Considering the caliber of actors doing it, I suspect that a) the Scarlett line just isn't it as good and b) it was only ever going to work in a transatlantic accent.

I had a professor whose given name was Michael Johnson. He happily took his wife's name which was Sonneleitner - he was also a socialist and it fit in with his world view.

"As a dude…"

Marriage is the cheapest/easiest way to change your name. You can do it as just a price of the marriage license and at the moment you get married, you can change it to anything you like. Legal name changes are actually pretty damned difficult.

There's all kinds of evidence that a difficult-to-pronounce last name can have negative repercussions on hiring chances among other things.

At that point in the series, Babylon 5 had become much more serial and almost not at all episodic. I think having this cul de sac of an episodic story felt like a breach of contract with the viewers. I think the world of television viewers can be broken up into two camps: People who want serials and people who want…

A lot of us here have ancestors from there. So no, I don't think it's genetic. It might be something you pick up from the land, though - I feel pretty strongly about the fairy tale imagery from Grimm because I grew up among the trees and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. There are places where you step into the…

I really think it's just a British thing. They're all about it. There was an episode of Babylon 5 where a guy shows up claiming to be the "future" part of the Once and Future King (played by Michael York no less) and the only person who was at all moved by it was the incidentally British character.

I'm just hoping that the end of season one will end on Patrick Stewart on a medical gurney in a Starfleet Uniform with a giant, ancient probe on the main screen.

It was so un-Portland in every way, I just figured it was an inside joke. Like "Heh! They think LA can stand in for Portland. That street way way too wide! HA HA!"

NPR says numberwise, the anti-vaxxers are more likely to be conservative than liberal. The liberals are louder and get quoted by NYT, though.

What, you don't buy that there are magical, invisible roadies at Charlie's houses? He was *really* rich.

My take on Libby.

There's a reason the wedding industry quotes the average and not the median. The nutso-fantastic $3M weddings have a disproportionate effect on the average - which ends up normalizing spending half a year's salary on one day.

Unless our AOL goes down….

Didn't the Scot have to talk like he was English?

As an American fan of British tv - it's pretty clear that there are precisely 30 male and 30 female British actors and they are recycled as is deemed appropriate for different recurring roles.  I'm not surprised that in those 60 actors, people of color are under represented…they have to wait until someone dies and…

Like the US?

In between Season 1 and Season 2, I read three of the Walt Longmire books that the series is based on.  In that, Vic is a very, very competent big city/techie cop with expertise in forensics - which creates a kind of fish-out-of-water in the low-budget, tiny Absaroka but when she comes back with evidence it's…

It's not inexplicable. It's the "HEAD ON-APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD" of network TV moments.