For some reason, my brain’s always been wired pretty well for recognizing faces, and given I watch as much TV as I do, I frequently see familiar faces show up in guest star roles—especially when they then appear the next week on a different show. So as a public service, I’m thinking of providing this semi-regular feature where I tell you where the hell you’ve seen that guy (or gal) before.

Today’s candidate? Mark Sheppard. I’m guessing many of you will know Sheppard from his recurring role on Battlestar Galactica, but I swear to God, every time I tune into a show it seems like he turns up eventually. Here are a couple of other places you might have seen the prolific 44 year-old London-born actor (that’s right, ladies: the accent is real), who usually plays villains and characters of questionable morality.

• On Battlestar Galactica, Sheppard plays Romo Lampkin, the lawyer who defends Baltar in his trial at the end of season 3, and turns up in a couple of later incidents (including ascending to auspicious post in the series finale).
• You also may have seen him pop up recently on Dollhouse, where he plays FBI Special Agent Tanaka, rival to fellow BSG alum Tahmoh Penikett.
• On TNT’s Leverage, Sheppard played the recurring role of antagonist Jim Sterling, who had taken over the former job of Timothy Hutton’s Nate Ford. And, in the last two episodes, Sterling’s chief henchman is played by Alex Carter….
• …who also played opposite Sheppard in an episode of Burn Notice. Sheppard played a bank robber; Carter reprised his role as federal agent Jason Bly.
• Over last summer, Sheppard also showed up in my favorite show of the year, The Middleman, with a two-episode stint as mogul Manservant Neville.
• In 2007, he played the mysterious inventor Anthony Andros in the short-lived revival of Bionic Woman, although he only appeared in two aired episodes.
• And most of you probably first saw Sheppard in his memorable two-episode stint on Joss Whedon’s cult-classic Firefly, where he played Mal’s underworld contact with the very fine hat, Badger.

Of course, Sheppard’s got an extensive filmography dating back to 1992 with additional roles on Star Trek: Voyager, Charmed, and 24, so the chances that you’ve seen him somewhere else are damn good.

The fourth episode of the Doomcast covers a variety of topics that may have slipped through the cracks of so-called professional news organizations:

• Dungeons (and Dragons)
• matters prestidigital
• high-end book retrieval
• words, and the people who love them

[podcast flashvars="titles: 'Doomcast: Play the Dungeon Master'"]http://doombot.com/d-cast/doomcast3.mp3[/podcast]

Download, for your listening enjoyment. [18m 15s]

Subscribe via iTunes

With Tony off collecting rattlesnakes and other dangerous animals, the task of compiling your weekly list of links falls to the rest of the Doombot crew. Please to enjoy.

Things That Happened a Long Time Ago

• Lincoln’s Pocket Watch Reveals Long-Hidden Message. That message? “GO TO THE OPERA INSTEAD.”
• Female “vampire” remains unearthed in Italy. The remains had a brick inserted in the mouth, supposedly to prevent the vampire from eating her way through her burial shroud. Unfortunately, the “scientists” in question were apparently not smart enough to realize that vampires don’t leave remains, meaning the real vampire is right behind you.

Frozen Goods

• Five human heads discovered in ice chests in central Mexico. It’s a little bit like Deal or No Deal, except instead of money you get a human head. Every time.
• The $35,000 NitroCream N2-G4 is the world’s most advanced ice cream maker, perfectly recreating the signature taste that the Amish perfected over a hundred years ago.
• Maytag Recalls Refrigerators Due to Fire Hazard. To be fair, the engineers missed their first day of refrigeration design class, which contained the all-important rule “Refrigerators are about keeping things cold.”

“Don’t touch that, 007″

• One-eyed filmmaker plans to shoot documentary with a tiny camera in his prosthetic eye. Unfortunately, for the next three years he will not be able to wear sunglasses or blink.
• The Jetpack: An Idea Whose Time Has Never Come, but Won’t Go Away. Yet another another activity where years of geek anticipation end in an anticlimactic 30 seconds.
• US Forgets How To Make Trident Missiles. “This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them.” Jesus Christ, this guy doesn’t know his James Bond from his Mission: Impossible. No wonder they forgot this shit.

Taking Back the Streets

• Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US. Sadly, the likes of Black Owl and Mr. Invisible do not seem to be able to do anything about the problem of severed heads in Mexico.
• Rumor: John Woo’s Stranglehold to get the film treatment. The action video game, produced by John Woo as a sequel to his classic film Hard-Boiled (starring Chow Yun-Fat), is reportedly being turned into a movie that will neither be directed by John Woo nor star Chow Yun-Fat.

YouTube Video of the Week

• 100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers. A parody of the AFI top 100 lists featuring movie quotes containing numbers. This gives me new impetus to complete the list of “100 Years, 100 Mustaches.”

