Apropos of @avclub-83de02c3cfc3634de1279cbc17a8fbae:disqus — I'd not put it in the "must be read as a teenager" category, though I admit that's when I first ran across it (I was actually a bit younger when I first tried reading it, but it took until I was a teen to be able to get through it coherently — the Hobbit it…

Can I say that both the book and the movie made lobotomies the scariest, most fucked up nightmare fuel for me even now?

THIS. It applies to any creative endeavor, writing too.

I wonder if there's any connection with it being the 70s and 80s and these drawing shows. Besides Ross and Alexander, New Englanders might remember Captain Bob, who was a staple of Saturday mornings in the 70s. I used to get up insanely early to watch that. Bob (Bob Cottle) was a former B-17 flight instructor, of all…

Albania in particular has the distinction of being the only majority Muslim communist country (or former communist country). Hoxha had this weird thing going on where he actually split with the USSR and got closer to China, and then had this odd mix of loyalty to the Party and to Islam happening. Strange, indeed.…

I am going to check out And Then There Were None , thanks.

I figured as a gentlemen he'd have the Latin and French (they actually demonstrate this in one part where his friend writes a Latin motto on a closed mine).

There's some other stuff in this show that's really, really misogynistic and they tone it down from the source material.

One reason the myth is persistent is that it's a way of just saying that the Vietnamese are awful people.

What's funny is that when I was a teenager and we were watching this film (it had come out the year previous and we were seeing it on early cable I think) we counted up the number of people Schwarzenegger kills. We topped out at about 100 on screen deaths before we started wondering if we should estimate since he…

I think one of the other things that marks 80s action films is their racial politics as well. Rambo: First Blood has some that are especially pernicious. The presentation of the Vietnamese is just a couple of steps above the caricatures I saw in WW II era movies.

I wonder if I am the only one who actually digs Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I admit I haven't sat down to a serious Forrest Gump viewing in a while, I usually catch chunks of it as it gets rebroadcast.

That could certainly happen. But even Michael Jackson didn't go that route when he was accused of child molestation — twice. The first time he settled for $22 million, the second he was actually put through a criminal proceeding and was acquitted. So the result would be highly dependent on who the accused was, how…

I wasn't thinking that a court would agree someone had committed a felony, just that if Feldman came out and said "X abused me" and X comes back and says "I will sue you for libel" if they actually abused Feldman and he has any evidence at all that a civil libel case would be tougher to sustain. All this would likely…

I'm confused. The only legal trouble he could possibly land in is libel. Libel requires a "reckless disregard" for the truth. Even though in California the truth is not all by itself an affirmative defense against libel, (if there's any legal experts who can correct me please do, my information is 20+ years old and…

I'd have kept the Stone Roses self-titled album, and ditched everything else. Granted I am biased (that album is the only one I had on CD) but it's so goddamned good.

Wasn't some of his problem the result of a drug/ alcohol habit? I remember he and Corey Haim appeared in Skinemax-ready Blown Away and I couldn't see any huge reason he couldn't appear as an adult in something or other. (I actually thought Feldman's performance in that — despite it being a deeply stupid movie — showed…

There is something really, really weird about that when I watch it now. I've been to shows with a sizable teen girl contingent, and I have never seen anything quite like that. Was there something different about teenaged girls in the 60s?

I'm less upset about the players' strike, because sports teams have a pretty egregious labor relations history and it isn't like most players become millionaires. (Remember that on average you'll play for what, seven years or so? Eight? You're done when you're 35 or so, and now you have to make ~500K for that a year…