CLOVERFIELD

If the end of the world - or, at any rate, the end of Manhattan - eventually comes via a pissed-off, skyscraper-sized reptile, and the destruction is captured on video by an empty-headed twentysomething slacker goofus, the results will probably look and sound a lot like Cloverfield.

Like many noted directors of opera, Bill Fabris has a résumé that boasts a number of heavyweight titles, among them Bizet's Carmen, Puccini's Tosca, Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, and Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, which Fabris stage-directs - with Ron May music-directing - for Opera Quad Cities on January 18 and 20.

Unlike many noted directors of opera, though, the New York-based Fabris' résumé boasts an even greater number of productions that are not only considerably more lighthearted than Rigoletto, but as far removed from tragic opera as is conceivable, including My Fair Lady, The Wizard of Oz, and Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

THE BUCKET LIST

I can't begin to describe how much I was looking forward to making fun of The Bucket List. A Rob Reiner-directed dramedy about two squabbling terminal-cancer patients -Jack Nicholson, cackling and flexing his eyebrows, and Morgan Freeman, providing soothing, pithy bromides and the inevitable voice-over narration - who gradually become friends and live out their final days skydiving and race-car driving and scaling the pyramids ... . Was there any way this wouldn't be a syrupy disaster of epic proportions?

Authors who'd kill for a publisher to even consider their works probably hate Doug Smith.

The Davenport native, a bio-medical equipment technician at Genesis Medical Center, is also a noted collector of local photographs, papers, and artifacts, and has written a regular feature column - "Doug's Q-C Collectibles" - for the Quad-City Times since February 2007.

Yet finding a company willing to publish his first book, says Smith, wasn't a struggle: "They actually found me."