But see, King Bastard, movies and books and what not have prepared us to expect at least one female student who is achingly beautiful and wise beyond her years, who will melt your cold, cynical exterior with her startling wit and passion. Call her the Academic Pixie Dream Girl. And of course, this person doesn't…

I'm with C.C. Some of the most interesting "flops" are the ones that fall far short of critical / cultural expectations, not just financial expectations. Godfather 3 certainly falls into this category.

Yeah, I'm really curious about the Toronto answer. It implies one of three things: 1) It was a fake answer to reassure us humans that the machine is imperfect; 2) Watson disregarded the category; or 3) Watson was thinking of a US city named Toronto. I don't know what the answer is, but algorithmically, that question…

Prussian Blue.

To be fair, I watched the Super Tournament of Champions a couple of years ago, and Ken Jennings got owned pretty quickly be a far-superior human opponent.

Maybe. It depends on the type of restriction and the motivations behind the people who are doing the restricting. Artists tend to complain about the latter more than the former, I think.

Quettle Quorn: the delicious meat-substitute made from only the finest all-natural fungi, harvested en masse in the dark of night from our industrial-sized petri dishes, where the hardy organisms multiply and multiply, and then packed into a pleasing rounded-cylindrical shape, like the world's biggest suppository …

The Running Man was great also. Try your best to ignore the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in a yellow jumpsuit.

'Salem's Lot stands out in my memory, but I do remember enjoying The Talisman, and a lot of his early short stories, which could be quite nasty and disturbing but also ironic and funny, at times. My favorite King work overall is The Long Walk, which has the best ending, hands-down, of anything he's written.

If memory serves (and it's been a while), I think the idea was basically just to achieve martyrdom. Which has a heightened significance (whatever you think of the act itself) in a world that has just been decimated by plague.

I don't know about heaviness, because there were plenty of bands who were heavier than NIN, but Trent Reznor was definitely ahead of the curve in incorporating dance & electronica elements into his music (e.g. The Perfect Drug EP), and that was an important feature of late 90s pop & rock: The Prodigy, The Chemical…

I remember the first time I saw the video for Wannabe on MTV. I was in someone else's dorm room, and I thought it was a joke at first. But nope, and that's how I knew the dream of the 90s was pretty much dead (except in Portland).

Or is that rinse and repeat? I don't bathe, so I wouldn't know.

If you want to hear Kevin Smith in full dick mode, listen to his recent Marc Maron interview. He spends half the time railing against his enemies (of which there are MANY—and at some point, a reasonable person would have to wonder why his enemies list is so goddamn long) and the other half of the time insisting he's…

Kevin Smith and Uwe Boll should fight.

Yes, this issue was addressed in the movie itself, when she says that Superman is her cousin.

Where's Summer Glau when you need her? This place is starting to smell like crotch-sweat.

"The problem is every other show portraying fictionalized and glamourized versions of other cities."

My wife is from Baltimore City, and she's usually the one doing the Wire evangelizing. We've never met a single person who has seen a single episode, with one exception: the father of a friend of hers, who is a retired city cop, and who says that the show is pretty much dead-on. Apparently most of the Baltimore PD has…

She looks like one of those Berrie figurines from the late 60s / early 70s.