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Boy, it's hot in here. I gotta loosen this tie. Are you sure we want to go through with this? I mean, have you looked at these numbers? Whoa. Let me wipe my glasses. Would it kill someone to crack open a window? No, I understand. I'm sorry. But just look at the numbers. I couldn't -- it's not ethical. Wow, you're right -- that is a lot of money. It's boiling in here. Is it just me? Can I get a glass of water?

Ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce H!ITG! extraordinaire, Mr. Saul Rubinek.

You know him. Just picture a curly mop of black hair. Now add thick, black Groucho eyebrows. Maybe some horn-rimmed glasses, if it's a period piece. Plus, he's a portly gent. A wee bit stocky, perhaps. Now spritz the whole package with some spray-bottle perspiration. A little more. A little more. Come on -- make that hair really glisten. You know, like Rick James's jheri curls back in the day. Yes -- that's it.

Recognize him now?

Saul Rubinek has spent the past twenty years playing nerds, nebbishes, losers, cowards. yes-men, apparatchiks, and Henry Kissinger. Actually, he only played Kissinger once, in 1999's Dick. He also starred in Nixon, but in that film he played "Herb Klein." You can currently enjoy him as "Howie," a vaguely shifty, slightly sweaty agent in Baadasssss!. But you most likely know him as W.W. Beauchamp, the sweaty, lily-livered biographer in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

Sadly, his opportunities to play characters named "Beauchamp" have been limited. In fact, a list of typical Rubinekian parts reads like a roll call at the neighbourhood shvitz: Ira Stone, Saul Panzer, Alan Mesnick, Mr. Ferderber, Sam Smotherman, Seymour Heller, Hersh Rasseyner, Alan Mintz and, in one memorable instance, Eric Schlockmeister.

There are a lot of reasons to like Saul Rubinek, and here are ours:

1) He's Canadian. Born in a refugee camp in Germany, but growed in the majestic north.

2) He was a series regular on Bizarre, which was a kind of Canadian Benny Hill, but in a good way.

3) He starred in a little-known 1981 film titled Ticket to Heaven, a film about a guy who gets sucked into a Moonie-like cult and is only saved by the caring intervention of his wisecracking Jewish best friend, a.k.a. Saul Rubinek. The cultists in the film shout "Bomb with love! Bomb with love!" over and over again, a phrase which still gives us the chills. This is because we were shown this film at an impressionable age, several times over, by well-intentioned people who hoped to dissuade us from joining Moonie-like cults and who did not, apparently, see the irony in showing a film about cults repeatedly to a bunch of impressionable kids. Curiously, this repeated exposure to Rubinek had the unintended effect of making us want to hang out more often with wisecracking Jews, a practice we embrace to this day.