Being a Baby Boomer is pretty great. Think about it. You get handed the wealthiest and most advanced empire in the history of human civilization, and what do you do? Decide to throw a big party to some great music!

That's how I felt about Trading Places, but my life just ended up like Mr. Mom.

NOBAMA! BENGHAZI!

But did you ever get your mail order x-ray spectacles?

CHECK YO' PRIVILEGE

I always liked the idea of the White Walkers not being this nihilistic force of evil but more like high elves driven into exile by orc-ish humans.

I think a lot of the animosity towards Aegon from the book's die hard fans is that he's perceived as an usurper in terms of the protagonists they generally care about. Hence, everyone being so quick to buy into the Blackfyre theory. In a way, the book's own varying factions have inspired a sense of genuine…

Maybe so but I have an inkling that if Jon does turn out to be Rhaegar's bastard, he'll still do the Stark thing and keep to his vows (in itself a subversion of the archetypal hero's refusal to the call… except he'll actually follow through with it and piss everyone off). Could be wrong but speculation is the point of…

Dany is a harbinger of anarchy and destruction. Yes, she frees slaves, but she provides no social order in which to make their freedom meaningful while dispatching her enemies in the most brutal ways, often resulting in them being just as subjugated as they were before (if not worse). And what's her ultimate plan? To…

MEGA BOOK SPOILERS BELOW IN CASE YOU'RE READING THIS IN MY PROFILE

I've read the books and I enjoyed the episode thoroughly. I watched it with other people who read the books and enjoyed the episode. The "I am pretty far down the autism spectrum and any sort of divergence from my expectations inspires an inordinate amount of anger/anxiety" demographic of book readers, while…

I think the nerd rage towards Books 4 & 5 has more to do with the fact that people had to wait too long for them and their greater focus on character development/interactions wasn't appealing to a lot of fans in a genre of fantasy where "book of the year" nominations often go to utterly shitty murder fantasies…

Haha, my wife always used to fuck with Jeni's employees by asking them bizarre questions about the origins of the ingredients.

Ah, that drove me crazy. Always some gaggle of 50 year-olds in animal print blouses shuffling in from dinner at North Star and spending 20 minutes swishing it in their mouths like it was wine then just ordering a tiny cup of vanilla anyway.

Graeter's is good for ice cream ice cream, but it's not too different from what you can get anywhere else. Jeni's novelty flavors can range from blah to outright disgusting, but their more straightforward flavors invariably range from good to I-did-not-know-my-mouth-could-feel-like-that. Salty Caramel is fantastic,…

If Gamestop fails, what will I do if my copy of Madden 13' suddenly stops working? Politics be damned. I say it's time for single-payer video game insurance.

The depth at which molecular biology is studied varies greatly from department to department, but generally, there's a reason neuroscience majors have one of the highest unemployment rates (equal to religious studies majors last I checked), just as most of the professors teaching molecular biology in the programs…

It's sort of like vegetarians. There are vegetarians and then there are the "vegetarians you know" which is a way of saying "the vegetarians who let you know." The attachment parenting books I've read are mostly just collections of practical advice and suggestions for (totally optional) parenting methods that…

It's a poorly conceived synthesis… which is the appeal of it. You take cursory study in biological systems and use that to make grand, conjectural leaps into other fields. It's the obsessively reductive "cult of the brain" aspect of psychology taken to extremes, so it does involve hard science, it just doesn't…

As I recall, she's also a huge advocate of taking attachment parenting to the most ridiculous extremes. She eventually got divorced (which is GREAT for the kids) and insisted it had nothing to do with an over-the-top parenting method that prevents the parents from having any sort of relationship that isn't constantly…