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With great sadness we must report that veteran actor Don S. Davis passed away on June 29, 2008. He was 65 years old.

Don co-starred on Stargate SG-1 for the show's first seven years, helping to launch the enduring science fiction franchise. Davis played Major General George Hammond, base commander and a father figure to many of the show's characters.

He is also well-known for his portrayal of Major Garland Briggs in Twin Peaks.

MP3's! Video! Wallpaper! Ringtones!

Definitely one of the better commercials of the year.

Terminator will be back

Sarah Connor Chronicles renewed for second season by Fox; will return with 13 episodes.

Sarah Connor has done what the Bionic Woman could not: take an existing franchise, update it, and make it watchable. NBC's Bionic Woman, a reworking of the 1970s show, rode a wave of hype and marketing to impressive first-week ratings, but couldn't maintain momentum and was ultimately decommissioned by the network.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a different story. The show was able to hold on to its audience--being a midseason show didn't hurt--and was the highest-rated new scripted show of the season in the 18-49 age demographic, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

To no one's surprise (well, the only surprise is how long it took), Fox today ordered a second season of the show, reports the trade. The network has asked for 13 more episodes of the show, but has not given an estimated premiere date for the second season. It will likely return once again as a midseason show in early 2009, when it can be paired up with the delayed seventh season of 24.

BARROWMAN'S BOTOX ADVICE

British actor JOHN BARROWMAN is a big fan of using Botox injections to preserve his good looks - but urges other thespians not to have too many of the treatments.

The 41-year-old Torchwood star admits he regularly receives the wrinkle-smoothing treatment as he is determined to slow down the aging process.

The injections - which freeze facial muscles - have been blamed for giving devotees a rigid, expressionless look.

But Barrowman insists actors can still opt for Botox, but only in limited doses.

He says, "I have Botox. The key is not to do the forehead. Men need forehead lines and doing the forehead makes you look like Nicole Kidman.

"Just do it around the eyes. I can still smile and look expressive. If something makes you feel good then you should do it." (LR/WNTST/TN)

...Still single (the tabloids have, usually erroneously, linked him with various women, including Kylie Minogue), David is pretty careful in all his choices. The only area in which he goes positively mad is in his choice of clothes. In fact his wardrobe can be very flamboyant, which is why those who know him quickly gave him the monicker of “metrosexual”.

In the early days many of my friends (principally male, I’ll admit), thought that he must be gay. “He has to be – you’re his best friend, and look at the way he dresses,” they’d protest.

Leaving aside the suggestion that an association with me reflects on a man’s sexuality, I had to break it to them that just because a guy wears a red velvet suit and is able to form a close friendship with a woman he isn’t sleeping with doesn’t necessarily mean he’s homosexual.

David, meanwhile, took all this teasing in his stride; he is so unmacho and fair-minded that the speculation about his sexuality never bothered him . “Why would it?” he’d say. Now, that’s what I call a real metrosexual....

The Deep Thoughts of Keith Olbermann

And other election coverage highlights.
By Troy Patterson
Updated Wednesday, March 5, 2008, at 4:10 PM ET

Last night, Keith Olbermann kicked off MSNBC's election-returns coverage by unpacking a trunkload of figurative language suited to match the nasty weather in Ohio. He riffed on flood tides and sandbags and bridges. He self-consciously ventured that the storm constituted a form of divine gift, aid to "political reporters, desperate and weary, already out of analogies and imagery, and it's only March." And then, as is the habit of commentators on that most pop-savvy and merrily allusive of news networks, he plunged deeper into reference, speaking of "M.C. Escher-like perceptions," Groundhog Day, and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, further attempting "a Cape Canaveral kind of analogy" and some Jiffy Lube sort of imagery, and nodding to the Oregon Treaty of 1846 in a way that risked a neck sprain. It added up to a vision of anchoring as a free-form Dennis Miller routine.

...May ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd?
Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell?
Be thy intents wicked or charitable?
Thou com'st in such a questionable shape.
A cyber-shade, by human mother loved,
Until thy brain was from its bony cup
Untimely ripped? [Scans with sonic screwdriver.
I see it is not so.

A gassy Gelth, a windy wanton wraith? [Sniffs
Not likely without calorific airs,
Nor yet sustaining suppurating flesh.
Perchance a hologram? En-bodied light
Doth dazzle blind the credent Danish eye
With smuggled tech from two millennia hence.
The projector of this apparition's shape
Must hidden lie not five and two score paces
From this not-so-haunting haunter. [More sonic screwdriver.