If anyone made that connection before Alex explained it, he/she is worthy of even more praise than someone who figured out candle/canoodle.

It is basically backwards from every other country in the world. It drives me nuts. (Mostly because it has been projected back into all these maps that show pre-2000 elections. I think the Millennials assume this is an old tradition when it is not.)

Alex's desire to keep his remarks brief was just a cover so he could say the one-word intro "Welcome." He said at the end that this was meant to be a deliberate allusion to the m.c. from Cabaret (i.e., Joel Grey). I don't think I've ever seen him do anything like that before.

I don't know how old you are, but show was really more of a cult classic at best before the recent revival.

I don't know - there is that "Every euphemism eventually becomes a pejorative" paradox. If $10,000 is the lowest possible amount, then $10,000 becomes laughable. The champions would certainly appreciate the bigger payday, though!

People (at least mainstream people) left Malia and Sasha alone. One Congressional staffer criticized them on Facebook for wearing revealing outfits at some event or other - and when the Internet found out, that was the end of her career. Half the time you would hardly even know Obama had kids.

I don't really care for Logan as a character, and I have not had a chance to watch this episode yet, but I am going to predict that this is an over-the-top hyperbolic description of what actually happens in the episode. If I am wrong, I will come back and say I am sorry.

I have also noticed that there was a lot more off-color humor in Season One (and even Season Two to some extent).

I can't pretend to have made that calculation on my own - I just remember that someone claimed that somewhere. I guess that person was (barely) right. I graduated from high school in 1998 and find it pretty funny that Harry et al. are supposed to be my exact contemporaries.

The desire for profit (through syndication) is actually what saved most American programs. Lost American programs mostly come from the genres that were seen as having limited rewatch value (news, sports, talk shows, game shows). It also helped that the U.S. is a physically big and relatively decentralized country,…

Which I seem to recall is an anachronism in the other direction. (Maybe - I would have to check the exact dates.)

I think Reynolds is the real inventor of Twitter.

I am too young to remember those columns (and was not yet a Rhode Island resident at the time, although I always had connections to the area), but I laughed out loud just imagining what they must have been like. I guess Reynolds was the same 25 years ago as he was today. Thanks for the laugh, Bunky.

I will confess - I just find "ginger" a kind of funny-sounding word, and the stereotypes that the British attach to it (which were even more unknown than the word in the U.S. until recently) are also funny. I did not mean for this to get out of hand, and I apologize. I will now go missing from this thread and hope…

Have we finally reached the moment when The Simpsons (even though still on the air) is Before Your Time?

The main impression I get from these comments is that I should drop everything and watch Lilo and Stitch.

It was just a joke. The movement of Britishisms into American English is one of my pet interests. (If non-native speakers are learning "ginger" as a standard term, I find that even more interesting.)

Are you British? If not, I don't believe you really thought "Who's the ginger?" That word was all but unknown in the U.S. at that time. (Of course, this site does have many international readers, so if you are actually British, never mind.)

I actually met a professional ghostwriter the other day, and she told me that there are still many unacknowledged ghostwriters out there. Athletes and musicians tend to acknowledge them, as far I can tell from calling recent examples to mind, but I wonder about the rash of memoirs by comedians and actors, which…

It happens a lot more than I thought.