Jeremy, Your description of the Ren and Stimpy hommage to _The Searchers_ brought two thoughts to mind (utterly unrelated to each other, but both related to your post): 1) I just saw _The Searchers_ at the NY Public Theater (on a big screen . . . it was magnificent!), and was struck by the same line about raising pigs. It made me think about the opening of _Unforgiven_ . . . do you think having Munney (Clint Eastwood) farming pigs as his post-gunfighter job was a reference to Lars Jorgensen's line? 2) Hommage, comment, or theft?: I recently read _This Is Orson Welles_, the book of interviews with Welles done by Peter Bodganovich in the early 1970s and just published last year [plug: it is a wonderful read and fascinating if you are at all interested in Welles]. During the discussion of the Welles film _Mr. Arkadin_ (which I have never had the opportunity to see but which has just been released on video, I think), the conversation turned to a story which the character of Arkadin (Welles) tells over dinner. The story (which Bogdanovich quotes from the film) was very familiar: it was the frog and the scorpion, which we all know now from _The Crying Game_, which may even have lifted it word for word from Welles' script for the initial telling by Stephen Raye to Forrest Whittaker. All of which suggests hommage, not theft, but why? As I said, I haven't seen _Arkadin_, but from what I know of the movie, I don't really see any thematic resemblance to _The Crying Game_ (unless one wishes to see "desire to hide one's past" as a theme of both, but that seems a little broad). Any ideas why Jordan chose to lift this story? Has he discussed _Mr. Arkadin_ in any interviews or articles? -- Ben Alpers Princeton University