Episode three of our continuing podcast adventures sees Tony and Dan consider a number of important issues:

• aliases, noms de guerre, and the legend of Biff
• matters mendacious
• reader feedback
• cryptozoology revisited

[podcast flashvars="titles: 'Doomcast: Pants on Fire'"]http://doombot.com/d-cast/doomcast2.mp3[/podcast]

Download, for your listening enjoyment. [18m 50s]

The third and final installment in Leone’s Dollars trilogy is the lengthiest and the most iconic, if for nothing other than its trademark theme. Eastwood’s Man with No Name (here called “Blondie”) is the good, taking on the bad, in the form of the amoral contract killer Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef, who played the sympathetic Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More). Then there’s the ugly, Mexican bandit Tuco, played by a show-stealing Eli Wallach, who can’t quite escape his Brooklyn accent and occasionally looks eerily like a pudgy Dustin Hoffman. All three are looking for a box of Union coins, but the convoluted plot features more twists and alliances than your average game of Risk. The version I saw was the extended 2002 version, with an almost twenty additional minutes of footage that had never before made it into the English cut and required Eastwood and Wallach to return to dub more lines 35 years after the original film (van Cleef had died in the meantime, with another actor filling his role—and I also swear I caught The Middleman‘s Matt Keeslar in the credits, though I haven’t been able to confirm). Frankly, several of the cut scenes probably could have been left on the floor, since they stretch the movie out almost 3 hours, and make it lag in parts, but whole film—including the 5-minute Mexican standoff at the end—is still a work of beauty.

In this, the second in a series of podcasts, our heroes take on the following pressing topics of the day, to wit:

• creatures cryptozoological
• matters arboreal
• insect identification, and pamphlets related unto
• film adaptions of literary classics
• the aforementioned canine haberdashery (for which we recommend these [key](http://ziggysboutique.homestead.com/files/12hats.gif) [informational](http://www.pet-clothing.net/dog-hats.jpg) [resources](http://www.costumedogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/tux.jpg))

[podcast flashvars="titles: 'Doomcast: Canine Haberdashery'"]http://doombot.com/d-cast/doomcast1.mp3[/podcast]

Download, for your listening enjoyment. [19m 05s]

Based on the novel by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman and brought to life on the screen by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach), Coraline is the tale of Coraline Jones, who discovers another world behind the tiny door in her new house’s living room. The movie, filmed as stop-motion, is absolutely gorgeous and exquisitely crafted, with the kind of attention to detail you’d expect from such a production. Of particular note to me was the recurring theme of reflections—for instance, a scene in which Coraline and her mother are driving in the car, and out the window you can see the side mirror, in which you can watch the road disappearing behind them. They could just have not bothered—but the fact that they didn’t tells you something about the immersion of the world they were trying to create. The 3-D effects were used to good effect as well—too often it’s a technique used mainly for cheesy gags, but here it added depth and texture to the experience (in particular, I loved the shots of the corridor that connected Coraline’s house with the other world—it was like you could actually feel it). Oh, and they snuck in a They Might Be Giants song, which was pretty cool, too. On the whole, the movie is a little bit creepy (probably too much so for the younger set), but does a fantastic job of creating a living, breathing world.

The first in a series of podcasts, in which Tony and Dan discuss sundry matters of importance, including—but not limited to:

• bands, of the musical variety
• matters of money and measurement
• the sport of kings
• hybrid sports
• …and general doom

[podcast flashvars="titles: 'Doomcast: The Sport of Kings'"]http://www.doombot.com/d-cast/doomcast0.mp3[/podcast]

Download, for your listening enjoyment. [21m 51s]

As I haven’t been posting a lot, I’m sure what you’re all (okay—what some of you) wondering is: what am I up to when I’m not helping unstick widgets.

Well, boy am I glad that you let me appropriate your voice and ask. I recently spent some time working on a little film project, featuring my friends Merlin, Scott, Adam, John, and, most especially, John. Delightful folks, all. I hope they don’t sue me.

Anyway, you might enjoy watching the trailer below. Or you might not. Admittedly, it’s got a pretty limited audience.

Fireball – The John Gruber Story Trailer from Dan Moren on Vimeo.

Update: This widget relies on data that we don’t control, and has not been tested for Snow Leopard. It appears to be having difficulties updating now, so we can’t make any guarantees that it will work. Sorry!

If you’ve been using one of the fine folk using our Xbox Live Widget, you may have noticed that it’s lately been suffering from a mild case of not-working.

Turns out we had a slight bug in the works that caused the widget not to be able to get your friends’ statuses, and resulted in a totally blank widget. Fortunately, it wasn’t too difficult to iron out once we knew what was causing it. Thanks to our hard-working volunteer widgeteer Andrew (seriously, folks, give him a hand).

And so we present to you our newly updated widget (v0.81 if you’re keeping track at home), now with 100% more workingness. You can download it here; I’ll also note that it’s been updated on that original download page.

I’m thinking we might need to get an actual download page for this at some point, huh?