Yeah. I've noticed a lot of Millennials seem to be merging GenX and the Boomers as part of the generic "Olds". Honestly we're not the same! Yes, mocking grunge is probably as easy as mocking insipid new age musicals, but they are different.

You have a governor with a Frenchy sounding name and who is insane as Rob Ford, so that sounds pretty Canadian.

C.P. Snow in his famous 1959 "Two Cultures" speech (about how Western culture was splitting into a scientific and artistic culture that really couldn't communicate to each other) brought that up. Politics played as much a role as academics. At the time many famous scientists like J.B.S Haldane and J.D. Bernal were…

Well, I suppose you could technically fuck it, but it would be rather unsanitary.

I'm not a huge fan of the movies myself. I'm annoyed on how they've kind of supplanted the actual books in the public consciousness. When I was growing up any self-respecting geek had read them all several times including the appendices and maybe even The Silmarillion as well. The amount of detail in the books is…

Not according to le Carré. I know, in the postmodernist world we are supposed to not treat the author's opinions as more valid than anyone else's, but he goes on and on about Guinness in his recent memoir "The Pigeon Tunnel".

And off-color puppet shows!

Not a fan of the remake. Much like the "Robocop" remake, the "Dawn of the Dead" remake missed the point of the original. There was basically no criticism of American consumer society, which was the real villain (rather than the zombies) in the original.

You can't do much research, tenured or not, without a grant. All tenure gets you is an office and partial salary based on teaching. There are plenty of real fields that have fallen out of favor over time and for which getting grants is even more difficult than normal. A lot of classical systematics (classifying…

It was actually published by the Naval Institute Press (before Tom Clancy was, well, Tom Clancy). And before "Red October" NIP basically published dry tomes of naval statistics. They probably thought "well, I'm not so sure about all this fiction stuff, but the stats seem okay".

Right. But I don't think it was a matter of not having enough troops. In the 20th century, blatantly open imperialism simply became politically unacceptable to Western nations and more subtle means of control needed to be invented.

In Burns’ talent show, Comic Book Guy sneers that Terri and Sherri’s The Prestige-style water cabinet trick means that one twin escaped behind a curtain—but we see Sherri (or Terri) actually floating drowned and dead while her sister takes a bow.

Does anyone else remember a show (late 1970s-early 1980s) on PBS that was sort of like Bob Ross's only with a guy reading a chapter of a book while drawing/painting a scene from it?

The Wiener Riesenrad in the Prater?

But real life empires (like the British and Austrian) used native troops to boost up their ranks. That's what the Risk free armies thing is modeling. Yes, in real life occasionally you had mutanies of native troops when they could get organized, but mostly they were loyal because often times being in the service of…

Bonnie Prince Charlie (no, not the current homeopath-loving, modern architecture-hating prince of the name) didn't have it so bad. Yes, he failed to get the throne, but he lived and had a nice retirement in France and Italy. Well, until dying of a stroke at 67, but that wasn't that bad of a run then.

Well, while technically Sting's "Russians" was released several months after Gorbachev's coming to power, I think it was too early to really see what reforms he was going to do. It was more about how Reagan was demonizing the "evil empire" which was actually composed of actual human beings.

I just got the joke in his name. But were American kids in the 1960s that knowledgeable about Russian history and/or opera to get the Godunov-Badenov connection?

Regoogling it, I find several references to this idea. but no solid ties. There was in fact a Zero Effect pilot episode made by Kasdan (but with the Zero character recast from Pullman) but it wasn't picked up. And then of course came Monk, but Kasdan wasn't involved with that. So it could be coincidental.

It's the standard Hollywood diatribe against scientists from 1950s B-movies onward — "didn't you think, when creating super carrots to cure malnutrition, that you'd be creating carnivorous monsters, etc.?" I think it was supposed to be a parable for the Manhattan Project or something, but there the scientists knew…