The blog's been resting, but the critics have not, as a bunch of us did lightning visits to studios from Hollywood to Burbank, meeting with the casts of TNT's "The Closer," NBC's "Heroes," CBS' "Two and a Half Men" and "Cold Case" and ABC's "Brothers & Sisters."

We even spent time in the offices of TMZ.com, which is about to become a TV show but today was just a very busy place, thanks to Lindsay Lohan's latest misadventure.

You may know Masi Oka -- the Hiro of "Heroes" -- as a high-IQ actor playing a character who can manipulate time, but until you've seen him walking backward through stage sets full of wires and other hazards, while warning those walking behind him to "no flash photography, please ... if you have a photographic memory, that's fantastic -- you can be on our show," you ain't seen nothing.

Oka, who claims he chose Brown University because it was the one college he visited where the guide faced visitors (hey, I've heard stupider reasons), kept up a steady stream of chatter, some informative, some more imaginative.

Example: As we entered what appeared to be an Irish pub (located on the street in Hollywood's Sunset Gower Studios that used to be Philadelphia in "American Dreams"), Oka suggested that one of next season's quests would be "to save 'The Black Donnellys.'"

Oka wasn't the only cast member present: Though no one, including them, would explain it, I'm taking it as a good sign that Milo Ventimiglia and Adrian Pasdar, whose characters were last seen zooming into space and presumably exploding, were nevertheless there, along with cast members whose characters are still assumed to be among the living.

Other nuggets:

-- At least one reporter wasn't shy about opening up all the drawers in the desk Kyra Sedgwick's character, Brenda, occupies on "The Closer," looking for the one where she keeps the sugar. And once the drawer had been left open, no one else seemed shy about checking out Brenda's stash, which included a Ding Dong, M&Ms and some Ghirardelli chocolate squares. "It looks like it was left for us to find," sniffed one reporter, apparently forgetting that six months ago, someone accidentally left a report out on the "24" set that discussed the torture death of Jack Bauer's brother. Not that we gave it away (or even fully understood it) at the time. Still, you might want to clean your house before TV critics come over.

-- "Closer" co-star Corey Reynolds, who talked during a recent visit to Philadelphia about his longing to play the Green Lantern, showed me one of the props on is desk -- an envelope bearing a Green Lantern stamp. Also on his desk: a picture of him with his fiancee, Tara Schemansky, and another of four very cute pit bulls put there by a crew member to commemorate Reynolds' run-in with a not very friendly pit bull that charged him and Schemansky on their first day in their new house in Los Feliz and which eventually was shot to death by police after pepper spray couldn't stop it. (Reynolds has two dogs of his own, one a shih-tzu, and still feels bad. "I'm a dog lover...[but] the police told me this was the most vicious animal they'd ever seen.")

-- Melanie Lynskey, who left "Two and a Half Men," where she'd played Rose, for Fox's "Drive," only to see it unceremoniously canceled, will return in the show's 100th episode, to be filmed next month, said show creator Chuck Lorre. "For now, it's a recurring character," he said. "I hope it's as often as we can make it. We love her."

-- Charlie Sheen's comment on Lohan's latest DUI arrest: "it's not that complicated to hire a car."