She's just a figurehead, but has the grandiose title in Canada of "Honorary President Pro Tempore of the Zoning Board of Appeals".

Canada doesn't have a mayor. It's like an alderman or something.

Donald Trump would be a disaster for the country, but it's not at all surprising that Fox News has not been his biggest fan. Fox is the mouthpiece of the most powerful part of the conservative establishment. In the '90s and early '00s, that meant that it was also the network of a right wing insurgency against an…

There are a lot of things going on in Minority Report, but it's an interesting argument whether "precrime" would be a good thing even if the system could perfectly predict behavior. Why are we punishing these people? They can't, in any real sense, stop themselves from doing what they're going to do, and clearly the…

You may have kind of missed the point of both versions of Minority Report. It's not a serious policy argument against the use of precognition. It's a philosophical examination of determinism. The police making do with a system of precognition they know to be imperfect and attempting to rationally cope with those…

Well, she's 28, so whether she can act or not Hollywood will forget she exists in two or three years, so probably never?

You should read the short story (novella, really) that the movie was based on. Very different ending—I'm not sure one is better than the other (in terms of endings), but the novella version is more open-ended.

He was pretty upset about Kubrick's version of The Shining, if I remember right.

Respect for picking two off of Beat the Champ. Such a great album.

That's part of what makes Coroner's Gambit such a great album. It has some killer tracks, but it's also one of the most coherent wholes. It's one of my favorite albums to put on and just listen to on loop, late at night. But it's not lacking lyrics—check out Family Happiness:

I used to listen to Coroner's Gambit on loop. Family Happiness is perfect in every way. Maybe my favorite track on the whole album.

Not enough of it. Think about it: stand in front of a gamma bomb, become the Incredible Hulk; travel into space in an unshielded ship and get cooked with cosmic radiation, become the Fantastic Four; stand inside the intrinsic field test chamber, become Dr. Manhattan.

That's actually part of the book though. It would take maybe thirty seconds of voiceover or dialogue to explain that the valley is relatively unaffected because of [insert some handwaving about deep aquifers, distance from major urban areas and topographical characteristics causing most particulate fallout to…

It makes thematic sense for The Road, since the whole book is in the allegorical mode. For this, though, I don't see why you wouldn't just say "nuclear war." The fact that the surface of the earth is a radioactive wasteland is a major plot point, and it's not like the threat of nuclear catastrophe is that much less…

More power to you if this still sounds good, but it eviscerates the concept. Even aging up the protagonist is a kind of questionable move, since the power imbalance (antagonist is older, male, educated, has a suit that would allow him to survive outside the valley and so on) is a huge part of the tension that drives…

L4D2, on PC, would have been a decent choice, if the goal was just to get him capable of playing an FPS.

Oh god that sounds terrible.

This is a fantastic playlist. It's missing a bunch of absolutely phenomenal songs, but that's more a reflection of the fact that the Mountain Goats have way more than an hour of pure gold. I can't wait to listen to this.

I knew a family law attorney once who said that divorce should only be available for the first ten years of marriage. After that, there's so much water under the bridge that it'd be much more effective and better for everyone to just give them pistols and let them turn and fire after 20 paces. That's what I think of…

Totally agreed on "No Children." Those two are never, ever, ever breaking up. Not for longer than it takes each to sober up and get bailed out, anyway.