Unfortunately out on the West Coast CA, OR, and WA all have this same issue of booming modern cosmopolitan coast vs. stagnating parochial hinterland.

Do I detect a note of … sarcasm … in that response?

I have read similar stories in relationship advice columns, so this sounds very familiar. Some wives will try to forbid their husbands from looking at porn out of some combination of motives, including not only insecurity about their attractiveness but also a mostly unexamined mishmash of two kinds of puritanism, the…

Wow. I have to say you definitely shot yourself in the foot there, because it sounds like things were actually going your way. Not only did you blow your chance with her, in exchange for a fleeting feeling of power, but she also may have actually been telling the truth. In which case you not only hurt her feelings,…

"It's not hell, but we can see it from here…"

"Oh no! Uzbeks have drunk my battery fluid! I knew this would happen."

Of course he has the slightly risque (and possibly apocryphal?) story which gave his name to the "Coolidge Effect":

The Ottomans did indeed get owned - the Allied naval expedition to capture Istanbul almost succeeded, and one of the three de facto Ottoman leaders thought he could reclaim from the Russians long-lost formerly Ottoman territory in the Caucasus and Black Sea areas, and he failed miserably.

Trek 2009 is indeed kind of similar to previous incarnations of Trek, but unfortunately that's because the screenwriters ripped off the "crazy revenge-obsessed Romulan with a ludicrously overpowered ship" plot of Nemesis and crossed it with the planet-busting Xindi nonsense from the third season of the Enterprise…

Eh, whatever. It's alphabet soup gibberish that doesn't stand for anything anyway. It was late and I'm not going to bother editing.

"Pi r²" by Clint Mansell is an amazing song from the soundtrack. Twenty years ago I saw the music video on MTV's old electronic/techno show Amp. The video includes old film footage of ants attacking a snake invading their nest - it's a perfect creepy accompaniment to the music.

Come on, Star Trek IV (The Voyage Home) is bonkers but it's so much fun. And VI (The Undiscovered Country) is pretty great too - as a TV Trek film marathon of twenty years ago put it:

Of course, being better than Episodes I & II is a pretty low bar to clear…

Ice planet Hoth is actually my favorite part of Empire. Yoda's dime store Zen philosophy, Han & Leia's lame attempts at humorous quips, and C3-PO quoting ridiculously precise odds of survival (a total ripoff of Spock, who was annoying when he did it on Trek) all grate on my nerves.

Twenty years ago, if someone had told you that someone would fuck up both Trek AND Wars, and that it would be the very same guy, would you have believed it? I would not have believed it.

I admire its insane creativity and enjoy finding out what happens next, but I can't see how anyone could really connect emotionally with this show. All of the main characters are either major assholes or total losers, and Rick and Morty's adventures typically result in death and horror for any number of innocent…

"Do you always have to hide behind sex?"

As I was watching the damn autoplaying Digg video of KTVU news footage, I realized I have often parked in front of this very Safeway on Market St when visiting the Castro and Mission Districts. Parking in this area is completely bananas.

Not-so-fun fact: European starlings were deliberately introduced to North America by an eccentric aesthete named Eugene Schieffelin who wanted to introduce every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. His American Acclimatization Society introduced a whole bunch of other bird species as well.

The Asian Art Museum is amazing and very soothing, especially on weekdays when it is not too busy, but it's in the downtown Civic Center area so parking is difficult. There is an underground garage, but it is grungy and fills up sometimes, however there is non-metered parking in some of the neighborhoods to the west…