As I said, Chicago has a real problem, but also: the media has failed us, and people don't believe in per capita statistics. I knew two girls in high school who got held up at gunpoint in a San Francisco neighborhood that was even nicer than Lakeview. Didn't mean there was a crime spree. I moved to Chicago for…

Without commenting on a film I haven't seen or a historical event I'm only familiar with in passing, there seems to be great anxiety with some people about the propriety of showing even a few non-white faces in historical contexts where there would in fact likely have been a few non-white faces. There's a baffling and…

I'm not going to debate about what an accurate representation of the facts of Dunkirk would look like, because I'm not informed on the matter, but I think using "British" as a contrast for the Indian and African soldiers on the beach is … a rhetorical misstep? They weren't their for their own sake, they were there in…

(1) Chicago has an awful problem with violent crime right now.
(2) That problem is highly concentrated and regionalized; contemporary Chicago in no way relates to the idea that Times Square after midnight in the 70s was a dangerous place, anymore than contemporary NYC does. The neighborhood a well-off doctor lives in…

The thing is that Willis WAS kind of "different" and "every man" (considering he was still supposed to be a cop) in Die Hard, something that got lost in all the sequels regardless of their varying quality. I guess you can only pull that trick once or twice though, like how now we expect Liam Neeson to be stiffly…

I don't recall which area you live in and I don't get out much these days so … Ukrainian Village?

So the original Death Wish movies are remembered as, what, Hollywood giving paranoid expression and justification to the fear and desire for "justice" of a nation observing high levels of crime, and this will be remembered as Hollywood giving paranoid expression and justification to the fear and desire for "justice"…

See I don't think he's subverting much of anything, or ever really intended to; I DO think he's very interested in holding fantasy tropes up and saying "hey, let's examine this and see why it works and why it doesn't." Which is why we've got at least five variants of the…

Which is why I think it's hilarious if it happens in the show but not the books. I'm imagining this dialogue:

Yes. My personal take on the show evolved from "pretty good adaptation, maybe even some advantages over the books!" [S1] to "not a great adaptation, but rewarding in its own right!" [S3] to "this is not only an awful adaptation but an outright bad television show, and I'm out" [S5], and I'm hanging around these…

Euron, like [spoiler for people who might want to read ADWD but somehow don't already know this] Aegon is basically an authorial conceit on Martin's part, and I agree that AFFC/ADWD didn't really nail the payoff, but I find the idea interesting, and I'm willing to believe it'll work out in the long run. The conceit…

There are always more cousins. The Lannisters have been marrying into their local bannermen's families for thousands of years. There's just about always a next person for the title to land on, even if you need to skip back a few generations to find the connection. (This is a "realistic" answer to the question of what…

The books timelines are not synchronized, in that Dany's timeline is for the most part supposed to be something like six months ahead of the Westeros timelines, we almost certainly see Jon receive the "pink letter" in ADWD before it was written, etc.

I always get tickled with these screenshots of the royal types standing around in public with a couple of buddies and not a retinue of courtiers and men-at-arms.

I'll be annoyed if any of the Lannister kids are actually Aerys' children in the books, though less so with the twins than with Tyrion. That said, I think it would be funny if W&B started veering in the direction of using the show to promote popular fan ideas from the ASOIAF reddit that Martin has never intended to be…

"This ain't like the movies, kid," said the grizzled veteran FBI agent before doing a somersault while firing a 9mm pistol in each hand. "Forget all that flashy action hero stuff. Stick to the basics if you want to live," he said before throwing a grenade that produced a large fireball instead of spewing shrapnel.

Rene Auberjonois only needs to be in the final scene of every episode, as the reveal of how the crime was solved shows you which bits of scenery Odo had shapeshifted into to do his investigation.

My point is that overall, senatorial collegiality has strategic purposes.

Does John McCain vote "no" on the ACA repeal bill if Democratic senators spent the last 16+ years treating him the way he deserves to be treated?

Well, I don't know what the books are going to do in terms of the plot consequences of Bran's astral projections. But as you say, the books already make clear to a limited extent that he can speak through the trees. We know that not all CoF were greenseers, and Jojen clarifies that he is "only" a dreamer, NOT a…