Still riding feel-good Roger Ebert waves from Chris Jones’s now-iconic Esquire profile from a couple of years ago? Well, hop off those and soak in some cattiness, egotism, high jinks, and fine usages of the term frenemies courtesy of Slate’s lengthy excerpt of a new oral history about Ebert and his longtime sparring partner Gene Siskel. “They never would have chosen each other as friends,†says one source, awkwardly identified via initials and an initials-key. Minor revelations include: At the Movies’ tapings often ran four to six hours owing to arguments, and a coin toss was the official deciding factor for disputes. Like, so official that every producer had to keep a quarter in his or her pocket. But by far the best anecdote, corroborated in triplicate, is the news that Siskel and Ebert began every taping with a boisterous round of patty-cake. “They performed it with complicated hand/knee slaps and everything,†recalls an associate producer. Here’s an unsuccessful YouTube search for “Siskel and Ebert patty-cake†if you want to open a tab and obsessively hit refresh until there’s video evidence.