I think she's on the same cable, right? It's wrapped around her, and then she's holding a tether, and then Clooney unclips the tether and floats away and she is able to get back to station because he's not pulling her down anymore. It was something wildly wrong—at least that's what I remember.

Admit it: this only happens to you when you're reading the book because you saw the movie.

Pretty easily, but I recognize that the vast majority of science fiction is really just fantasy in a non-medieval setting. I don't mean to make any value judgments—hard sci fi can be (and often is) atrocious on numerous levels.

I'm not sure if you've read the novel, and I don't want to spoil things, but I'm at a loss for what those people are talking about. My suspicion is that the people making that criticism haven't read the book.

That is not my recollection, though it would be better if it were the case. Though, if that's the case, Bullock should have rotated away when the tether cut, and probably pretty quickly if the station were spinning fast enough to hurl him off like that. Also, how was Bullock not straining to hold onto the station? …

That's like a minimum of 120 nickels these days. that's a lot of nickels.

But what's pro-science about the movie other than that it takes place in space? The protagonist is a doctor (I guess kind of a scientist?) and the astronauts are largely portrayed as something between safari guides and handymen. I haven't seen Interstellar, but my understanding is that it at least contemplates…

You bring your 2-year-old to movies. You are literally worse than Mugabe.

It can actually be made about virtually any spending, period. Even spending on social services can be criticized for failing to put the money to the highest and best use. Shouldn't we all be sending money to the third world to raise the living conditions of the most disadvantaged of humanity and so on?

The science in Gravity is pretty laughable, really. I'm not even talking about the orbital mechanics or whatever—that scene where Clooney "falls" away alone is jarringly unrealistic. I'll give it points for the LEO setting, but it's only pro-science in that science has made it possible to set a parable in a dreamy…

Given the general political leanings it's more like the tumblr Stasi, but yeah, the increasing rejection of free speech as a value by a huge portion of the left is concerning.

Jon Stewart on Crossfire and Stephen Colbert at the Correspondents' Dinner are transcendent events. I'm sure future generations will completely fail to appreciate how affecting and significant those two things felt at the time they happened, but they'll be a touchstone for me for the rest of my life.

Yeah, killing the OTA and ACIG were huge. Let's not forget that he was also the manchild behind our (still longest) government shutdown, and one of the first and worst at destroying the "weak party" system in America and otherwise disregarding and wrecking the social conventions and systems that kept Congress…

I haven't started to yearn yet. Boehner and Gingrich were both historically awful Speakers. Just because there are Gohmerts and Bachmans out there doesn't mean you should want other people so bad the needle isn't just resting at zero, but rather is burrowing to negative, back.

I can totally see why. Can you imagine being an established star and then having to follow Stewart on the Daily Show? People you know in your personal life like and care about that show, and are going to tell you that the bit you did last night was almost as good as this thing that Jon did one time and do you…

I don't know if I'd go that far. There are things about the food industry that are horrible—cards on the table, I am mostly talking about its environmental problems and mistreatment of labor, rather than cruelty to animals (though that is also a problem)—but I also appreciate having inexpensive, plentiful and varied…

Virtually everyone lives in ignorance of how their food gets to their table. The entire industrialized food production process is alien-looking, uncomfortable and has dark corners and consequences. Strawberries, among other crops, require awful manual labor at slave wages to be economically feasible. The massive…

His next episode should be a re-run? That doesn't make any sense.

I remember that time fondly.

"sane Western democracy". He's got it covered.