IN a questionable bit of casting, Nicole Kidman will play Gwyneth Paltrow’s husband/wife in a strange romantic film The Danish Girl.

Two of the coldest and least sexy actresses in Hollywood? (Make that on the planet.)

Whose idea was this?

IVAN is a former student of mine. I remember him because the first time I called his name, he corrected my pronunciation. Ay-van, I said. Eevan, he said. But a few months after that, he got used to my calling him “Ivan”, and he sort of gave up.

A year after that, long after Ivan had left my class on Business Communication, I kept seeing him in ads. The first time he was a doting father. Was that his child in real life? Was that his wife? It did not matter much. He is a young father, that much I knew about him. Then he was in more commercials. No problem with that. Until he came out in this ad where he was obviously a dentist favoring one toothpaste brand over other brands. Did Ivan become a dentist? Or, is he playing the role of the dentist?

APPARENTLY, it became listed on the reference book for so-called urban lexicon sometime in 2006.

In Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com), “Crackberry” is cited as the Urban Word of Day for November 17, 2006: “Nickname for the popular RIM communication device named Blackberry. The device, which is a phone, PDA and e-mail appliance, has gained outrageous popularity. Users/owners are typically addicted to checking e-mail and swapping short messages on the device. It appears as though they are addicted as a crackhead is to the pipe.”