My brother has one, and I've seen it. Nielson even pays for a landline for it to send data (my brother and his wife are cellphone only otherwise) and sends them a check for a few bucks every couple months. You'd think at this point the cable company could just get all the data themselves. Maybe they do, but don't…

Tony Robinson had already been cast as Baldrick, but had a scheduling conflict during the original pilot.

Yup. The OMON (Cyrillic N looks like a Latin H) is a Russian special police force. They're apparently basically like a SWAT team. George Takei's Twitter is where I remember seeing the picture with it mirrored and looking like HOMO.

In the recent past with gay protests, the police have kind of shooed the Cossacks and then arrested the whipped protesters laying on the ground.

And for those who think that gender neutral singular "they" is weird or new or wrong, etc., please note that it has antecedents back at least as far as Chaucer, ca. 1400.

Zeppelin deserves all possible flack for ripping off Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" without credit as "The Lemon Song" (among other musical thievery), but Jesus Christ do I love JPJ's (one take, comp'd!) bass line on it. One of my favorites ever. He and John Deacon both deserve an award for hyper competent, quiet,…

In that situation, you'd make one of two assumptions. 1) This is a biased coin that is weighted towards heads or 2) the coin will return to (or at least head back toward) the expected 50/50 ratio eventually. With that posterior distribution, you'd certainly want to update your prior at least somewhat. But the rational…

Oops. Damn. I'm about a decade out of practice (last Japanese class I took was a Japanese Linguistics class in '05), so I forgot the correct transliteration of "fuck" into Japanese. By the way, it's not a glottal stop; it's gemination (i.e. it's still a voiceless velar stop, but held longer).

At least a subset of it.

A Japanese person saying "fuck" would come out as ファーク ("fāku"), but with a really short duration and low intensity "u" sound (basically just some late voicing and lip rounding). "though" would probably generally come out as ゾー ("zō").

On a Mac, you hit option-u then a vowel, e.g. option-u-u for ü and option-u-U for Ü.

Let's put it this way: Wolfgang Peterson is attached to direct.

He did also play a Ferengi, but it was on Enterprise. In one of several episodes that Brannon Braga has specifically apologized for the existence of.

Yeah. I generally have a preference for series over movies. SF Movies tend toward the explodey dumb summer tentpole model. Series are more likely to actually have character development.

Old Man's War is optioned as a movie, so you might yet see it in some form.

She would've been on even earlier, but the producers thought LeVar Burton was joking when he told them his friend Whoopi Goldberg wanted a part on the show.

It goes along with "whiteness" being a flexible social construct. 100 years or so ago (when they were immigrating en masse) the Irish and Italians weren't considered to be "white", but now people would look at you like you were insane if you suggested that. Today latinos (particularly fair skinned ones who speak…

Dunno. I got married over 100 miles away from Bloomington and almost a decade ago. I've only been to the Mall of America twice, both times after flying in - the light rail runs between thee airport and the mall and it's more convenient to meet people at the mall than make them wait in the cell phone lot when they're…

Based on just the sample of my extended family members, I'd say it's pretty close to 1:1.

That estate tax issue is a thing in the US too. The successful US supreme court gay marriage case invalidating part of DOMA was based on Edith Windsor (surviving half of a lesbian couple, married in Canada but US citizens living in NY) having to pay estate tax on her wife's estate that she wouldn't have had to pay had…