Sure. I wasn't trying to be pedantic or argumentative. I just don't think many kids are trying to convince their parents to go to Coney Island nowadays; they're probably angling for the M&M store or some other godforsaken place. I think there's an inherent tension between being in a place as a tourist and being in…

Oh god. I've really been reading this site for 20 years, haven't I?

This is why we passed the Clean Air Act. People used to be able to see Paris from Brooklyn!

I'm not sure Coney Island counts as a tourist trap. Most NYC tourists never leave Midtown; going to the WTC site is considered "adventurous" because you have to get on the subway. Crossing all the way into Brooklyn is a step too far. The people I see at Coney Island are mostly local schoolkids, and Russians from…

Did you do the silver mine tour in Potosi? I'm only 5'10" and that shit made me claustrophobic.

Nathan's and Popeye's? You're doing American fast food right.

"we went quickly from there to South Street Seaport"

In a bagel store in Brooklyn once, I saw a ludicrously hot woman wearing a very tight t-shirt that said "you must be at least 18 years old to enjoy this ride."

White supremacy, too.

That's an odd choice of a music festival to go to with someone who isn't into metal.

Check out Witch Mountain if you like female-fronted doom like Blood Ceremony. That band is amazing.

He wasn't! He only became president because Zachary Taylor died in office, and he never ran for president thereafter. Fillmore joins John Tyler, Chester Arthur, and Gerald Ford as the only men ever to serve as president without winning a presidential election in their own right.

I saw it in the theater with a friend who agreed to go with me but said he was going to be annoyed if there wasn't at least one scene of a crowd of people holding their fists in the air and screaming in unison.

Yeah I guessed 1948, Harry Truman. (Who was inaugurated in 1949, so it would have been wrong anyway.) In hindsight the connection between Carter and the Department of Energy is obvious, but that is before my time (barely!), so I don't feel too bad about getting it wrong.

Hell yes on Blood Ceremony. Love that band. Also check out Orchid's "Capricorn" album, if you like your metal Sabbath-y:

It's apparently Greece, if anyone else is brushing up on their C-listers.

Yes, but since he was around - it was developed before he died - the "would have" is inappropriate.

I'm supposed to know what country Ariana Huffington was born in? Jeez. I thought I was done with homework when I finished college!

And her life was, if anything, even more tragic than Evelyn Nesbit's; she attempted suicide in her 30s and spent the last 65 years of her life - she lived to 104! - in a lunatic asylum.

At the time, I read the ending of Hannibal as a Harris's insurance policy against ever having to write another Lecter book; that he would make the end so bizarre and unpleasant as to be unfilmable (though Ridley Scott sure did give it the old college try, didn't he?) and ensure that no one would have any more…