Mad Men‘s Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) is no more, and as I write these words I can hear the shriekings of 10,000 spoiler whiners. Pryce’s blotchy neck and bluish tongue have been written about all over the place. Harris even gave an interview to TV journos on Monday morning to talk it over. I read about it myself before catching the episode in question (“Commissions and Fees”, which I’m now watching for the third time) — do you think I cared?

Roger Sterling (chuckling after hanging up the phone): “25 year-old coat check girl from Long Island. Or Rhode Island. She’d never had room service before. Too easy.”

Don Draper: ‘Why do we do this?”

Sterling: “For the sex. But it’s always disappointing. For me, anyway.”

I also loved it when Draper’s 12 (13?) year-old daughter told her platonic boyfriend that she can’t walk across Central Park with him (i.e., east to west) because “we don’t go across the park — there are bums on the other side.” Which of course there were in the mid ’60s. On the Upper West Side, I mean. Particularly Columbus Ave. It never ceases to amaze that the area adjacent to the 72nd and Columbus IRT station was “Needle Park” (i.e., where you would go to cop smack) as recently as the early ’70s.