We have no chairs...

...so I can't type for long, but two things:
1) Santa Monica is GREAT.
2) There's a great exchange of comments here at Jon Schwarz's blog, Tiny Revolution (read down the thread). I didn't want to besmirch the thread's excellence by adding this factoid (you'll see why), but I seem to recall from my reading that the dictator Sulla was consumed by worms.

Also, striking while the ire is hot: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was very disappointing. Johnny Depp is a great actor, but his performance here is extremely offputting, as was Burton's attempt to locate the movie in something like our own reality.

Our artistic era suffers from a surfeit of timeliness; we have an historical self-regard bordering on prejudice. The only reason for the remake I could ascertain was that the old one didn't look current. And where the original movie (and book before it) delivered Dahlian black humor and whimsy, the remake gives us context-free pop culture references (Busby Berkeley, 2001). And don't get me started on the lame backstory for Wonka; explaining him is like explaining how a peach can grow to titanic size. "So, Aunt Spiker, are you ready to investigate this hostility of yours? Was James's mother your parents' favorite child?" Roald Dahl would've puked.