Meh. Just watch the episode of the British quiz show "QI" (where all the contestants are professional comedians). Hodgman was totally out of his league in terms of wit against Stephen Fry et al. It was embarrassing to watch him and it made me embarrassed to be an American if he's the best we can do.  

I don't see much pf a tonal difference in any of the Wes Anderson films. If Aquatic and Darjeeling were less successful than Tennenbaums, that's more likely due to the fact that they all are kind of the same movie — quirky eccentrics who eventually have a emotional moment with a family member.

I don't get the enthusiasm for Berardinelli either. Watch the brilliant "Trees Lounge" (about middle-aged alcoholics and the bar they hang out at) and then read his negative review, which completely misses the point of the movie, comparing it to "Cheers" with the humor taken out.

One of things that Apple-detractors seem to miss is that besides the attraction of Macs to the techno-challenged, they are also the computers of choice for scientists, because underneath it all, they are running UNIX (well, BSD Unix on top of a Mach microkernal, just as NeXT workstations used to do, as OS X is really…

I don't think those are really comparable to "Star Wars" or "The Wizard of Oz". Blade Runner is a cult classic, but not something everybody wants their children to love. And Chaplin just isn't part of the modern consciousness at all with the exception of silent film buffs.

But isn't the passing on of beloved pop culture across generations sort of a tradition? Depending on your age, "The Wizard of Oz" (movie) is your parents' or grandparents' childhood obsession. And yet it has managed to become a "classic" crammed down everybody's throats despite being weaker in most respects than Star…

What I find interesting about the whole Babylon 5 phenomenon is J. Michael Straczynski. Remember when he was TV's golden boy who could do no wrong? And then he basically fell off of the face of the earth. Basically the same thing that happened about ten years later with Joss Whedon, and what will probably happen to…

Of course the whole thing is somewhat spoiled by the fact that the people behind his execution weren't really common Romanians, but lesser communists in a power play. The so-called "National Salvation Front" that took control was led by the opportunistic, up to then loyal, Ion Iliescu, not a noble dissident or…

The Library of Congress classification system was developed expressly because Dewey didn't work very well in practice. And besides the Library of Congress itself (which is awesome, and one of the main things I miss about DC — I used to spend whole Saturdays there), most university libraries use it. Most public…

Exactly. Sure, in college towns there were plenty of indie bookstores that could potentially be threatened.  But in most of Mid-America, at least in the 1980s and 1990s, pretty much your only option was things like Waldenbooks — and if you weren't into the latest bestseller, Garfield comics, or books about the newest…

I wonder who actually bought them — are classicists really that common? Or were they just to show how cultured the bookstore was?

What always amazed me about the downtown Washington DC Borders was that it had a nearly complete set of the Loeb Classical Library — basically the only bookstore in the world where I've seen that was at the Harvard Co-op, where it would be expected (Harvard publishes the damn things). Not that I ever actually bought…

Yep. Pretty progressive. In today's world, women can be anything assuming they are pretty — stewardess, Playboy bunny, or ex-stripper impersonating her socialite twin!

Well, hate is a bit strong, but I just don't understand the affection for post 1970 Peanuts — it's like The Simpsons after Season 9. Which doesn't mean that both early Peanuts and early Simpsons aren't awesome.

Er, how much would one be worth?

Snow Crash had a villain who was a pizza delivery man/mafioso and another who was a parody of H. Ross Perot, only with his own battlefleet. I mean, I *like* Snow Crash, but plausible it was not.

@Leto
Three Kings was about the original Gulf War in 1991, which most people have forgotten by now, unless they had a family member in the military at the time.

What I never got though, was wasn't Furious supposed to be college-educated or something with a white-collar job? That never seemed very realistic — why wouldn't he take his kid out of the ghetto if he was successful?