Just don't ask her any questions about Jews, or Trump.

It's been a long time since I made any study of it, but my vague recollection was that he'd pledged to respect civil liberties in the wake of the attempted revolution in 1905. A bit of Googling around, though, indicates that he was pretty committed to absolute rule all along, and his "reforms" amounted to little more…

While Gorbachev wasn't the "authoritarian robot" that, say, Andropov had (briefly) been, it should be noted that he wasn't really looking to fundamentally transform the Soviet Union. His intent seems to have been to use "openness" to fight corruption and attempt to reenergize the Soviet economy. As with so many other…

That propaganda trope is spoofed in Red Dawn, as I recall, where several of the Soviet occupiers are sightseeing and the one who claims to read English tells the others that a bland historical marker is marking the site of a brutal massacre of American Indians by white settlers.

In fairness, Destro described the "carving Cobra Commmander's face on the moon" plan as "The stupidest idea I've ever heard". One of the joys of the show was watching the villains contend with bureaucratic inertia, group politics, and the Peter Principle.

US intelligence feared the MiG-25 might have all kinds of world-beating capabilities until a defecting pilot permitted one to be examined, revealing it to be technically primitive (steel construction, tube-based electronics) and essentially a "one-trick pony" — a high-altitude interceptor that could reach mach 2.5+,…

I guess it makes a certain sense in terms of stereotypical character too — The Romulans being more cold and "inscrutable", and the Klingons more blustery/hard-partying, etc. But the Romulans did come along later, as something of an afterthought, and I tend to think that their kinship to the Vulcans was originally just…

The "parallel evolution" trope in The Omega Glory (sure another civilization could develop republican democracy, including a word-for-word duplicate of the US Constitution!) is one of the more off-the-wall ideas Star Trek ever slipped under the door. I mentioned some time back in a discussion of Planet of the Apes,…

That's where procrastination gets you…

While the assumption is often "Communist = Soviet" in modern discussions of the show, I think the Klingons were clearly intended to appear somewhat Asian, and therefore as a metaphor for Chinese communists rather than Russian ones. The conventional wisdom in a lot of strategic thinking circles in the mid-'60s was that…

The most distinctive Philadelphia linguistic oddity that I know, I discovered during a 2nd grade reading workbook exercise — that "dog" and "hog" don't seem to rhyme here. Typically Philadelphians pronounce the former "dawg", but most other "og" words with a simple short "o". Pretty much everywhere else pronounces all…

I recall hearing it once or twice back in the '80s (to my puzzlement at the time), but not really much since. That's probably a function (as alluded elsewhere here) of my being a pasty-white suburban guy, who heard it (used more-or-less ironically) from my few white and black friends who lived in the city.

I think that's more a function of what he wants to do in terms of roles than of what he'd probably be capable of if he had a mind to. I've seen a hint of coldness in some of his characters' ornerier moments that I think would make him a good "corporate villain". Given that he wasn't even comfortable taking the Clyde…

He'd be perfect for a remake of Live And Let Die where he has to go undercover at the Oscars…

How about a 10-years-younger-than-he-was-at-the-time Newhart playing Burke in Aliens?

The name "Pazuzu" may ring poorly to some ears, but it and the film's allusions to it are at least historically accurate — https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

Either way, it's clearly no contender for "most Catholic of all horror franchises". If Catholics tend to roll their eyes at fundamentalist Protestant literalism generally, the book of Revelation is kind of the epicenter of that friction.

Obviously there's been shrinkage, though.

Agreed, and possibly an built-in search term for "genre enthusiasts".

+1 for the sort of civilized disagreement we can all appreciate in this fevered election cycle.