It is interesting (as a writer) — I wrote a piece about 20 years ago about a guy who deals with prosthetics. At the time I thought it would be a while before neural controls were perfected, and I have to say I was surprised how the real thing turned out.

Thanks, maybe that's it. Or is he a buddy of Sandler's? I have trouble imagining it but none of us knows what various celebs are like at home. (For some reason I have this image of Adam Sandler the brilliant, witty raconteur who reads Proust and Joyce, puts on Ibsen and Beckett performances for friends and has a wine…

How the hell is Peter Dinklage involved in this? Does Adam Sandler have some video of the guy murdering someone?

Interesting he mentions Elfquest, which also for me was a big deal, I identified with Skywise a lot.

Speaking as another who writes for a living, there are some errors that drive me nuts but I suspect it's because I had to edit people's stuff.

Jack Frost:

Suharto was given a pass because he was useful to the US. The current Indonesian government is still given a free pass for West Papua.

I'll disagree a bit about the book. I thought it ambitious and okay, but I didn't think Sagan was much of a fiction writer.

Speaking as a Sox fan (who watched those games live). Calvin Schiraldi only had to make one good pitch. But he let himself get rattled. Even with a guy on base you can go for the double play ball, and Schiraldi didn't do that, he kept going for Ks. More important he was left in the game — he should have been pulled…

Jose Canseco appeared in a movie called Mail Order Wife, which was a kind of mockumentary that turned into a revenge movie of some kind. It was pretty weird. Seeing Canseco appear was a sort of WTF moment, but it was fun to watch.

Apropos of @avclub-08ae6a26b7cb089ea588e94aed36bd15:disqus - Brazilian is not a language though people are known to speak Portuguese, Ge, Yanmamö and Tupi-Guarani. Did you mean Brazilian Portuguese? :-)

You got me thinking of Carrie Fisher's monologue in Wishful Drinking. "Yeah, that's my galacto snatch." and "George Lucas says there's no underwear in space."

I always wondered about that, actually— there's a never any indication they were siblings before or after until the last moments of Return of the Jedi. At the time I thought someone just dropped that in for no good reason, and it made so little sense (and cast a huge WTF factor on that scene in Empire.

Um, not to nitpick at A. A. Dowd, but:

I'd argue that there's a patriotism in Norrell for the North as much as for the government in London. Norrell sees the North as part of England, but he built his house int he very spot the Raven King ruled and he's a northerner through and through, as are Chlldermass and Strange.

The Communists in Vietnam weren't dogmatic about it; Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first, so generally Buddhism was seen as part of the national character and worth (sort of) defending. It's complicated; even in China the relationship of the CP with local Buddhists and Taoist tradition has been sort of back and forth,…

Remember that the Catholic church acted, mostly, on behalf of the French. That is, the converts were early on a fifth column that was used to help undermine the native emperors.

So I see a lot of this as a meditation of sorts on all the colors
and shapes violence can take and different ways to react (or not).

ah i should have edited that. I meant that most developing nations you
don't get to go to a hospital, and historically they have gotten away
from it because getting to one is such a problem for huge chunks of the
populace. Many births are at home or a clinic.

Thinking through Jonas' bit about killing. I wonder if it wasn't the point that non-Sensates are just killers, but that it is a whole lot easier to do. He notes that evolution is parsimonious (which scientifically speaking is true). Tweak a chromosome and you get a Neandertal. The difference between us and chimpanzees…