I agree with you, but one of the reasons I never liked it as much is that I felt the writers don't. I felt like they were trying to tell us Grimes was right, and they totally changed Homer's character to make that point. Very "Seinfeld finale" of them.

By this point, Married With Children was wrapping up its run. The last few years were pretty dire.

There's not much depth to Married… With Children (unlike, say, with Roseanne), but I had to admire its commitment to being unwaveringly stupid; most of the time it didn't even pretend its characters were anything but sitcom tropes dialed up to 11.

Yeah, I played against him once or twice. We have some friends in common. He's actually the second poker player I know who appeared on Jeopardy! (the first one lost to Ken Jennings).

Was it Alex Jacob? I heard that name in my Twitter feed from a couple friends from my poker playing days. If it was, he was probably stoned.

I wasn't… but now maybe I will. Right now I'm on my way to the Art Car parade!

It's not so bad if you're in the city proper. It's cheap, there's lots to do, it's wildly diverse, I live in a great neighborhood with all sorts of arts and entertainment and dining and other cultural happenings. Now, the suburbs are full of paranoid conservative white cogs in the fossil fuel industry, and I'd…

Yeah, my brother lives just outside LA and really loves his community, the weather and scenery, etc. and hates New York— he's a pretty private person, so I can imagine why he wouldn't want to live in a city where people are all on top of each other all the time.

One of the things I've heard about L.A. that I like (which is similar to Houston, where I live) is that in many ways it's just a really large collection of different neighborhoods, rather than one big city per se.

Cool column. I've been thinking about moving to the L.A. area in the next couple of years myself. I had similar misgivings earlier in my life, with what I heard about L.A.'s vapidity and the way it swallows up people. But, hell, I live in Houston now, and all the problems with sprawl and traffic and pollution are just…

Yeah, it does kinda bother me that the argument is "I know this season will suck because I already know about a bunch of major plot points and they're not the same as they were in the book." Especially if you don't actually know HOW those points will be executed.

Yeah, I agree with your last point. Sonia is an odd one in that she can write really well, so when she has a good grasp on what she's writing about, she can knock it out of the park, but every once in a while she takes an out-of-nowhere idea not supported by the material and writes something that makes no sense.

Not sure if you're just referring to his comments here or if this is an ongoing pattern

Yeah, I was pretty pleased to read Sonia's review, since her opinions of books 4/5 seem to be of a piece with mine, and she says S5 significantly improves on those books.

How do you know all this?

I think this guy is just opposed to any and all deviations from the book. Like, the TV show's primary failure to him is that it is not an entirely rigid adaptation that delves into the kind of deep detail the book does.

What the hell is awesome about a Ford Fiesta?

*cough cough* Quentyn Martell *cough* *cough*

When I was in college some guys I knew had a DVD of "Foreskin Gump."

Two cigarettes… in a van… and then a meteor hit.