Playing Catch-up

• The Showtime series Homeland, starring Claire Danes and Damien Lewis, “dominated” last night’s Emmy Awards ceremony, winning commendations for drama, actress, actor and writing. “The wins were not just well-deserved, they saved the broadcast from being a complete and utter bore,” writes Mary McNamara in the Los Angeles Times. I’m sorry now that I missed the show.

• Although the American version of The Killing was cancelled after two very disappointing years, the third season of the original, Danish version of that crime drama is scheduled to return to BBC4 in mid-November. (Hat tip to Eurocrime.)

• As previously announced, the Manhattan bookstore Partners & Crime closed with a party last week after 18 years in business.

• Wow, you don’t see book covers like the top one here anymore.

• Spinning off a new post theme, “competition,” A.V. Club contributors do their best to dissect the more-than-metaphorical chess game played out in “The Most Dangerous Match,” a 1973 episode of Peter Falk’s Columbo. Even though they insist this installment, written by Jackson Gillis, is not one of the series’ best, their words and video clips make me want to slip that episode into my DVD player soon.

• Buddies in the Saddle blogger Ron Scheer’s futuristic Western tale, “Half-Breed,” is this week’s new offering in Beat to a Pulp.

• Today brings an end to the Web’s “What a Character!” Blogathon, which--over these last three days--has highlighted “scene-stealing, delightful character actors that we all love to see on the big screen.” Among the performers discussed are Eve Arden, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Jaeckel, Ward Bond, Ann Miller, and Charles McGraw. A full list of participating bloggers and their subjects is here.

• And since it is National Punctuation Day here in the United States, let me just mention one of my biggest pet peeves: people who fail to use commas properly around the names of cities and the states or countries that contain them. The Associated Press Stylebook offers two correct usage examples: His journey will take him from Dublin, Ireland, to Fargo, N.D.; and The Selma, Ala., group saw the governor. Too many writers fail to insert a comma after the state or country name. This sentence, for instance, is incorrect: The Selma, Ala. group saw the governor. Having now made my point, I hope never to see that kind of mistake made again. Yeah, fat chance ...