I Claim First On Your Comments Section, Even Though I Am Clearly Not First, and Have Not Read the Article in Question

But I am you, so I get to take credit for both. Politics is neat!

I am not a hillbilly witch
I am you

That clip is crap!
Beatniks don't clap - they only snap. It's a good thing they are remaking this, so they can fix details like that!

I saw Black Hole on the big screen as a little kid, too. The advance publicity mostly highlighted the two little robots - I was so excited to see them, since they were going to be like R2D2, only cuter! And then the giant robot killed that guy using big spinning blades, and I didn't sleep through the night for weeks…

I read the Lord of the Rings books in the summer between sixth and seventh grades, which was perfect timing - still one of the peak reading experiences of my life. My best friend and I were reading them at the same time, and we used them as a way to stay in touch over the summer - we'd call each other up and the one…

Hour 10, with more to go tonight. There's pretty much no way I'm going to end up living as long as Ozzy Osbourne.

Nice!
Glad to see this get a decent review - this was my favorite show in the world when I was a kid, but I kind of suspected it wouldn't hold up. Maybe it does!

Maybe the lead character has visual agnosia? "Nothing is as it appears to be! What he thought was a hat, was actually his wife!"

I just got back from a Camera Obscura garden concert. They admitted from the stage that they were unnerved by all the children staring at them. It was a case study in twee, and I loved every minute of it dearly.

When I was in grade school in California they used to take us on a field trip every year to this private nature preserve on the coast, and the lady who ran it would show us the actual stinking corpses of animals that had washed up on the beach after being strangled by 6-pack-rings. Which left with such a compulsion…

1972

I did like the parallels between Crowe and Aubrey - Jack is great at his job, but he can be a complete jackass when he's away from it. It's the part Crowe was born to play!

One point of clarification - that first sentence in my post was intended to make sense. It did not turn out that way.

In defense of skipping ahead
Since I was one of those commenters who if Book 1 was actually the best starting point for this series, I guess I ought to step up and defend my contrarian view.

Kemo - you hit that point much better than I did. You very neatly summarized what I find so absorbing about the novels, and what makes it very hard to discuss this series based on the first book. The sense of events just happening, rather than being laid out according to a plan, take a while to develop, and the true…

If you can't buy the idea that an author can have complete control over his tone, then there's going to be a whole lot of writing out there that won't speak to you.

I've got to cut Jed some slack on that - it's very hard to back and view O'Brian just through the lens of the first book, and without doing that, it definitely sounded like you were trying to troll. I think even if you later go back and re-read this book, you might see some of the same things differently on the second…

I think comparing Flashman to Aubrey/Maturin is like saying beer is better than soup. There's no reason you shouldn't have both.

Very bad things happen to a lot of the major characters by book 20 (and many of the major characters haven't even shown up by the end of book 1). And a lot of the crew do come back and prove to be fully-rounded human beings. But it's a fair point about this book - I didn't love it the first time I read it, and I'm now…