Scepan Mali was made ruler of Montenegro for 6-7 years in the late 18th century by pretending to be Peter III of Russia. He was actually found out about three years in, but the Montenegrins liked him so much they just decided to make him Tsar on his own merits. Catherine the Great eventually gave him an officer's…

Yeah, but in any era before the Information Age, if they pulled it off, what are the odds that we'd ever know?

That's probably true, but only because rulers only get labeled those things when they lose. If you won prior to the internet, you just quickly rewrote everything so that your claim was totally legit/won fair and square when nobody was in a position to question you. And of course, being in charge at all, regardless…

Insurrection starts out pretty bland and then suffers a LOT for Trekkies by essentially just being a remake of a final season episode with all of the nuance stripped out.

Does anyone else get the feeling that this guy who wrote a book and then made that book into a movie about getting drunk with his bros and bagging lots of chicks might, deep down, not be the next Scorsese or even a particularly well-adjusted person?

I have to disagree. Amazing Spider-Man 842 clearly identifies which issue you're talking about. It's something a kid off the street with no other knowledge of comics or history can easily ask for to finish the story from issue 841, and asking for it would get you the same comic in every store in the country.

Well, I hope you a good time here. I look forward to watching all your posts vanish in the next few hours.

It's hard to even tell what the criminal injustice that would personally offend someone is here. Is his father a Brazilian cop who missed his birthday over the reckless time wasting or something?

Turning Nite Owl into an action movie badass instead of a pudgy, out of shape guy. Indeed, the badassification of everyone. The alterations to the ending. The aforementioned murder.

I'm basically a pacifist. On paper, I align with Jill Stein on 90-odd percent of policy positions. I'm voting for Clinton because:

Schlafly got into a legal dispute with her own nephew, a St. Louis brewer, over his attempt to trademark Schlafly beer. She lost about a month ago, meaning she literally spent her final months involved in a petty argument that went against her. A fitting end, I guess?

Yeah, what seems to be getting overlooked is that none of these lines are particularly out of character for a CC roast. The jokes are routinely racist, sexist, accusing the target of being a rapist, a child molester, a murderer, worthless, a total asshole, etc, etc.

If you're dead, I bet it feels about the same.

That's the problem with any artist or band that were fucking huge in the moment and then somehow never broke up or had anyone die for long enough. Rolling Stone has published that exact "this is the return to form until the next return to form" review of everything Dylan has released for forty plus years. Bowie was…

When he played one of 30 Rock's sex idiots, it was almost enough to trick me into thinking there was a glimmer of self-awareness about all this. Like maybe he was a savvy enough to at least realize that successfully training to be Aquaman had colored the way people saw him and perhaps limited his experiences in other…

His defense, if you can believe it, was that he was working on a Law and Order spec script that he had since deleted. Which, whatever else it is, is a pretty bold fucking choice over a plea deal when they've also got you on motive, opportunity, and links to the murder weapon.

Perhaps not 100% on topic, but I had a professor who was a "person of interest" in his wife's murder. He was a teaching a reduced load while the investigation was ongoing, and he had a bunch of uncomfortable tics, taking a second or two too long to answer questions, staring at the back wall while teaching, not…

Yeah, I feel like this is one of those things that people mostly see in retrospect, and the ones with a conscience sometimes feel unnecessarily guilty about. If police arrested everyone who seemed a little off, I'd have half the friends I do, and I suspect 4/5ths of my favorite artists would be in prison. Hell, I…

10 year old me was a big Perot backer because I thought it would be funny to have a president who seemed like he might legitimately be a little crazy.

Kobayashi's Harakiri is a pretty good response to that kind of portrayal.