Obama certainly has his flaws, but no president is perfect, and when are we ever gonna get one who's this cool again. He referenced the Red Wedding at his last WHCD speech, for crying out loud.

Nah, he actually refers to them as friends, and seems to be cracking up a few times too. I think it's more of an act than it seems — turns out that Pally may be a decent actor after all?

I'd rather have a picnic at Hanging Rock.

Old, rich, and lacking either compassion or intelligence: a sure recipe for being a Republican. It's the same old story, same old song and dance.

Norse mythology isn't exclusive to Scandinavia (though it was a Scandinavian who wrote it all down); it's Germanic, i.e. just as much a part of English heritage as say Norwegian heritage. And I'm gonna assume the Hemsworth family has British/Anglo-Saxon roots.

Looking at that picture, I'm thinking he could hire Geoffrey Rush to go pick it up for him without anyone noticing the difference.

Let's not forget Nighter Court, Cheers Again, After MASH, Roseanne in Space, The Seinfeld Mysteries and Mama's Family: The New Batch

I was thinking more of his cabinet appointments and general attitude of acceptance (which I totally get was more of an "everyone who wants to contribute to the economy should be allowed to" thing than an "all humans are equal" thing) but yeah, one could certainly make the opposite argument based on Hurricane Katrina.

I agree. I think this was all an attempt to revitalize his brand with some easy publicity. I don't think he even ever necessarily believed the shit he was saying; it was all just a showy con artist's natural instincts for riling up the rubes. (There's no way he doesn't have anything but contempt for his "base.")

Yeah I never really thought W was evil, just dumb as shit and too arrogant to know how dumb he was — and thus easily manipulated by his VP and cabinet, many of whom did fall squarely into the "evil" category. Which maybe makes W evil by proxy … but at least he wasn't racist

Nor mine growing up Lutheran Missouri Synod. That shit was all about fear.

On the other hand, we Caplan fans will take all the Caplan we can get, and can appreciate the fact that a gig like this will elevate her profile like a thousand percent. I mean, I'm still annoyed at her for dating (marrying?) Chandler, but …

Thank you for this moment of clarity!

The Middle's lyrics may be cliched, but they're not stupid, and the tune's got one hell of a hook. Not ashamed to love it.

I still enjoy The Middle. Maybe it's just me, but for me it doesn't seem all that overplayed, at least compared to some other songs of that era (lookin' at you, Weezer and Green Day)

Ah, Taylor Swift. I know she's more or less regarded as a legitimate artist now, and I have to admire that she champions lesser-known artists — and she clearly possesses abundant charisma and even star power. But man, I cringe whenever I have to hear one of her moronic songs on the radio or at a bar or wherever. So…

We live in very clean-shaven times, and I'm not just talking about porn.* Excepting Portland-adjacent startups, facial hair of any sort is almost universally considered unprofessional. You'll be hard pressed to find any politician or business leader with so much as stubble, whereas in the TR era it was regarded as…

And if I'm not mistaken, that would put them on equal footing with all other Roman citizens, in that rejecting the authority of the emperor could be classified as treason, which was punishable by death — a measure employed not infrequently by the Roman powers-that-were as a tool to get rid of rivals, annoyances,…

I've been reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Gibbon's well-researched, and then-controversial assertion that, instead of the tens of thousands of Christian martyrs the church at the time claimed to have existed under the Roman empire, there might have been no more than, like, a few dozen, is pretty…

I think Dowd's suggestion that Roth's work is untranslatable to film is pretty much accurate. The plots are interesting, but what makes his work great isn't so much the plot but what the language conveys in service of the plot. And it's hard to convey that without voice-overs, which are almost always a bad idea, or…