DEAR MR. HENSHAW was the first Cleary book I ever read; I would've been 7 years old.  I loved it at the time, which makes it funny that these days epistolary novels drive me nuts.

Gah, meant for the Stormwatch convo below…

Well, he WAS getting thirty percent of the profits from the convention.  Better to give him a lump sum and clear the consciences of attendees and business partners of the 'con going forward.

I am VERY happy to hear this.  I don't know what finally caused Kramer to accept the buyout (he'd been resisting for years), but I don't care.  It's enough to know that he's out.

If it helps, I always buy via the websites to avoid the 30% Apple Tax. :)

The promotion for Deathmatch REALLY turned me off.  I bought it because I was at work and couldn't leave the day after Xmas in spite of having literally no work to do, and because it was $1.  It was so completely different than what I expected that I was totally engrossed, and I've been enjoying it thoroughly even…

All I got was AvengersAI (which was hugely disappointing) and Deathmatch (which I'm a month behind on due to the $2 price cut for digital, and which I continue to enjoy much more than I had expected to.)  I'll be getting Avengers proper and Transformers RID (on which I am also a month behind) when I get paid Monday.…

(Directed to Teller of the Fucking Truth, not varmints):

I absolutely do not get the hype for this guy. I read the first two Mistborn novels and, while the concepts were neat, the chars and structure were so dull and cliched that it was like being beaten with a sledgehammer.

Yeah, it does, but it's never meant as much to me as the Farewell album, which deliberately doesn't have that song (they performed it as the final song on the show, but it wasn't even recorded.)  Instead the album and VHS/DVD end with a really epic version of "Only a Lad" but the whole album is the goodbye.

We will all look back on this with Regret.

I discovered Oingo Boingo about 3 months after they broke up, in the space between their final run of shows Halloween 95 and the "Farewell" live album's release the following summer.  In that period I bought about half their albums, and I got "Farewell" the day it came out.  The whole thing is amazing, and I started…

Meant to put that in the "Hitler from Downfall to play the pope" thread, not here, obviously.  I are dumbass.

Downfall is the source of the "Hitler Reacts To…" meme, right?  This will result in some fascinating Youtube mash-ups.

Mentioning Dr. Seuss and not the "Private Snafu" shorts he did with Chuck Jones for the Army?  For shame.

Buttermoths:  no, the true master is Bob Newhart.

If you ever interview James Woods, you must ask him the secret to time travel since he apparently has been to the 1920s.

Unfortunately, they're going to retool the "toddler starvation comedy" direction into a heartbreaking tale of two orphans starving to death on the streets of WWII Japan.

Not only is it an adult movie in that sense, but it's an adult movie that would have been rated PG if they hadn't thrown in those two F-bombs about five seconds apart.  The language doesn't bother me (I'm pretty fucking hard to offend) but it's always struck me as weird and a little sad that we as a culture seem to…

Devo, Q&A:  "Uncontrollable Urge" and "Satisfaction" or Oingo Boingo, GOOD FOR YOUR SOUL, "Who Do You Want to Be?" and "Good For Your Soul" are the first two that sprang to mind.  I would likely change my mind if I thought about it very hard.