But if you've missed the last two years, don't worry. Here's a brief summary that ought to get you back up to speed in a hurry:

Agent John Doggett (in a gravelly voice): "My job is to find Mulder. And I intend to do it. I may seem gruff and antagonistic now, but you'll learn to like me because I'm a stand-up guy."

Scully: "I'm going to have a baby! But how is that possible?"

Deputy Director Kersh: "I'm the new ominous black guy."

Doggett: "Scully, you're not trying to tell me Mulder was abducted by aliens, are you?"

Scully: "Yes, I am, Agent Doggett. But you can't let these mysterious strangers hurt my unborn baby."

Doggett: "Don't worry. Just don't try to sell me any more of this alien conspiracy hogwash, OK?"

Deputy Director Kersh: "I'm a mysterious, ominous presence."

Agent Monica Reyes: "And I'm the peppy new female presence!"

Assistant Director Skinner: "Don't forget about me! I'm as ambiguous as ever! Why am I always so painfully conflicted? What am I hiding?"

In Orlando, I am staying at the Hard Rock Hotel, which is directly across the street from the Portofino Hotel, where all the official bake-off activities will take place. The Hard Rock is built around the theme that you, the guest, are a drug-crazed rock star who only emerges from your narcotic haze to have wild monkey sex with groupies before, during and after your big show. Even though most of the people staying at the hotel are pallid, shy Midwesterners, any one of whom could be a naked body double for the Doughboy should he ever need such a thing, they are treated by the spiky-haired hotel staff like Keith Richards on a bender.

After checking into the hotel, I head over to the Portofino and hang around the pool, hoping to get bake-off dirt from the contestants who are sunning and drinking margaritas on the fake "beach" that the cement-filled swamp of Orlando is unable to provide. I am amply rewarded when I overhear a conversation between two of the participants talking about exactly the kind of cut-throat attitude I'm looking to unearth. The two women, who are drinking margaritas in the hot tub, describe how someone put threatening notes under the hotel room doors of the other contestants a few years back.

These women are returning finalists, and one of them is a legacy, because her mother had also been a finalist. There is a disturbing number of these people in the contest. The rules, which are designed to discourage legacies, state that a person can only be a finalist three times, and after the third time, not only can they never return, but no one they are related to by blood or marriage can ever attempt to enter again.

Says me: The "Phantom Menace" was laden with scenes that had the dramatic zip of a concrete block being dragged across a desert, but one missed opportunity stood out -- the scene in which 3CP-O and R2D2 first meet. It's a pivotal moment in the mythology -- these are, after all, the only characters to inhabit all nine projected episodes, and the mind reels when considering how Lucas might have handled the scene -- perhaps a point-of-view shot from each robot, or some slapstick. But the scene just sat there like a dead Wookie.

Fanboy reply: "It's 3-CPO, not 3CP-O, you d00fus. Secondly, okay, when Wookies died they are instantly removed from the scene and buried according to their warrior customs, okay, and we KNOW this from the third book in the "Dark Hope of Trandor" series. Idiot!"

Anyway, rather than reform some of the hate mail into cogent paragraphs, I'll summarize the objections.

George Lucas writes dialogue duller than a preschooler's scissors. George Lucas cannot direct actors; fine talent comes across so wooden that you expect the characters to die from Dutch Elm disease rather than lightsaber wounds. George Lucas cannot pace a movie; he simply shuffles back and forth between stories, leaning on John Williams' score to supply the drama. To repeat: can't write, can't direct, can't pace. These would seem to be liabilities in a movie director.

And if all you diehard geeks want to disagree, stop and realize that you know I am right. The first movie was great. The second was wonderful. The third had teddy bears in it. If you want to believe in a big, mythic tale that not only ends with singing teddy bears but has all the dead characters show up as ghosts to smile at the teddy bears and wave bye-bye, then you are still 13 years old. Grow up!

And yes, I'll be there on opening day. And yes, I'll be there for Episode Three, as well, even if Episode Two ends with Jar Jar Binks blowing up the Death Star for the 19th time. I'm pathetic.

One of the nets, realizing it had run out of ideas, commissioned Lynch to do a pilot. He came up with Mulholland Drive, which had all the basics for a year of good TV: a woman with amnesia; mysterious movie backers pushing the career of a woman for no known reason; a harried director who, on the worst day of his life, is threatened by a financier in chaps and an outsized Stetson; the obligatory midget in a curtained airtight room issuing cryptic commands; an ingenue hoping for a big break; and a man who sees in dreams the filthy embodiment of evil behind a Denny's in Hollywood. If you liked Twin Peaks, you'd have loved Mulholland Drive. And I realize I am, by now, speaking to an audience of ten.

