Pioneer Square's Sake Nomi is mostly a retail store—artfully appointed shelves of rice wine with funny names ("Drunken Whale," "Frolicsome Emperor," "Monkey's Lament") and pretty labels, rustic little pottery sets for sake-specific purposes—but it also has a bar, and the bar has a TV behind it, and once in a while, the TV shows movies. Usually, the owner told me, they screen movies with an obvious sake connection, but this past weekend it was The Big Lebowski. He justified it with the observation that a glass of cloudy sake looks kind of like a White Russian. Touché, sake man. Touché.

Watching a movie in a sake shop is less than ideal. A sake shop is not a movie theater. Sake is not popcorn. Patrons (there were approximately eight of us, making it a weirdly intimate living-room experience, if your living room were strewn with sake bottles) perched on tall, lumbar-liquefying stools and sipped cloudy sake samplers. I hadn't seen The Big Lebowski in a few years, and it wasn't as good as I remembered—less expansive, more dated (that said, it's still better than, oh, 100 percent of the movies I watch on a weekly basis). The sake, though supremely tasty, gave me a headache. That's about all I got. I would be pleased to buy sake at Sake Nomi in the future. I do not want to watch movies on its TV, however.

Speaking of headaches, Natasha Richardson fell down. Then she died. In between, she got a headache.

Richardson—blond, likable, European—occupies a weird blind spot in American popular culture. When the news of her accident surfaced (while taking a beginner's ski lesson in Quebec, she fell down, hit her head, was okay for a bit, got a headache, and then DIED), half the people I talked to had no idea who she was. One friend thought it was Miranda Richardson who died. Another, Natasha Lyonne. Both admitted, sheepishly, to feeling "less sad" once they realized it was some blond, likable, European lady. That blind spot is a shame—Richardson may wind up more famous for falling down and then dying (but seriously, WTF?) than for her body of work. That's too bad. Elegant yet accessible, she occupied that reassuring feminine space between sexy and motherly—like, come to think of it, Maureen O'Hara in the original The Parent Trap, a role that Richardson reprised in 1998. (Earnest Parent Trap reference!)

I have trouble with sincerity. But you know who doesn't? People who create and comment on YouTube video tributes to dead celebrities. I'll let them have the last word: "Why have beautiful people to die so early? I don't understand this." "omg dats soo sad like she was in da parent trap and... dat just sad man!" "Her Everlasting Beauty And Eternal Light Will Cocoon The World In Her Rememberance." "I loved her."