Nah, those words remind people of joy, so they won't be used. Instead we'll have Trump Bugs and Perfected Trumps.

I think you and I must have watched a different pop-cultural phenomenon. After all the praise it's been getting I genuinely wanted to love backlash, but it turned out to be predictable, overly in love with itself, and only superficially engaged with any meaningful issues. For my money smug indifference is still…

We have lived too long…

I made sort of an angry/horrified sighing sound, closely analogous to the noise a zombie would make immediately after rising from the grave.

Another fun one is how the Jesus movement is pretty clearly a spin-off of the much more popular John the Baptist movement. I'm not sure being a well-known disciple of another failed messiah is a way you'd want to portray your leader if you had any choice.

You don't need formal training to be a Christian, but to be a professional academic historian of Christianity I'd say you need to know a few things. I'm not religious but I'm sick of the kind of anti-intellectualism where everybody can just make up their own facts. If someone is going to make a claim like "There was…

Jesus mythicism is sort of the intelligent design of the social sciences. Laughable to anyone with any formal training in the subject, but promoted incessantly as "scholarship" by people who don't want to do real research.

Late to the party here, but the most important proof of Jesus' existence is the way the Bible narratives clearly have to work their way around a real Jesus of Nazareth. For instance, Matthew's Gospel says the guy everyone knew as Jesus of Nazareth was born at his parents' house in Bethlehem, then forced to move to…

I think you have to factor in that he gave up any hope at a normal life to live as a deep cover spy. It's not like he had a change of heart at the last second, Darth Vader style, he did something dumb and selfish when he was a teenager and then spent 20 years trying to fix it. You can respect his actions without…

"…conventionally watchable"!

Maybe he'll look less horrific in different circumstances. When he interacts with the main characters they already know what It is, so he can be out and out terrifying to them and still appear as a somewhat normal clown to the uninitiated.

It's kind of the best and worst of King for me. Moments and people and places so real they're tangible and some of the best vignettes he's ever done, coupled with an unsatisfying ending that deflates the threat just so the good guys can win. And yes, the orgy scene and the creepy sexualization of Bev in general.

That bit with the dog slowly dying is just unbearable for me, especially since it almost gets away. I had to put the book down for a while after I read it. The kid didn't suffer close to enough after that.

She'll always be Marla from Gremlins 2 to me. Surprised she was supposed to be a different character in Home Alone 3, since she definitely looks like a Catherine O'Hara substitute.

That photo means there's at least 1/30th of a second in the movie where Bev Marsh isn't being weirdly sexualized, so this is a major departure from the book.

Y'know I've never met a single person who was opposed to capes coming back into fashion, yet here we all sit.

What's worse are the occasional efforts by Shakespeare scholars to say it's not literal or secretly feminist or whatever their current approach is.

I was born in '82 and the emphasis growing up was always that we were the baby boomers' kids, or "little boom" or something like that, then when I was in my late 20s I was suddenly supposed to be a "millennial" with a ton of cultural signifiers that didn't apply to me at all. This comes up a lot with people I talk to…

I rationalize it by assuming A New Hope is several days later and it took Vader and the Empire some time to track the ship. It'd be like if police were chasing a car in Boston, lost it, and then got a report of the same vehicle in Arizona sometime later. In that case I think the people in the car would have some…

A lot of times the professionals we consider "bad actors" are actually just one note actors. Most can at least make lines sound like they're spoken in the moment and not memorized and recited, which, from my experience working in local theaters, isn't nearly as easy as it looks.