There's a barber near my apartment that has those old-school massagers, along with every possible 50s & 60 barber-related tschotske you can imagine. It's name - I shit you not - is Don's Cutting Edge

Gang rape and clever literary devices
So, I should have put this on last week's discussion, but it only occurred to me when I rewatched it a couple of days ago; Gemma's rape is ironically foreshadowed by her telling Halfsack to "Join in or get out." Be careful what you wish for indeed.

Plus, the actress who played Adrianna also played Jax's babymomma

Yeah, she not only repeatedly said she thought it was a girl, but she projected smug satisfaction at being such a smart mother that she would be able to tell. So she's disappointed, but I think less because she really cared whether it was a boy or a girl so much as she wanted to have known it all along.

The Sequence
(Not a) first of all, thanks for covering this show - I've been hearing about it for years, and always meant to check it out, but actually having a forum to then go analyze it more finally got me to do so, and it is unbelievably awesome. (Also, has anyone seen Heat? I just…)

I've been reading S8 as they come out - as much to return to the monthly comic shop trip of my youth as to enjoy the actual comic. I figured I'd limit myself to Buffy, and then get Angel TPBs when S8 is done. The comic's pretty good, but it's important to think of it as an act, not a whole episode. 20 or so minutes of…

SPOILERS

I agree with SYC about the comic bookiness of the S5 retcon, but otherwise I couldn't disagree more with alls y'all: S4 is the best season of all Buffy/Angel-verse. I can understand it being frustratingly confusing during the initial run, as it would be easy to forget things as the weeks go by (especially since, in…

If I remember correctly, on the commentary of "Restless" they say that the whole sequence of one room leading into another, unrelated room was their taking advantage of that being how their sets are actually built - the hallway at school does lead to the basement, or whatever. Which I thought was a nice meta-touch:…

I sat surrounded by members of Dengue Fever on my way to Philly, where I stayed with one of the members of Dirty Projectors…oops, wrong thread!

In addition, I think it's a bit of a straw man to say I (or possibly Ortenzia) was saying that those things would inevitably happen _exactly the same way_. In fact, I'm pretty sure I explicitly did not say that. Specific events, like the killing fields _exactly as they were perpetrated_ or Stalin's collectivization…

Enkidum - I think that's kind of beside Ortenzia's point. I read her critique as pointing out that alternate histories tend to rely too much on "Great Man" theories of history, which place a lot of emphasis on the choices of a handful of powerful people and more or less ignores the actions of countless little people…

I should have put my previous reply here, but yeah, Sophist is right. I would say a band in the Santa Barbara area is more likely to go up to Monterey than a band in the Bay Area is likely to go down to it. To Northern Californians, civilization ends at San Jose, and it's pretty much "here there be dragons" until you…

BTW - they're not in Northern California. Noel thought that b/c of the vineyards. But there's a whole bunch of vineyards in the Santa Barbara / Paso Robles area (after they decided to rip off the real wine country's cachet by planting some grapes and calling it "California wine", this Napan grumbles), and all other…

Dirty songs
Although it was quite a while ago ('01 - yikes), I still fondly recall putting together 4 cds worth of music for our wedding reception (these were pre-iPod days). Not least because I spent most of the afternoon the day of fighing with my computer to actually burn the goddamned things - turns out it was a…

(wow, dammit, I did know it was Drusilla, I had just typed Darla so recently. /shame)

Actually, didn't Darla pull a couple of guns in her (first) final fight with Buffy and Angel? You can't kung-fu a bullet, sure, but Buffy is pretty good about dodging lines of fire (as with Darla and, for that matter, Ms. Post), and has super-healing for the hits (as with Warren).

GINORMOUS SPOILERS

I thought he was pretty awesome in Milk, actually. But it's easy to be awesome when you're playing Cleve Jones.

Lords of Dogtown
Hardwicke directed the feature-film, slightly fictionalized version of that story, Lords of Dogtown. Dogtown and Z-Boys, which is vastly superior, was directed by Stacy Peralta.