Something doesn't have to be immediately advantageous to persist. All that's required is that the evolutionary pressures against it have to be weaker than the evolutionary pressures for it.

A Freddie deBoer gimmick? Little bit obscure, don't you think?

"you say taylor swift, I say bad company" being the best YouTube music comment template of them all.

There are some people who have this weird sort of hyper-sensitivity to knowing anything about a movie before seeing it, other than the name, the billed leads, the director, and (I guess?) the general concept. They won't read reviews or look at IMDB or tolerate anyone talking about the movie at all.

No political types of any note, other than the Republicans who called ARRA the "porkulus" and have opposed every infrastructure bill Obama has proposed since, including bills strictly dedicated to infrastructure spending:

Which is much worse than lynchings, the Holocaust, etc.

Ha ha, yeah! There's roads everywhere! Everyone knows roads last forever.

The problem is that our society is based around the necessity of having a job. If you require people to have a job to survive, of course they're going to fight tooth and nail to preserve their jobs even when they're obsolete.

Also, American educational performance is better now than it was when Sorkin was in school. Sorkin and his like are welcome to see their successor generation as a bunch of lazy valueless mouth-breathers, but they'll be just as wrong as their grandparents were, and their grandparents before them. (The loathing seems to…

Go away and shut up.

Did you really think he thought Billy Preston was one of the Beatles?

DAVID YOW!

It's Big Bank Hank, e.g. it's a Grandmaster Caz line.

@avclub-a93a879594c13c12a83fd45ab289a022:disqus *slide whistle*

There was a LOT of sperm imagery in the liner for One Nation Under A Groove.

That album is big, glowing, and terrifying. Beautiful slick pop with shiny synthesizers and threatening lyrics.

He was extraordinary. All spuds are in mourning.

I think Night Watch kind of makes it look like a decline exists that never did, because it's one of his best books, but it's not like it was the culmination of a trend of increasing excellence. The previous full Discworld novel was Thief of Time, which isn't that well-regarded.

I like that they only riff a little bit about the synthesized animal noises, but mostly just crack up at them. Because what the hell can you say about a sampled horse whinny that's funnier than it existing in the first place?

Outlaw is hilarious. I don't know what his problem is.