Goddammit, Olbermann, why did you have to go and feed the troll?

Yes, at least Episode 3 had some decent action scenes and sorta-suspense, in between the melodrama. Ep. 2 was hot garbage. Oddly, one of the few things I clearly remember about it is how much I disliked Anakin/Christiansen.

Oh, for sure. It's got to be one of the most bizarre almost-castings ever, given how safe the humor tends to be overall in Star Trek. In IV, it was enough of a stretch to have Spock say "hell" and "damn" and have it actually work in-universe, I can't imagine what might have happened if they'd tried to turn the movie…

I went to Cornell and I don't recall it being all that douchey, at least compared to some of the other schools on that list. OTOH, I did attend the phony hayseed Ag School Cornell as opposed to the REAL CORNELL which has produced such luminaries as Ann Coulter, so what the hell do I know.

Leonardo DiCaprio was apparently attached to the role early on. It's arguable that just casting a different Anakin would have saved Eps. 2 and 3, but damn, that right there would have been a huge improvement.

Catherine Hicks' marine biologist character in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" nearly ended up being an alien-obsessed professor played by Eddie Murphy. Really. The movie, and Dr. Taylor, are pretty good as-is, but the idea of having a mid-80s Murphy in there (the '80s being Peak Eddie Murphy) is...interesting, to say…

Oh god no. Why a sweater? Why around the shoulders, inside? Why dark green on a pink shirt?? WHY???

Grits are just one dish made with hominy corn, which is corn that has been treated with lye and lime. Meso-Americans as well as Native North Americans (such as the Cherokee) preferred hominy corn because it is much easier to make into dough such as that used in tortillas (masa), and other breads. The grain also…

Lifelong Southerner, here: my family's school of thought is, you can either do your grits sweet with sugar and maybe some butter, or go savory with salt, pepper, red-eye gravy, etc. Most other people I know go by something like this as well. My dad is the weird one in that he prefers sugar AND pepper in his grits.…

I just recently read about a project that aims to modify rice plants to employ a different type of photosynthesis (switching them from C3 to C4), which would potentially allow them to photosynthesize more efficiently and thus yield more grains per plant. This is something that could provide a big boost in food…

My mom switched to Diet Coke many years ago, and has long since become so accustomed to the taste of aspartame that she finds the regular stuff - made with HFCS, sugar, whatever - unpalatable. It's really strange. Meanwhile, if I, a normal person, accidentally take a sip of that diet shit, I tend to recoil in horror…

I went on a tour of some Neolithic mound sites in Ireland last year, where there are lots and lots of huge stones with various mysterious carvings on them. Maybe it's because my standards have been lowered by the mass media's desire to assign ancient alien/Freemason/occult explanations to each and every ancient…

I think the WotW thing is more like, these aliens figured out space travel but they didn't even consider that there might be harmful pathogens on another life-bearing world? I mean, we can't travel very far from our own planet, yet the first two Apollo moon landing crews were put into isolation for a couple of weeks…

One of my favorite scenes in TNG is when the Enterprise is hijacked by Ferengis and Riker uses the power of Treknobabble to confuse the hell out of the guy assigned to figure out the ship's controls.

If there's one thing that "Groundhog Day" got right about on-camera meteorologists, it's that they are usually the ones who get assigned to do the gimmicky publicity stunts for the station (i.e., live Groundhog Day coverage). One of our local weather guys was once asked what his most terrifying on-air moment was, and…

It was nice of Nedry to set up that office park-style UI where each file directory has its own little building.

Well, to Scotty's credit, he really was better off with the keyboard.

Honestly, one of the things that bugs me the most about how movies handle medical science is that they continue to use coughing as short-hand for: "this character will suffer a horrible illness and die by the end of the movie". Seriously, characters can't just randomly cough in a movie like normal people do all the…

That episode of TNG where Barclay's t-cells mutate (or whatever) and infect the entire ship and cause everyone to "de-evolve" into lower life forms is great if you just assume that Barclay has some dormant superpower ability to turn people into random animal/humanoid hybrids. Oh, and cats into lizards.

Well obviously, I'd like a good historic volcano movie ;-) . But the first time I saw a trailer for "Pompeii", my immediate thought was, "bland, basic, overdone sword-and-sandal horseshit + 'splosions". Given how all recent movies in Ancient Roman/Greek/whatever settings have started to look exactly alike (and not in…