And yet the Chinese invented gunpowder!

Not even back when he was a serious actor like in "Leaving Las Vegas"?

I miss the times when people understood what "AV Club" was referring to. At least I assume so — I don't imagine current high schools have AV Clubs — what is there to learn about Blu-Ray players?

I really liked Roger Ebert's track for "Dark City". First of all, because I love "Dark City", but also because unlike the normal commentaries where directors or actors give out lame trivia, Ebert uses it as a sort of film school lecture. I wish more commentaries were like that.

I seriously knew a guy who loved the Treehouse parody of "The Shining" (No TV and No Beer Makes Homer something something) without ever having seen the "The Shining" or even knowing in a cultural osmosis way (the way most of us know Rosebud is a sled) what it was referring to.

I'd argue the other way around. Bert is a boring guy who never seems to have any fun. Ernie is his alter-ego who seems to be more extroverted and uninhibited.

No, because Cookie isn't a letter. While eating sentient beings can be argued to be unethical, it isn't cannibalism unless you are the same species.

Get off my lawn! I was born when Nixon was president. But really, a nuclear war? Now? With whom? France?

Depends on where you were, I guess. California and the Pacific Northwest certainly had lots in the 1990s, but yes, I've noticed when visiting my parents in the Midwest, even my old hometown has a couple microbreweries now, and it certainly didn't twenty years ago.

From the explanation, I guess it is for the disastrous effects on climate suggested by his EPA and DOE choices. It's not like he's going to start a nuclear war with his best bud Pootyface.

Oh, they had to have *seen* them (they are still everywhere in public), just like it would be hard not to have heard Morse Code in a movie. Being able to *read* an analog clock is getting to be like understanding Morse Code these days, though.

Yeah, 1962 (when we almost had a nuclear war) got a fairly high rating while many years where nothing even came close had a much worse rating.

Yeah. The Department of Energy only fairly recently (past couple of decades) began to look at actual energy research. Traditionally it was a euphemistic name for "Department of Nuclear Weapons".

Beards maybe, but I thought the microbrews were more a GenX thing. The standard GenX fantasy in the 1990s was to quit your job and start a microbrewery.

In the Civil War there were so many immigrants that some Union units used foreign languages like German or Italian for orders in order to be understood. Somehow I doubt this administration would be up for Spanish and Arabic speaking units.

But 1984 is pretty obviously about the Soviet Union too. Why is Oceania obsessed with the "traitor Goldstein", who supposedly had a army of spies? Because the USSR was obsessed with Stalin's exiled rival Lev Bronstein (better known by his alias Leon Trotsky) and likewise believed that he had infiltrated the USSR. Why…

Orwell wasn't really the progressive that the left wanted him to be, though. I suspect had he lived, he would eventually gone full Tory. You see signs of this in "The Road to Wigan Pier". Half of it is Orwell complaining about his "fellow" socialists for being into things he wasn't, such as birth control,…

I love the 1984 movie, and it is nice to see it if nothing else as a farewell to John Hurt, but really, the dystopia we are in isn't really the Stalinist regime with no free enterprise that Orwell was talking about where starvation rather than obesity was the issue. It's more a cyberpunk dystopia where corporations…

Kinda been done (without the siblings, granted) as the Ethan Hawke 2000 version of Hamlet.

Although it is only *one* voice. Billy West he ain't.