The number is 960/1001.

Watch me get nerdy up on this shit.

Movies are shot at 24 frames per second, because projectors in movie theaters run at 24 frames per second. Yes, there are exceptions, but shut up.

In order to be broadcast on television in the United States, or released on DVD etc. in the US, movies are slowed down from 24 frames per second to 23.976 frames per second, in order to be compatible with the NTSC time base of 59.94 Hz. (These decimals are rounded off; the actual values are the irreducible fractions 24,000/1001 and 60,000/1001, respectively.)

In order to be broadcast or released on video in PAL countries, movies are usually sped up by 4 percent exactly, from 24 frames per second to 25 frames per second. These are integer values, not rounded-off decimals.

So the difference between an NTSC DVD and a PAL DVD would be the difference not between 24 fps and 25 fps, but between 24,000/1001 fps and 25,025/1001 fps, or 960/1001.

So if the guys are watching an NTSC DVD and you have a PAL DVD, you're going to drift out of sync by about two and a half minutes per hour; after the first hour, you'll be 2:27 ahead of the podcast.

But if you play back the podcast at 104 percent of normal speed, Teague and the fellas will sound delightfully chipmunky … and also you'll drift out of sync with them by only about nine seconds per hour. To get better than that, you'll need more decimal places; the actual factor to speed the podcast up by is 1001/960, or 1.0427083etc.

Most of your good audio packages have a variety of preprogrammed audio pulldown presets for things like this. They work by changing the sample rate of the audio file from 48 KHz to some weirdo fraction that has the net result of playing back the audio either faster or slower in order to match a known video frame rate.

I can't think of a movie less in DiF's comfort zone but that I would really like you guys to do more than "Amadeus."

You wanna know how super-exciting my life is? The crazy big plans I had lined up that I'm gonna have to reshuffle in order to attend include laundry and vacuuming.

Can I throw "The Right Stuff" onto the pile? (Though at three and a quarter hours, it might be a stretch.)

Heck, assume your private island has unlimited shelf space. Want to bring along the large-print unabridged edition of À la recherche du temps perdu? Knock yourself out.

There are very few perfectly plotted stories in the world. If you pick any story from the epic of Gilgamesh on forward and think on it long enough, you can probably find some aspect of it that stretches credulity, or just doesn't make any damn sense.

The trick is to entertain the audience sufficiently that they just don't care.

It's like Trey says on the podcast sometimes: "I'm going to allow this." You want me to buy that the alien has no apparent metabolic cycle and that its blood is incredibly corrosive to both metal and flesh? Okay, mister fancy-pants Hollywood writer, I'm gonna go along with that for the time being. But you better make it worth my while.

The telling of stories differs from, y'know, fraud in that it's mutually consensual. I, the audience, agree to go along with some basic premise, even if it's nothing more than "Once upon a time." You, the writer, have to uphold your end of our deal by captivating me. If the writer fails to provide the audience with a quantity of entertainment sufficient to justify their investment of attention and credulity, then the writer has failed.

But … y'know … if the audience just crosses its arms and refuses to go along with anything, then it's the audience that's failed.

Eh, the why-hobbits thing was handled pretty deftly in the novel. It was more of a just-trust-us thing in the movies, but in the book it was really clear that hobbits, due to their inborn humility and down-to-middle-earthness are more resistant to the ring's temptations than anybody else. Frodo had to carry the ring for like a year or something, and he almost made it out okay. Gollum had the ring for hundreds of years, and the worst that came of that is that he lost his mind. Nobody but a hobbit could have done it, was the justification for that one, and I give it a pass.

I have a bigger problem with the fact that, due to the retrograde storytelling involved, the surviving Jedi ended up hiding Darth Vader's son — one of the two most important children in the galaxy — on Vader's homeworld … with his family … under his family name.

My pet theory? Luke was the decoy. Vader was supposed to murder him before he was on solid foods, thereby leaving Leia safe to grow up and make with the heroics.

DUDE. I totally got the first season of "Land of the Lost" from Netflix a year or two ago. It was great! The production values couldn't have been any lower, but the stories were actually pretty cool. The one where the kids find an illusion of their dead mom inside a pylon was startlingly mature for a Sid & Marty Kroft joint.

Well, okay. If it's a parable or a thinly veiled metaphor, then all bets are off. I was referring more to those quirky sci-fi stories that posit the paradox as some kind of major plot point of "ooh, look how mind-blowing I am" show-off thing.

When an ontological paradox comes up in a time-travel story, that's usually my cue to stop paying attention. Not because they make my head hurt — though they do — but because they're usually just goddamn lazy writing.

Guy's walking down the street, hears an obviously crazy homeless guy singing a song. Gets it stuck in his head, goes on to write it down. Song becomes a big hit, guy gets rich. Then, decades later, the guy falls back through time for some reason, loses his mind, ends up singing to himself in an alley as his younger self walks by.

Crap like that makes me nuts. If you're doing it just to be clever, stop it, because it's on the same level as asking whether Jesus could beat Superman in a fight. And if you're basing your whole story on it, give up writing forever and go be a park ranger or something, 'cause you're not cut out for it.

Grumble grumble curse and swear.