Or Real Genius. As a high schooler when it came out, I was hoping university would be that cool. It wasn't, sadly.

Except in that case, the Eloi are so degenerate that they are basically livestock for the Morlocks. So hooking up would basically be beastiality.

These off-brand shipping outfits are everywhere. When I was on the West Coast it was ONTRAC, now back on the East, it's Lasership,

People actually think he was a singer-songwriter? I mean, he was basically a real-life Forrest Gump. I'm not even sure he knew how to actually read music, let alone be a composer.

Looks, yes. But I'm not sure knowing that his American name is Philip is all that useful. She doesn't know his last name.

Even Infinity, despite being the debut of Perry, had more of a prog than arena sound.

Journey, Styx, Foreigner, Boston, REO Speedwagon… just the names conjure up images of sunglasses-wearing, cocaine-carrying major label A&R men and shady, mob-connected independent promoters, conspiring to buy airplay.

It also had very clever dialog — it kind of reminded me of Buffy only with supervillians instead of vampires.

Indeed. I have a whole Jewish section of relatives, most of which would identify as atheist, but still follow Jewish tradition because they are Jews, goddammit.

The annoying thing about Titor is that the price of vintage IBM 5100s went from practically free (who the hell wants a computer slower than 1980s microcomputers) to nearly $3000. Maybe the author had a stash of them or something.

I think the movie overemphasized the class angle. Yes, the theme of lower floors = lower class was in the book too, but that's just because you can't *not* bring up class in British settings. The movie made it more Snowpiercer-like in suggesting that that class was the primary cause of conflict, and that kind of…

Britain has *always* been involved in Afghanistan. One of the brilliant features of the Cumberbatch modern-age "Sherlock" is that Martin Freeman's Watson had been an Army doctor in Afghanistan. You might think that's just imposing recent events on the Victorian stories. But in the *original* Watson also was described…

Even though the trope-starter (American Graffiti) was technically about the JFK-era early 1960s rather than the 1950s.

Exactly. It's the early scenes of "Blue Velvet" which seem to be a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery rather than what it eventually becomes.

Same here. I don't really mind if kids get all excited by them (I was into lots of crap as a kid, so I really can't blame them) - it's when adults talk about how amazing they are that infuriates me. Even if we are just talking about genre fantasy, there are dozens of better written series with better thought out…

But that's a standard trope in fiction. Consider Oliver Twist. The real tragedy isn't that he's just an orphan who is being mistreated, it is that he's actually from an upper class family as he discovers in the end. The other orphans don't really matter and their parents were poor.

High school maybe, but if anything the problem in university is that that people think being unconventional is cool merely for being unconventional.

But how would future generations know the Nazis were evil if they didn't know the worst thing they did was mildly inconvenience a family of singers?

Exactly. Bombadil seems rather like Beorn from "The Hobbit" — a powerful being that isn't really fully explained but helps the heroes and sends them on their way.

I only discovered Tomita recently (his electronic version of "Pictures at an Exhibition" was a plot point in "The Tower", Uwe Tellkamp's novel of growing up in East Germany in the 1970s/1980s). Listening to the recording itself is pretty good, especially the "Great Gate of Kiev" section. It is weird how he never got…