When the 50th anniversary hoopla was going on, I toyed with the mad idea of watching every single (available) episode, starting from "Unearthly Child." I got about five serials in before it started to feel like homework, and I had to quit. Though my OCD streak says that I've gotta watch them in order, and watch ALL…

Wonder how much overlap there is between the circles of people who (a) really, really like Minor Threat, (b) have $2 mill to burn, and (c) don't already have a house.

As far as I can tell, Michael Richards was guilty of a colossal miscalculation of what his audience would find funny/acceptable…or he was having some sort of weird episode. In either case, I doubt he's a white supremacist in his heart of hearts. On the other hand, Victoria Jackson is clearly a true believer in all…

Violated his prime directive.

Skyrim belongs to the Nords!

Not to be pedantic, but later Egyptians heavily tweaked the hieroglyphs of earlier Egyptians, to make them more useful as a form of writing.

That colorized still from Capra's film looks really ugly and wrong to me. There's no doubt in my mind that Capra would say to Turner, "my God, what have you done to my beautiful black and white cinematography?" The "improvement" on Final Fantasy doesn't bother me at all, though…maybe I'm tone-deaf to the problem…

It's the perfect crime, because local news is on everywhere at the same time, so you're not likely to compare Cleveland's to Pittsburgh's. (And if I'm from Cleveland, then why would I watch local news from anywhere but Cleveland?).

I especially liked how the whole movie comes to turn on a line from a biker flick ("we want to be free!" etc.). That was pretty damn clever.

Same here. Goddamn, I wish I could take Prof. Smirnoff's class on the Business of Laughter.

Huh? Chomsky has written dozens of books and delivered countless lectures and interviews on a wide, wide range of topics of general interest. Even if you disagree with everything he has to say, if there's one person you can't accuse of being "too narrow" in their focus, it'd be Chomsky.

Chomsky certainly qualifies as a public intellectual, and he's also written a great deal about the role of intellectuals in society. He has consistently attacked intellectuals for acting as tools of the man…going back to "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" (1967), where he describes the shameful role of…

Sure, we've got plenty of public intellectuals in the US…we just call them pundits, or talking heads. Just because they're idiots (Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakariya, George Will, Alan Dershowitz, et al.) doesn't mean that they're not public intellectuals. If you mean public intellectuals who deserve respect, then…

In season 4, through some unexpected turn of events, Saul and Dar Adal become comically mismatched roommates. Then, Carry dies, and they adopt her baby. Now they've got to figure out how to raise the baby, get along with each other, and do their sinister black ops stuff all at the same time. Yes!

Thanks for the tip, uselessbeauty. Just watched it. I won't say
anything about it except: I was expecting that something completely
ridiculous would go down (Dexter style)…but it didn't, so that makes me happy.

You don't hear anyone saying, "Dana is such a great character…if only they got a better actor to play her, that'd fix everything!"

Don't forget "Last Days Here," about Bobby Liebling from Pentagram. There's an exploitation/freak show element to this doc, but the filmmakers seem to be literally helping the guy to stay alive (e.g., by keeping him off the crack).

Isn't hip hop sorta based on the idea that it's okay to "appropriate" other people's music (say, sounds from P-Funk songs), and do one's own thing with it?

As far as I can tell, according to this author, it's racist to attack ostentatious displays of wealth by African Americans, because "wealth operates differently" for them. They can't control themselves once they've got some dough (??!!)…something like that. Anyway, this author doesn't seem to be embarrassed about…

What a meaningless phrase. To have agency = to be active, to be an actor/agent, to do stuff. Indeed, Miley Cyrus is a doer of things. But so is everyone else.