Yeah, but if they let some pencil dick shut it down there'll be chaos! Real wrath of god type stuff! Dogs and cats living together!

Reminds me of the classic lines,
"He's stooping! He's lifting the fridge! He has it poised over his head as if to throw! But why? Why?"

I've tried, but that damn thing has a mind of its own. It's like rodeo riding.

I know; my scrolling finger got really tired.

Would it be too much to ask you to work up a precis?

Is that why Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt keep looking distressingly cross-eyed in Jurassic World?

Does Charlize Theron's haircut count as a practical effect? It's pretty rad.

Has anyone actually read that list? I mean, it's awful nice of the A.V. Club to post it, but that's a lot of work for very little reward.

"There can only be… wait, uhh, how many was that again?

Oh. Of course. I should probably have been able to work that out.

So I looked up the acronym GJI. This is what I got:

Well… Raj and Howard are doing fun things. Bernadette has gone to make a sandwich.

Was it just my imagination, or did the shark following Oliver have a Dharma Initiative logo on its fin?

Especially when Merlyn's physique is more blancmangesque than chiselled, despite heroic efforts by his tailor to suggest otherwise.

Not everyone hates Laurel.
I, for one have a certain tendresse for the character. She's been through a lot, and come through pluckily. Now she's not drinking and tiresomely wallowing in self-pity, she is a good, sane friend to Oliver. Also, I have really enjoyed her gradual development into a credible fighter, too.…

I wouldn't call Roland Barthes exactly a "child", intellectually. Go read Death of the Author, then we'll chat some more.

"Then the text is at the mercy of the dumbest reader"

But that's only if you subscribe to the idea of writer as author. If however you believe that the meaning of the text lies within the interpretion of the reader or viewer, then the questions are entirely valid, and more than that, interesting. Why should we allow popular perception of what, or who is "meaningful" to…

Thanks for the recommendations; I think Weber's writing abilities as a prose stylist are a tad sub-par, too. He never uses one adjective when he can use four, I've noticed - and he has no interest in pictorial description beyond a kind of police-blotter brevity. Still, the imaginative scope and dense, thought-through…

Okay ; I'm convinced. I've just logged on to Audible and downloaded The Star Fraction.