He seems to be having more fun with it than he ever was with alcohol, and he doesn't seem to have nearly the self-loathing he did with, say, the Sylvia Rosen affair.

Yeah, I think that was a mistake on the list-writers' part. Not least of which because they could have easily said "Modest Mouse" without opening that can of worms.

I thought Ken was a little surprised by it, more than anything— having known Pete for at least as long as we have, he probably has seen enough weaselly, self-serving stuff to be surprised by such a magnanimous gesture. And, he was probably grateful to hear it after how unceremoniously and coldly he'd just been dumped.

The best live show I ever saw was Wilco in 2001. I caught them at the right time: There was a ton of nervous energy and uncertainty about the show as they were in the middle of the events of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart— Reprise had just dropped them; Tweedy had just kicked Jay Bennett out of the band— so nobody…

Anyone else glad to see that Don actually seems to be having more fun now that he's opened up a bit more and embraced his Dick Whitman past? Of course, he's still pretty lonely and sad, and this episode definitely set up a seasonal arc of Don finally deciding to follow the road not taken, but hey, at least he's…

It's too hard to keep up these days. My peak was about 2003-05, then I gradually lost interest in indie rock, and now I'm lucky if I find time for more than a handful of new albums a year of any kind.

Not sure one guy making mostly electronic music counts as a "rock band"

Yeah, Modest Mouse is a huge omission— The Moon and Antarctica and Good News For People Who Love Bad News alone should be enough to make the list. M83 really isn't a rock band in any reasonable sense of the term.

No, it didn't say any of that. In fact, Alan Sepinwall's take was the opposite— Ken was gift-wrapped the opportunity for a fulfilling life, the road not taken, but he opted for revenge instead.

How was that meta? Did Aaron Staton appear on a book jacket previously that I'm not aware of?

The calendar has been screwed with so much over the years by powerful people, why do people assume we've kept perfect and accurate time for the past 2,015 years? A decade is considered the years where the first three numbers are the same and a century is considered the years where the first two numbers are the same…

"I don't believe the marketplace should be government regulated"

This episode has some funny bits, but I still feel like I can see a few seeds of the Scully era in it. Too many spaces filled with needless exposition instead of jokes. After the Mr. Sparkle videotape falls out of the package and hits Homer in the head:

Objectively, no. In terms of disappointing expectations, yes. (I don't think anyone expected much better from Dexter by the time that finale rolled around.)

Apparently Showtime execs leaned on the Dexter writers and told them Dexter could not die at the end of the show, full stop. Which is a longwinded way of saying that if Frost/Lynch were concerned about the same kind of network interference that happened in the original series run recurring, Showtime was the wrong…

ONCE AGAIN, the right to enter the marketplace is not a "property right" nor is it inalienable. Businesses are regulated ALL THE TIME.
ONCE AGAIN, you are making the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS people made to justify "whites only" businesses fifty years ago, and they have not become more true or less bigoted.

No, it boils down to the misconception that the right to discriminate supercedes the right not to be discriminated against, combined with the equally misguided idea that the "free market" magically solves all problems of discrimination.

I don't think anyone who's suffered racial discrimination could honestly say that. Race isn't a product of the oppressed class; it's a product of the people doing the oppressing. They brought it in; to just pretend they didn't won't fix things.

Of course you are. Funny how libertarians really seem to care about individual rights when it's the rights of those in power to maintain their hold on power and their discriminatory practices, but not about the rights of those not in power to be free from being discriminated against.

"I think that if you really want progress you should take race or gender or any superficial quality out of the equation"