Arts

Forget the typing etiquette you learned in school. In this game, we ignore most of the keyboard to focus only on the 10 letters to the right of the Tab key. House musician Jonathan Coulton leads this game and shows us just how many words we can spell with Q, W, E, R, T, Y, U, I, O and P.

Ophira Eisenberg pays tribute to another classic game show: Wheel of Fortune. But instead of giving away cars and cruises, she's giving you clues to a pair of words. Your job is to "buy" a vowel, and add it to the first clued word to get the second word. Celebrate your "win" with a little "wine."

Who's on first? Ophira Eisenberg! In this homage to Jeopardy!, Ask Me Another's host tests your knowledge of pop culture's most vexing questions, and their answers. Thinking "I don't know"? Third base! Plus, Jonathan Coulton plays a song in the form of a question: a cover of "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" by The Clash.

Hey. We just met you, and this is crazy: But can you identify celebrities with a very specific pair of initials? House musician Jonathan Coulton channels Carly Rae Jepsen's smash hit "Call Me Maybe" for the clues in this game, where the answers are all famous people with the initials M.B. Plus, Jonathan Coulton prevents Jepsen's earworm from getting stuck in our heads by playing a cover of Blondie's "Call Me."

We've all done it: Skipped the reading assignment and rented the movie instead. (Because the six-hour Pride & Prejudice mini-series has Colin Firth, and the book does not.) In this Ask Me One More final round, the shorthand method will be put to the test. Our resident bookworm John Chaneski will give you the name of a book, and you have to name the film adaptation.

Transcript

OPHIRA EISENBERG, HOST:

Here are our next two contestants. Stan Lee and Charlie Esser are settling in behind their puzzle podiums. Charlie?

CHARLIE ESSER: Uh-huh.

EISENBERG: Have you ever taken any philosophy?

ESSER: No.

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: None at all?

ESSER: Not really, no. No, none at all. I read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

JOHN CHANESKI: There you go.

(LAUGHTER)

EISENBERG: And you are joined by Stan Lee, who I just have to point out...

STAN LEE: Hi.

I shied away from Marisa Silver's new novel because of its book jacket: a reproduction of Dorothea Lange's iconic Depression-era photograph called "Migrant Mother." You know it: the woman's strong face is worn and worried; her children lean protectively into her. Lange took the photo at a pea-pickers' camp in California in 1936; the name of the destitute mother of seven, who wasn't identified till the 1970s, is Florence Owens Thompson. The photo on Silver's book jacket is colorized.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Queen of kink E.L. James told the New York Post that her next book "won't be nearly so raunchy" as Fifty Shades of Grey, and that she will "probably write it under another name." Her "inner goddess" is probably tired after all of that merengue-ing.