That's giving the US too much credit — if we made it our policy just to beat up but not kill our adversaries as Batman does, we'd be a lot more respected.

Never heard of the term, or the song — I was actually hoping Noah Emmerich's Stan Beeman had reached pop culture status.

What about Nickels, the diner chain owned by Celine Dion? Maybe that was just a Montreal thing. And/or a 1990s thing. It's been awhile since I lived in Montreal.

While there are, I'm sure, quiet Christians doing good science somewhere, the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, is a really bad example. He kind of abused his position by publishing the book of nonsense "The Language of God". He has the right to believe whatever he wants, but this sort of stuff should have been…

You don't normally need funds to get into a doctoral program, at least in the sciences. You normally get free tuition and a living stipend as well, although you may have to work as a TA or RA occasionally. And it isn't quite so easy as just "wanting" to — PhD programs even at mediocre universities turn away lots of…

You can argue absolute numbers, but there's no way you can argue percentages of population. It's a bit hard to claim that there was no "casual sacrifice" taking that into account. And that it was British officers commanding the troops. There was a reason why in WWII the Australians and New Zealanders were largely…

And most of the Allied deaths were Australians and New Zealanders anyway. What's the point of a Commonwealth if you can't use their people as cannon fodder?

Of course the Apple ][ (which was Woz's baby, not Jobs') had the open slot architecture which the IBM PC copied, so it was more or less incidental to the off the shelf design. IBM could have easily not had slots and still used off the shelf parts.

So you'll get either food poisoning or your debit card info stolen?

Unfortunately that will come back to haunt him as the song mentions Yugoslavia. When he grows up he will be a high-level State Department functionary visiting Croatia and will accidently refer to Yugoslavia, triggering a major diplomatic incident.

The museum is real, but it is like $20/ticket. Which is a hard sell given that DC has over a dozen *free* museums.

Smurfs don't have junk! As so eloquently argued in Donnie Darko. So not only was Gargamel's plan to "honey pot" the smurfs (as the Soviet intelligence used to do to the West) was flawed, they didn't even have the homoerotic utopia you suggest.

You could put another stop sign on top. Then the vegetarians/vegans would be forced to stop stop eating animals. That is assuming the signs have any effect either way.

And yet Quincy, who was an M.E. solved crimes that the police couldn't. So *he*, rather than a coroner, was the one superior to the police!

I never saw the movie but I remember that awful mustachioed film critic who looked vaguely like Groucho and used to be on one of the morning lightweight news shows (maybe Good Morning America?) that always seemed to like awful movies liking it, so I knew it was crap. Although even he couldn't come up with anything…

Well, some are abbey-normal, at least.

Or an production of Shakespeare that wanted to be authentic (no women actors in the Elizabethan period!)

One of the saddest parts of my early teenage years was when Marriot sold off its Great America parks in 1984. Under Marriot management they were Disney-quality, with detailed theming. The one in Illinois was purchased by Six Flags. They basically didn't respect the theming at all, and did dumb things like put a Batman…

When I lived in Canada, Sol was the default Mexican beer, much as Corona is in the US. And the Danish beer Tuborg was the default European beer, much as Heineken is in the US. Canada had better default choices, I think.

Pretty much all mass-market beers everywhere are owned by conglomerates. Most Irish beers (including Guinness, Smithwick's, and Harp) are owned by the British conglomerate Diageo.