The thing is, there is no such thing as a "poor subject for a musical", or at least no such thing as a subject that someone won't try to make a musical out of — there was a musical of "Carrie", for crying out loud.

Do you mean just pro-totalitarian (kind of understandable given the government influence on arts and literature in China) or fascist in a more literal sense of promoting something like 1930s Western dictatorships?

That reminds me of something I've read that said Mafiosos picked up a lot of their slang and swagger from movies like "Public Enemy" and "Little Caesar" because they saw them and thought that's how they were *supposed* to act.

She did in real life, divorcing the French asshole she married. Her collection of short stories: "When it happens to you" is very influenced by her failed marriage.

Or the stories in the book about the girl who was slowly turned into a chicken and a boy into a statue. This was near the beginning of the book and you figure the grandma is just bullshitting, but given that magic exists in the universe of the book they may have been actual events in that world.

But the thing about WWII is that you *did* have these intellectuals in combat. It wasn't like Vietnam where college kids were excluded from the draft or today where the military is filled with people with no better options in life.

Yes. The miniseries (and its sequel "Smiley's People") are better and more coherent than the movie. To be fair, the movie did its best at trying to cram a very complicated story into two hours, and the cast was good. But I'm not sure if you hadn't read the book or seen the miniseries if it would be that coherent.

Governor Generals are "appointed by the Queen" in exactly the same way Santa Claus "brings presents" — in other words, they aren't, but we like to pretend that they are out of tradition. There is no reason they couldn't continue to exist without a stupid rubber stamp by the monarch.

Finally, with Kim Jong Un, the Kims have a dynasty!

You mean his parents didn't name him Snake? I feel cheated. Did he just call himself that to make himself cool the way that forgotten 1980s musician John Mellancamp used to call himself John Cougar Mellancamp?

That works better for non-fiction, I think. I like to listen to Sarah Vowell read her books because they are written in her manner of speech anyway and aren't too unlike the stuff she's done for NPR.

Yeah. Did she not have to pee at all during that time?

Yes. By Bruce the mechanical shark. They all laughed at him, for his fake appearance, for the fact he didn't work at the time, and for his name, which was a homophobic joke in the 1970s.

Well, wasn't that the case for the original microverse (Rick's battery)? They weren't either hippies or savages, just people with a roughly 19th century level before Rick got them to do the stomp box thing.

I'd agree — I had to read it in 7th grade too, but that was the early 1980s. But I'm not sure it is all that common these days. We read a lot of books about nuclear war — this, "A Canticle for Lebowitz", "On the Beach", etc. Nuclear War was kind of the mix of the fear of terrorism and of global warming that we have…

The radiation thing was the entire point of the book. It was just that the valley was far enough from explosions that fallout was the only worry, and due to a quirk of geography the fallout didn't get into the valley.

I was really amazed that Gould allowed the whole "I didn't do the tests" line because it is basically claiming that his fictional version committed scientific fraud. Not that Gould would really be the right person to do DNA tests, but at least these days, I don't think many scientists would want even their fictional…

Wonder Boys?

The difference between us is that we *get* that effort is useless. Millennials are like baby-boomers in that they really think they can change the world. Witness the utter naive uselessness that was the "Occupy" movements.

That wasn't a real Infocom game though. It was just an Activision game using the name after they bought it. Real Infocom games tended to be difficult but rational and fair unlike the absurd nonsensical puzzles in most adventure games.