I can only look forward to the world in which countries ban movies that feature anyone who supports a country they were ever at war with.

Interesting that naming Pasha after Pavlik Morozov turns out to be a Chekov's gun that didn't go off. (Pasha was at the center of a crisis, but not one that really harks back to the historical figure he's named after.) I guess it was more of an easter egg than anything.

Petty bourgeois/petite-bourgeois is a specific class insult for Communists; the connotation is different from "bourgeois and petty". Though if anything it's probably worse, since it's more specific, and pretty rich coming from someone with such a short career to people who've given decades of their lives to the…

And Superman: the Movie used the same insight: kryptonite necklace notwithstanding, the main tension isn't that Superman might be killed, it's that he'll be unable to save New Jersey, California, and Lois.

But not more popular than superheroes. (Which isn't something I would have confidently said a decade or two ago.)

On the other hand, stripped of genre conventions, once the Joker had performed a few of his inevitable breakouts and recidivism, he'd be regrettably "shot trying to escape" the next time he was captured.

While I found the gameplay frustrating at times, I really liked the basic concept that Superman doesn't lose by being destroyed (because he's invulnerable), Superman loses if he fails to save the day.

Just to be clear: is the thesis that there has never, in 57 years, been a good Justice League story? (Okay, minus a few years for the JL Detroit and JLI eras, but still.)

Why did it get dusty in here all of a sudden?

I can't imagine how you left out the bit where the writers realized that this left a thirtyish man dating a woman of around fifty. And since that obviously couldn't be, they decided on the obvious solution: Black Canary's mind had been transferred to her daughter (Dinah's memory of whom had been wiped, and who'd been…

I have affection for Borders from when it was "that big cool bookstore I get to go to the rare times I'm in Ann Arbor". And from when they were first expanding, when it was worth driving miles to get to one.

For about a week after the first one I ever went to opened, they had enthusiastic, knowledgeable salespeople and reasonable prices relative to the available competition. But that didn't last long.

I'll miss Best Buy as a place to recycle dead electronics for free. But that's probably not a sustainable business model.

Those electronics kits were awesome.

It all depended. The TRS-80 Model 100 was a treasure with no real competitors (except its manufacturer-branded sibling, which was a lot harder to find): a laptop with a real keyboard that ran forever on AA batteries, in 1983. The thirdhand one I used for taking notes was still the only laptop most of my professors…

Hey, I liked it! Granted, I was a sucker for anything remotely science fictional, but still.

He's got an awful lot of corporate vice presidencies on his resume for an everyman.

It was effectively the movie version of red K, as the molecule chamber in Superman II was the movie equivalent to gold K.

That was Jor-El's original plan. But he failed to convince the Science Council to support it, and ultimately ran out of time before he could complete a bigger ship.

Gold is of course tricky, since plotwise it can only ever actually be used on other Kryptonians. (At least this side of the series finale.) But it's a handy threat.