Have an awesome Saturday!

I’m off to eat smoked ribs and all kinds of other homemade things at a cookout hosted by my good friend James.

Photos and a full report coming soon.

In the meantime, rock out to the best song ever.

When Glen belts out that “There is healing in your hands” at the end, that’s as good as it gets.

I hope your Saturday is awesome, too, so please get out there and make the most of it and come back here and tell me all about it.

Update

As always, James delivered another above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty dinner. The ribs were amazing — after spending about eight hours on the smoker, they were perfectly tender.

James also made grilled (and seasoned!) potato wedges, while his brother Dan pitched in with two awesome sides. First up was grilled corn on the cob, which Dan had let soak overnight in a sweet mixture of honey and coconut milk. Dan also prepared “zucchini boats,” which are what you get when you boil some zucchinis until they’re tender, slice them in half, cut out long canals from the center, and then refill those canals with a mixture of grated cheese, chopped-up bacon, bread crumbs, the leftover zucchini pulp and freshly diced olives, tomatoes and jalapeños. Put it in foil and grill it and you’ve really got something special.

The funniest part of the day happened when James and Dan and I were sitting around watching television while the ribs were smoking. A huge, deafening explosion (coming from outside) rocked the entire house. Hard. We all looked at each other immediately with the same look of shock that said, “Somehow, the smoker just blew up in the backyard.” Luckily it was only the neighbors doing some early-afternoon test shots of their pre-Fourth of July fireworks. (Those things had to be some military-grade party-poppers. No doubt about it.)

Thanks as always to James and his wife, Cathy, and Dan for hosting another excellent day of eating and camaraderie.

Her?

TV Guide’s Michael Ausiello reports that Mae Whitman has been dropped from NBC’s upcoming re-imagining of Bionic Woman.

(More about that here.)

She was set to play the Bionic Woman’s deaf sister.

I know Mae Whitman best from her role as Ann Veal, the much-maligned girlfriend of George-Michael Bluth (Michael Cera) on the late, great Arrested Development. There was a running joke on the show that no one but George-Michael thought she was attractive. For example, he’d say something about his girlfriend to someone, and the person would gesture toward Ann and say, “Her?” And then they’d usually ask if she was funny or something.

So maybe the NBC executives watched the pilot and said, “Her?”

Anyway, the funniest stuff came from George-Michael’s father, Michael (Jason Bateman), who became a Freudian machine whenever discussing Ann with his son. In the episode “Good Grief,” for example, Michael tells his George-Michael that he thinks George-Michael and Ann really have a connection (even though he doesn’t think so at all) to make George-Michael feel better for reasons that are way too complicated to get into here (which is one of the reasons Arrested Development was so good in the first place).

Anyway, George-Michael asks Michael if he really does see a connection, and Michael replies, “A father can tell, okay? It’s as Ann as the nose on plain’s face.”

(Despite the hilarity of the gag, Mae Whitman is very lovely, and I’d ask her out myself if I wasn’t old enough to be her very-older brother.)

So who will replace her on Bionic Woman? I’ve already lost any interest I had in the show, and I mainly posted this so I could talk about Arrested Development, so there you go.

I now pronounce you Scully and Gordon

Melinda McGraw, the lovely actress who played Scully’s sister, Melissa, on The X-Files, has joined the cast of next summer’s Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight, as Lt. Jim Gordon’s wife, Barbara.

Gary Oldman returns as Gordon, and talks about the role right here.

Nathan Gamble, who just finished shooting The Mist as the son of Tom Jane’s character, will play their young son.

More Dark Knight news and photos here!