ryan phillippe
Has he had plastic surgery? His face was kind of freaking me out the whole show. Something about it is off.

Ah. Gotcha.

You should try reading the Tao Te Ching more than every ten years. It's also good to read different translations. Unless you can read Chinese, in which case . . . well, good on you.

I'm an atheist, but Fear and Trembling is a terrific book. Made me read a ton of Kierkegaard afterward, but as much as I enjoy him, nothing lived up to it. Also, hard to go wrong with The Brothers Karamazov, though I read it around the same age you did, and I don't even want to think about all the stuff that probably…

The Tao Te Ching is awesome. The Chuang Tzu is even better.

jason heller mentioned me by name
What do you know? It's ALMOST like it's some kind of phrase people use.

But remember, pico79, those books have too much fluffy pointless padding, with needless descriptions and schmaltzy metaphors. This we now know: it's Animal Farm or bust.

Well, at least we sidestepped one of those inane "death of the novel" discussions.

Saramago is pretty damn accessible, though. The only things that might turn off the average person are purely superficial texty qualities—i.e., paragraphs that go on for pages and no quotation marks. But otherwise, the dude is readable as hell.

I couldn't make it fifty pages into Life of Pi. Then when a friend finally explained what happened, I felt relieved I hadn't finished it.

Given the lead time to write a movie, get it cast and put together, then shoot it, there's no way their character names are based on Modern Family. Hell, Fey and Carrell's tv work schedules alone probably mean that the movie was shot before Modern Family ever aired.

I'm not talking about the inspiration for the character. Of course Sheldon is drawn from real life, or was. More than anything, though, I'm talking about how the show's use of him has evolved over three seasons. No one could really deny he's taken over the show, and I think on the whole that's been more to its…

ordinary
The show settled for being ordinary long, long ago, with its only ambition to do ordinary very well. But I think that lack of great ambition is slowly strangling the series.

I thought they put on the screen that Ryan Phillippe was hosting next week.

They had some extra weed lying around?

Probably makes a big difference that they're coming back after a break. Trying to create consistently funny material three or four weeks in a row on the work schedule they have must be brutal.

Kristen Wiig is really talented and funny, but the distance between what she does on SNL and in movies is bizarre. Every time I see her in a movie, she's subtle and funny. Not on SNL, though. But then SNL cast members rarely become big stars on the show by playing their parts with any subtlety.

the whole thing . . .
. . . didn't make me actually laugh too often, but I found it surprisingly solid and likable. Though could we please, for the love of god, get rid of Seth Meyers as the Update anchor?

Speaker for the Dead = classic, too.

Yet even This Is the Way World Ends, as bitter as it is, has a sense of humor about it, as black as that humor may be. The Eternal Footman lacks even that. Though This Is the Way World Ends didn't hold up for me on rereading it. It blew my mind in my early 20s, but seemed kind of thin and hollow in my 30s. Maybe b/c…