This week’s episode is quite the mélange and it begins with a cold open featuring a musical duet recorded late at night in Dean’s Motor City-adjacent home last week while Phil was visiting. Then, it is back to the “now” with Dean previewing his forthcoming trip to Minneapolis for a convention celebrating the 30th anniversary of “The X-Files” and Phil reveals the challenges he faced getting home from Detroit. Then, Phil reveals the latest show business strikes news and Dean offers up another vintage television series, this one an exemplar of Scandinavian Noir. In the return of “What We’re Reading”, Dean and Phil reveal the books that have garnered their attention, including a memoir, classic literature, historic fiction, poetry, music analysis and a guidebook. The phenomenon that is Oppenheimer gets discussed, as does large format film exhibition. Finally, in “Celebrity Deaths”, Jimmy Buffett gets remembered (as do his cafes and hotels!).

The show begins this week with a lot of questions for Dean. What is Sci-Fi Valley Con? Who is Julian? There is/was a TV show called “Supernatural”? Is Detroit really Canada’s Tijuana? And a listener wants to know if Dean got bit by a monkey on “The Lone Gunmen”! You will learn the answers to all these and many more, including what Dean and Phil think of the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special. You will also learn about one of the greatest voices in comedy, about perhaps the greatest Hammond organist of all time, and about one of the most groundbreaking indie filmmakers of all time in “Celebrity Deaths”. After the break, Dean and Phil offer analysis on the new James Bond film’s box office performance in the USA and put that performance into historic context. They will do the same with the film’s quality. Finally, they will reveal what upcoming movies might get them to go back into a movie theater in the coming weeks.

It’s the USA vs. Canada, Thelma vs. Louise, Batman Begins vs. The Dark Knight, the 3-D Avatar vs.the black and white The White Ribbon … Dean and Phil are back from Laughlin, Nevada, where they attended the UFO Congress and interviewed David Sereda and Jordan Maxwell. Along the way, they tried to visit Baghdad and got stopped for felony speeding! All that, plus what harmonic bowls can teach us about the end of the Mayan Calendar, what it means to be over forty and interested in writing for television, and the return of Jay Leno on this free-wheeling installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour!