Ha, yeah, that's probably why.  Just that, as someone who doesn't watch a shit-ton of TV, it's kind of unusual that out of all the shows I've seen, I'd be watching two Scandinavian dramas.  The A.V. Club Inventory lists about foreign language programs have had a lot of influence on choice of what to watch this summer…

Yeah, Cersei is pretty damn hard to like, and Joffrey is somehow even more fucking evil in the show than in the books, but the kid who plays him does a fantastic job of bringing enough subtlety to the role that he seems like a horrible, horrible human being than a one-dimensional evil villain plot device.

I hope your kid/nephew/niece/grandchild/great-grandchild/godchild/whatever-your-relation-to-said-child is more cognizant of the fact that the Lego train might not be the best set to treat roughly and take apart than my younger brother was back in the day.  Because those huge Lego sets can take forever to put together,…

Atlantis and Treasure Planet are both really good.  Granted, I was an elementary school-aged kid when both of those movies came out, and I loved them at the time in part to do with the fact that the juvenile me found the premises of the movies to be incredibly cool.  But still, Atlantis was lots of fun, and when I…

Oh, I'd heard something about Omar claiming that this was his main band now, and not a side-project, but given what you're saying, I'm even more skeptical of his claim than I already was to begin with.  Anyway, thanks for letting me know.

It was a pretty fun movie when I was six, but then again, Power Rangers was pretty fun too when I was six.  But now, Jesus fucking Christ is that a terrible movie.

I haven't gotten much reading done lately, but I made my way through ~60-70 pages of Infinite Jest this weekend, which puts me around page ~270-280.  Around the 200-page mark, the (spoilers?) passage where Hal's grandfather is lecturing Hal's father about tennis, Marlon Brando, and venomous spiders was probably a…

Good episode.  It probably wasn't my favorite episode thus far, but it's good to see that a strong episode of Borgen can rest on a premise wherein Birgitte's job security as PM is never at any significant risk if only for the sake of variety.  And the Kasper stuff was legitimately great, helping flesh out in part how…

On a tangentially related note, it would be a pretty shocking (not to mention wholly tonally fucking dissonant) twist if, at the end of the season finale, Birgitte was revealed to have been secretly converted into a human-looking Borg upon taking the oath of office as prime minister.  At the very least, none of us…

Do you mean Sanne?  As in Birgitte's secretary who's appeared in almost every episode thus far?  As in a character important enough that it would be kind of difficult for someone who's been watching the show not to know who she is yet?  Or are you just referring to some random extra who walked by in the background and…

Yeah, I definitely second CGI Pinata's sentiments, and I believe linktv (which is how I and I assume many Americans watching are viewing the show) is airing the second season right after the first ends, so covering the whole series would in the end hardly be any more onerous than covering a season and a third of, say,…

@avclub-9024f9f0a80d2d248c7c6efb2e715c37:disqus I was under the impression that the Plover novels were described as having heavy-handed Christian symbolism peppered throughout.

I dunno whether I though it was better than the first one, but I thought the second one was great.  It seems like there's quite a few people out there who didn't like the first too much and enjoyed the second one quite a bit more.  I'd say that based off your opinion of the first, the second one's worth giving a shot.…

@avclub-ad8fd4291fac0d1d7dbfe8d4c83c467e:disqus "And IIRC, they were three separate books in Japan."  I believe the same is true of Wind-Up, at least initially.

@edwardsung:disqus You make some good points.  Yeah, the "magic" in this show is such that it should be referred to as such whether it's bona fide magic or, as PB claims a lot of spells to be, a bunch of quantum entanglement stuff.  And you're right in the fact that what most people refer to as magic actually has…

What were Orwell's religious beliefs?  I was under the impression that while not exactly a traditionally devout Christian, he wasn't an all-out atheist either (which is what I assumed he was back in high school after reading Animal Farm and 1984, but I'm not exactly sure what he believed, or if anyone really knows…

Thanks, I've been planning on returning to Murakami's work in the near future, and was wondering where a good place to start would be.  I'll take your advice.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that as well.  And on the subject of future fantasy releases, Lev Grossman's conclusion to his Magician's trilogy is another book that I'm excited about.

Is Cormac McCarthy coming out with a new book this year, or was he writing the script to a movie.  Because the modern state of whatever Cormac McCarthy writes is fairly the-exact-opposite-of-awful.

And when you say The Bible, I assume you mean the novelization of the History Channel's television adaptation of the ancient collection of Judeo-Christian religious texts, right?