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That’s why, if you’ve got a serious home-theater system — or even a semiserious one with three or more components — a universal remote control is an amazing device to own.

Walter Bernstein, 101, a scriptwriter who was blacklisted in the 1950s for his Communist Party membership and who two decades later skewered the McCarthy era in “The Front,” a film that starred Woody Allen in a rare semiserious role and earned an Oscar nomination for best screenplay, died Jan. 23 at home in Manhattan.

Baldessari’s semiserious, stamp-printed jest surreptitiously bumped aside the Cubist painter being named.

Is this a dramatic, semiserious argument that is mostly underlining the point that something out of the ordinary needs to be done?

I promised to go in on this adorable, childlike 50-year-old and I was semiserious.