I have waited 32 years for this movie. That's a long time to assemble expectations. The movie met every one of them. Yes, it's a comic-book movie about comic-book characters who fly around in the sky, cackling and cursing and whooping it up. I'm not saying it's Shakespeare. But unlike the shiny noisy sturm-and-dung of the Batman movies, unlike the heartfelt & hokey first Superman movie and the dreck that followed, and unlike the ghastly bloodletting of the Blade movies (did like the first one, but still, not the most ennobling material) or the let's-do-downers-and-listen-to-Morrisey gothness of the Crow flicks - unlike the lesser superhero movies, in other words, this a human story, a movie that takes place on the rooftops and still feels down to earth. If I said anymore I'd really embarrass myself, so I won't.

I can't speak for myself, since my junk drawer is organized with a precision that suggests deep, deep mental instability. There are several containers with labels, and in those containers are the items listed on the label. Scissors in the scissor slot. Glue in the glue slot. Bullets in the bullet slot. Stamps, rubber bands, batteries -- all exactly as they should be, with no loose items whatsoever. It makes me happy.

What's wrong with me? I used to have a drawer of unspeakable disorder -- it looked as if Godzilla ate a Target, staggered over to south Minneapolis and threw up in my kitchen. But shortly after the birth of my daughter, I started neatening and straightening. Just a few things at first, but eventually the entire house, until my previously slovenly self had been replaced by the anal-retentive homo felixungerus that I am now. What am I repressing here? What anxiety am I displacing? Why do the answers to those questions matter less than the possibility that right now, as I type, the baby sitter is putting the juice box back in the fridge with the label side pointed sideways instead of straight out?

Einstein was right. Time is relative. How else could a genuine 1860 pharmacy soda fountain in Nantucket still be serving shakes? How else could an original 1950s A&W Drive-in Restaurant in Middlebury, Vt., still send car hops carrying frothy homemade root beer right to your car door. Here and there, in the shadow of high-rises and at the end of country roads, within the doors of New England's die-hard establishments, time seems to stand still.

We crisscrossed New England searching for these portal's to the past. We scoured for real places, not museums, but rather the likes of old-time general stores, classic restaurants, and antique movie theaters where things have changed slowly. Or not at all. Crave a 25-cent snow cone, or a trip to the 5 and dime? Memory lane is right this way.

''Things were so exciting back then,'' he says. ''I was obsessed with Duran Duran's mysterious, jet-setting image. I remember seeing the video for `Hungry Like the Wolf' and thinking, I like `Raiders of the Lost Ark.' I like keyboards. This video has everything. There were these guys walking around like a bunch of tarted up Indiana Joneses. I loved it.''

Leo: (July 23 - Aug. 22)
A report published in the journal Nature hypothesizes that both genetics and social dynamics are to blame for you being such an asshole.

Sagittarius: (Nov. 22 - Dec. 21)
Though it's hardly your fault, you'll be despised by children around the world when Santa's desiccated corpse is found stuck in your chimney.

Pisces: (Feb. 19 - March 20)
A Japanese fishing boat will catch you off the Philippine coast this week, astonishing scientists who thought you'd been extinct since the Pleistocene era.

[…] Founded in 1959, the Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things is among the world's leaders in stating the obvious. Operating under the motto Lumen Redundas, or "To Cast The Light Of Knowledge On The Already Well-Known," it has conducted non-groundbreaking research on a wide variety of self-evident phenomena.

Among the center's most notable non-discoveries are the 1974 determination that cars contribute to urban smog, the 1981 conclusion that taking the stairs burns more calories than taking the elevator, and the landmark 1997 finding that infidelity causes friction in marriages. […]

kakistocracy \kak-uh-STAH-kruh-see\ (noun)
     : government by the worst people

A reader of Time magazine was once so surprised to find this rare and unusual word in the pages of that publication that he decided the occasion warranted a letter to the editor. "Where in the name of Semanticus, did your writer come up with that word 'kakistocracy,'" he wrote in a letter dated February 6, 1956. "Is it a government of parrots?" (A "kaka" is a New Zealand parrot.) Good guess, but "kakistocracy" actually originated as a combination of the Greek "kakistos" (superlative of "kakos," which means "bad") and the English suffix "-cracy," meaning "form of government."