I really hope they make it "gritty". Murderous elephant mothers, clowns on fire, a collapsing circus tent... The Pink Elephants on Parade song alone has endless possibilities.

Thanks for the interesting article! And sure, Scotty was definitely used as comic relief sometimes, but he wasn't the full-on clown shown in the remakes.

Right, Kirk was portrayed more as ultra-competent, confident, and dutiful more than anything else. There's a lot of this sort of UberMensch type character in 1940s - 60s scifi, the confident, fearless, smart, moral leader type characters. Like Reith in Planet of Adventure. We don't see them in too much fiction…

My kid ISN'T vaccinated, because he's under 6 months old. Just like a bunch of the babies that have died in the whooping cough epidemic. And those deaths are at the hands of everyone that doesn't vaccinate.

Screw that. Take the kids away. They're endangering both their own and MY kids. Make it mandatory across the board.

Absolutely. There should be no exemptions, religious or otherwise. I can't drive drunk for religious reasons, I shouldn't be able to compromise the population's immunity either.

I'm thinking the peace was largely the result of wealth plus natural barriers. No close neighbors of any sophistication means that no one would be capable of beating their army in the field locally or successfully besieging them.

It's heavily alluded to in TNG at least that the PD mostly was developed in response to really, really bad results, like horrible interstellar wars , that were caused through interference and/or bad first contact protocols in the early days of human spaceflight. This wasn't really supported later when the history was…

I'm with you. Looking for something to read, I polled several friends on what was the best. They gave me the Thrawn books to start, which I know are highly regarded. I got through two and couldn't finish the trilogy. I thought the writing and plotting was just terrible. Though it was far better than the handful of…

This stuff can be fun to know. I have two friends who were kind of dating/hooking-up who said they were "distant cousins" with lots of removed, etc. I promptly confirmed that they were in fact second cousins. Lots of uncomfortable silences from them for the remainder of the cookout.

No one had claimed differently. Of course climate has changed in the past - to argue otherwise would be incredibly stupid. I'm sick on seeing this straw man argument pop up all of the time. The issue now is a) the cause is different b) the change is more rapid and c) the change is more severe.

What's the statute of limitations for spoilers? LOTR has been huge in the culture for a good 70 years now, and the movies have been around for 10. So it is bound to happen. An interesting take on spoilers: http://mightygodking.com/2014/04/15/spo…

Every July we witness the MA female spawning run up 95 North to Old Orchard, where they mate with French Canadian men and lay their eggs in the sand...

That's inappropes!

Agreed, this one doesn't belong on the list. It perhaps had potential to be terrible, but it ended up being a great movie.

Sometimes opinions on quality can be objectively incorrect, apparently.

Agreed - a carrier is really a WWII weapon system. With modern anti-ship missiles, I imagine they'd be fairly easy to take out, given a technologically equal adversary. If you look at the Falkland Islands War, the Argentines were able to take out quite a few relatively modern British warships with aircraft and…

Why aircraft carriers? Launch your drones from destroyers, cruisers, subs, even other aircraft. No need for all of that expensive flight deck.

No, I think he was just a pasty dude. He had sensitive skin, too, and always wore silk undergarments and took daily baths, even at the front.

At least McNamara had reservations later in life. Rumsfeld seems to be living the unexamined life.