Chat With Julia Child, Ken Burns, Tupac's Mother

Cooking shows can often be the most entertaining shows on TV, especially if you hate cooking; the food preparation often just serves as an activity to occupy the goofball whose bizarreness is the real show. Julia Child was the original and still the greatest lovable nut to pick up a sieve; other immortal PBS poultry-pounders (nice turn of phrase, Ed! Thank you, Ed!) like Justin "I Guarantee" Wilson and Martin "Don't Wok The Boat" Yan are forever beholden to Child's free-for-all, seemingly chaotic style. Chat with the living legend about her new book, "Julia's Kitchen Wisdom," on barnesandnoble.com at 7 p.m. EST, 6 p.m. CST, 5 p.m. MST, 4 p.m. PST.

I learned about the unique genius of Tupac Shakur a little too late -- last week, in fact. See, modern poetry has become irrelevant, because it is so muddled in the ivory tower of intellectual pretension that it can't reach the general populace. But Tupac could, and did, with a poetry that explored every aspect of his wildly contradictory, and thus infinitely fascinating nature. For proof of all this there is a new CD, "The Rose That Grew From Concrete," a collection of Tupac's famous admirers putting his more personal poems to music. Chat with the guiding force behind his fascinating life, Tupac's mother Afeni, about the release on bet.com at 8:05 p.m. EST, 7:05 p.m. CST, 6:05 p.m. MST, 5:05 p.m. PST.

Even for a guy like me, for whom football knowledge just doesn't seem to stick, Joe Theismann is a familiar name. First of all, it sounds a lot like "Heisman," which is a trophy you can win as a college player. And "Heisman" sounds a lot like "Hesseman," as in Howard Hesseman, who starred in "Head of the Class." Man that was a good show. Oh, and also, a 12-year NFL veteran, Theismann played in 163 consecutive games from 1974-85 and holds Redskins' records for passing yardage (25,206), completions (2,044) and attempts (3,602). Now he's ESPN's Sunday Night NFL color commentator, and he'll be taking any and all questions about football, or about "Head of the Class," on which he starred, I believe, on starwave.com at 6 p.m. EST, 5 p.m. CST, 4 p.m. MST, 3 p.m. PST.

Among film directors, Ang Lee is a cute 'lil dynamo. Reportedly a soft-spoken bear of a guy, he has helmed some of the better, more emotionally complex films of the '90s, including "The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Ice Storm," and now the raves-drawing new one, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Chat with him on usatoday.com at 1:30 p.m. EST, 12:30 p.m. CST, 11:30 a.m. MST, 10:30 a.m. PST.

And again: Ken Burns is the one of the few people able to gain national fame for making documentaries. It helps that instead of making ones about, say, Christo or R. Crumb, he chooses topics like the Civil War and baseball. A Ken Burns documentary means spending an evening with lots of slow zooms into grainy photos and voice-overs by Garrison Keillor -- not exactly a Jackie Chan movie, but it has a lot of quiet pleasures to offer. Chat with him about his latest, "Jazz," on barnesandnoble.com at 5 p.m. EST, 4 p.m. CST, 3 p.m. MST, 2 p.m. PST.