47" LED backlit LCD so you can see the difference. 1080i is an interlaced signal so on each frame refresh half of the lines of resolution are redrawn.

Broadcast TV does a top resolution of 1080i, Blu-Ray can do 1080p.

Aha, thanks. If I upgraded in the near future, I would probably be getting something like a 30" at the most (I have a 27" CRT at the moment), since I don't have that much space. Probably smaller, since it would be wider than this thing. In that case, I would probably be looking for a 720 or 1080i, then?

You'd be looking at 720p. On something like a 32" that's a decent option. I'm very fond of Samsung LCD panels. We have a 47" Samsung in the house and I have a 40" Samsung in the studio.

Not all channels that do HD do 1080. When I was shopping around it was mostly a gaming concern. But more stations are coming on board, and of course there's Blu Ray. But I haven't made that leap yet either, since I have a mixed region collection of DVDs and I'm not certain about interoperability.

Very true, a fair amount of the HD content on TV is also 720p, I forget that the TivoHD usually indicates that.

ita (or anyone else), do you know who this is: [link]

I don't, other than he seems to be on Stargate Universe, but he's cute.

Found him Jamil Walker Smith

(he's been added to my list)

He's the grandson of Barney from Mission Impossible. He looks more like him than his dad does. Totally the same eyebrows. Cuter than his dad too.

Did everybody already know that Helen Mirren's mother was Russian?

Wrongy-head! Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov's father was Russian. Her mother was English.