I have read a review of the first installment of the Hobbit, and I was dismayed by the simple fact that the first 20 minutes is taken up by a montage of the history of the Dwarves and the fall of Erebor. Really? The whole point of the novel is that you see the world from Bilbo's viewpoint: a simple Hobbit whose life…

But the appendices are not part of the main story for one reason, the book would be ten times longer and one hundred times more boring if every last historical reference and footnote were fleshed out. This is why the Silmarillion is great as a reference/history/encyclopedia text to fill in the backstory of Tolkien's…

They have had this plan for years, but they didn't advertise it (a sales person at a local T-Mobile store told me about it). When I bought my Galaxy S, I paid a small amount and then paid like $20/month for 20 months. My plan was a month-by-month plan (no contract) and I could leave any time I wanted, as long as I…

This. Whenever I have to use another streaming service (Amazon, HBOGo, Hulu, etc...) I always ask myself "why is their interface so crappy?". Netflix is consistently good on every device that I've watched it on (Web, Wii, Xbox, PS3, iPhone, Android). The others are very hit-or-miss.

Actually, AA and Weight Watchers are very similar in 2 respects. They both have a *much* lower success rate than they would like you to believe, and they are both *way* better than not trying at all.

marksdailyapple.com is a great resource. He promotes a Primal lifestyle, which is like Paleo but allows fruit (most Paleo variants are ultra-low carb or no carb at all affairs) and a few "guilty-pleasure" items like dark chocolate, beer or wine, etc...

That won't be until the end of season four. This season is only the first half of the book.

I'm nervous because while Peter Jackson did an amazing job with LOTR, the parts of those movies that fell flat were the parts where he invented new characters, had characters do things that they didn't do in the novel (Arwyn), and modernize some of the dialog. The Hobbit movies seem like a total cash grab and I think…

I love the first one, it was great fun. Number 4 returned to the sense of fun that the first one had and was *much* better than the "Jack Sparrow goes to hell and returns to save the world" duology of the middle two.

Some are actors and others are real people from the town, according to IMDB. One of the actors is Sonny Davis, who was the guy who wanted his money back in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Try reading it again, twice. The first time read it a pro-war, anti-communism treatise, then go back and read it as an over-the top satire of itself.

I'll second that. It's bad enough that they go straight to a car commercial or something, but this week's Chris Harwick segue was particularly jarring.

No, please don't get your friends and relatives hooked on this HUGE pile of steaming crap!!!

There is a fine line between "bad enough to be a guilty pleasure" and "so horrible I wish I could shove a raccoon into my ear to eat the piece of my brain that contains the memory of watching the first 3 episodes of this show".

My thoughts exactly. If I was the child of a famous author, I would hate to take over my parent's universe and have to try to continue it. Most attempts to do that have failed miserably.

That sucks, I was actually looking forward to signing up for that as soon as it was opened up from invite-only to everyone.

I'm also one of the few people here who really isn't all that gaga over the adaptation of Game of Thrones. It's OK, and I watch it because it is a decent adaptation and my wife loves it, but really, it seems pretty cheesy compared to the budget that HBO is spending on it. There really isn't a sense of scale to the…

I am one of the minority here (apparently) who actually enjoyed the last season of BSG as well as the last season of LOST. For both shows, if the ending wasn't exactly how I wanted it to end, I didn't throw up my hands and say "well I wasted all that time!", I said "that's not how I would have done it but it was an…

Just one thing, we in the military community rarely refer to someone "winning" or "earning" the Medal of Honor, since that implies that their actions were only performed in order to get a prize (it cheapens their sacrifice). We rather say that they were "awarded" the Medal of Honor in recognition of their extremely…

The problem with Objectivism (as with any "-ism"!!) is that people always tend to take it to an extreme that isn't practical. They also conveniently leave out the "enlightened" part of "enlightened self-interest" and the "rational" out of "rational self-interest" (see: Paul Ryan).