The sad thing is I feel like I've heard this story 87 times, with a different classic rock band and Republican presidential candidate each time:

I put Born in the USA near the top of my list of inexplicably popular songs. It sounds like the same boring shit for 5 minutes. I'm not a huge Boss fan, but Born to Run is a million times better.

Agreed. The Zulkey list takes responsibility for it's bizarre choices, whereas Todd is trying to have his cake and eat it too.

You are sort of right minderbender, taking the median is essentially treating the distribution of votes as uniform when it probably isn't. But this is necessary to remove incentive for strategic voting. So basically the loss of information isn't a big deal, because you could never fully trust that information to begin…

lylebot I actually recently heard a counter-argument to this theorem at an Operations Research conference. I forget the details, but it has something to do with taking the voters' median preference instead of the mean/sum. Like if all the AV Club guys gave Louie point totals of 15,15,14,14,14,14,14,13,12,1 you would…

This point allocation strategy sounds like cheating to me. What if everyone voted like that? The resulting point totals could be wildly misleading. Fire VanDerWerff!

I always like it when commenters call for someone to be fired. Sorry Claire, but we've gotten some complaints about you from Matthew Sweets fat ass, I'm afraid we'll have to let you go.

Do I even want to know what RuPaul’s Drag Race is? Claire Zulkey frightens me.

You guys probably don't know that "SKE48 no Magical Radio" is actually the Japanese title of Parks and Recreation. Community is just called Community.

These are good points, but isn't "best" something different than "most innovative/ambitious"? My primary want from a TV show is entertainment, not some sort of genre redefinition. If innovation is one of the qualities that makes a show entertaining, as with Louie, that's great. But there are other considerations, like…

I like the show Louie, but is it really better than Parks & Rec or Breaking Bad? I find those shows to be more action-packed, whereas Louie has a more introspective feel, which is fine I guess, but it just doesn't leave me wanting more like BB or Parks.

I second this question. Who the fuck is Dawes?

I don't really think Fallon had to apologize; but if I were him, I would take back the apology if Bachmann's only response is more political grandstanding.

Now I remember, we got to use it on the last day of class because we spent the rest of the time building it. I would have liked to build a more powerful, destructive laser though.

At least it was technically a big laser, in terms of being large and weighty.

The only fact I retained from that class is that LASER stands for Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Sometimes I casually mention that when I want to impress people with my wealth of trivial knowledge.

Yea I'm not really sure what the point of an ultra-violet laser is. I guess it was because lasers have a lot of more useful functions than just looking cool, but I've since forgotten most of those.

No, but I was on the math team once. Perhaps that is why I like all TV show episodes where they have any high-school competition, like even that Saved by the Bell episode where they played the trivia game against Valley.

They don't seem to know how to not ruin things during the promos. I wish all the ads were just Rob Lowe swearing at everyone and stuff like that, which was unrelated to the plot of the show.

I actually took a lasers class, and they did let use a real laser. But it wasn't until like the last day of the class, and the laser was invisible, so it wasn't that great.