Neither would I unless my dad had mentioned it, he was noting it as a sort of aside to how much mores had changed since 1960 or so. I mean, at that time having a woman over your place overnight was still sort of scandalous, at least if you aspired to respectability. And it just dawned on me that Dreyfuss was a pretty…

Wasn't sure — a lot of folks are too young to remember the really old books, or know him from the 90s and the Frank Miller stuff. And also, it's never clear how many people around here are actually from the city.

And @disqus_4kJRj7np0w:disqus — Nobody in this city calls it Clinton. The only people that do are the MTA (because it was the bus line name) and real estate agents.

It's not nostalgia for porn theaters. Or even the crime and subway graffiti.

I was a reporter for El Daily News (the attempt at a Spanish Language edition of the Daily News, and no it didn't last long) back in '95. That was when the big re-zoning happened. Rudy Giuliani had something to do with that, but it wasn't like he cracked down on the criminality — he just pushed through a change in…

I saw that movie for the first time in high school or early college with my dad. He mentioned (being a New Yorker himself, at least from Yonkers) that there was also a lot of class- and immigrant- politics as subtext there. (Baxter was a quintessential "American" name, while Kubelik(?) was more identified with…

True story: when I was like, in grade school I had a pet mouse from MIT. It was a little black lab animal (one of my parents' friends brought it back). He was pretty smart, and I think bred for longevity for cancer research, maybe? This was before they could do a lot of the genetic engineering, the late 70s, early…

It's easier to just mess with a sample. This is why DNA matching at crime scenes is a lot harder than it sounds on CSI. Small contaminations can throw off a whole set, I've seen scientists publish results in journals and find out later (or be told) that "nope, your protocols were f-ed and now you have to do it all…

"Every same sex sexual relationship is a triumph of lust over common sense"

right, but that would involve cracking the thing open beforehand, no?

"Obviously, if a trait can't be bred out it can't be genetic" — you really don't understand genetics.

Bu the problem with that line of argument is that while yes, people reproduce that way, that hasn't the slightest bearing on what we should be doing as a society, really.

That clearly didn't extend to brown people since most of the villains (Jafar, Scar, are two good examples) are notably darker hued than the heroes, and their features are more stereotypically "foreign" (lord knows there's been a ton of criticism in this vein you can google up f you want). But more to the point, the…

why are opposite sex relationships necessarily an ideal? A lot of them are pretty messed up. You speak of an ideal to strive for, but we're not driven entirely by instinct or genetic programming in any case.

well, exactly. That's what makes me nervous.

I have to say while I am cool with the idea of a gay princess, I have some trepidations about Disney doing it.

True, but as you say even MIRVs use inertial guidance; you'd have to fool a gyroscope and that would mean, I dunno, altering local gravity somehow? Weirding out the local laws of angular momentum?

Right, I got that. I was talking about how they managed to avoid killing millions (per Lyla) and got to 10s of thousands instead.

On the whole nuclear weapons thing…

I am going to throw out another example (if it hasn't been mentioned already): Ursula LeGuin and the Earthsea novels. She wrote the original trilogy between 1968 and 1972 and waited until 1990 to return to that world, with Tehanu. The next book wasn't until 10 years after that (The Other Wind).