I feel like the nuance being missed here is that Dear Leader doesn’t understand perspective, or is unwilling to allow that there was another perspective on the audience that made its sparsity relative to Obama’s 2009 inauguration more apparent. I mean, I can see how a reeeeaaaaalllly slow person would be confused by…

While I’m at home on paternity leave I’ve been leaving Midsomer Murders playing in the background to pass the time. I am convinced that Hot Fuzz is basically an episode of Midsomer Murders done in the Bayhem style. The show, too, seems to be having fun skewering the prim and proper village life, casting charming rural…

And that's why we love him.

Uh...the nazis did get their hands on the Ark of the Covenant. It's hard to say if he has ever saved the world, actually. He definitely saved a village of slave kids in Temple of Doom, and definitely kept one nazi dude from living forever in The Last Crusade, and watched some communists get disintegrated in Crystal…

Why is it that when we discover something like "eating too much wheat can have adverse health effects," the answer is always "stop eating wheat!," rather than "eat wheat, as with everything, in moderation?"

Is there a better capture of the nacelle as it emerges from the sea? The NCC number looks like it has a 5 as the second digit in the above image. If we could see the digits clearer we might be better able to rule in or out the Enterprise. Just a thought.

Even before you get to analysis of the data, the data has to be corrected for slight changes in position along the roll, pitch, and yaw axes. Having done a good deal of fMRI data preanalysis (i.e., cleaning the data, correcting for motion, etc.), I can tell you that there is enough motion in a person simply lying…

Using fMRI they "compared men and women participants self-stimulating to orgasm."

Has anyone wondered if the decimation of the mob in Kansas City means that time travel didn't end up being appropriated by them in the future? The time machine must be located near Kansas City since it transports people to a field near Kansas City in the past. So it must be controlled by the future iteration of the…

Oh, man. There was an episode of This American Life about one of these places. It's too much to explain or retell, you just have to listen.

I was glad to see the bone tossed to Buddhism in question six, though it isn't exactly the case that Buddhists reject the possibility of objective perception. At the very least Buddhists admit of a fleeting form of perception called "direct perception" (pratyakṣa in Sanskrit) that occurs each time a new stimuli…

Hmmmm. I wonder how Meredith really feels about it?

I loved Crash. All the reviews I've seen for Cosmopolis, including this one, leave me torn. Basically the message I'm getting is, "It sucks. But then again, it's Cronenberg."

Nice to see the Wisconsin Uprising getting a visual shout out.

I love #2! I wish I didn't have to buy all of them in order to get just that one.

I think really what is at stake for me is the distinction between folklore, which does subsist primarily orally, and literary or cinematic products in a market. The stories that a people circulate orally, having read versions of them in print somewhere, cannot be considered as totally equivalent to stories that are…

Which Himalayan folklore are you working with? I also have an interest.

I like this analogy, because it can also be used to help illustrate the difference between folktales and movie remakes. If Hollywood is like a supermarket (see, market is right there in the title), then folklore is like the garden in your back yard. You grow what you want there, for your own consumption, with little…

Mullah Nasruddin! So happy to see someone mention that.

I can accept what your saying at a very basic level. That is, I think the continued *appeal* of the Spider-Man story at the box office points to its folk power. However, the analogy being made in the initial article was between folk tales and remakes, which I think isn't a perfect analogy because it overlooks a major…