Maybe I am spoiled living in NYC. The cost of a hailed taxi here is $2.50 to get in and then 50 cents per 1/5 of a mile, which works out to about four or five blocks in Manhattan. Tack on an extra 50 cents for late nights or $1 for rush hour. Basically you can usually get a cab in a few minutes via street hail in…

The issue I think might be the nude part. But either way, it isn't automatically evil to hire a cleaning service/ maid service/ go to the laundry guy (I live in NYC, and few people have washing machines at home, and hanging around at a laundromat is a massive waste of time, so many people drop off their stuff and get…

I am curious how long ago this was, as back in 1989-90 a roommate of mine was also a Cutco salesman. Clearly this has been going on a while.

Speaking as a science-oriented guy…

"all those great accomplishments under the Soviet system were only
possible because the Kremlin decided to direct resources that way" —
well, of course, and the same is true of any "big
science" project. The private sector never does any of that unless it's
in a relatively protected system, like AT&T and Bell Labs.…

I'd disagree slightly. Once Fermi published The Curve of Binding Energy the idea of a chain reaction was out there. (I don't know how much physics you've had but the math is really, really clear). The fundamental science problems were engineering, so while Klaus Fuchs saved the Russians some time, I submit that it…

Ferriss is an old teacher of mine, and I respect him greatly. But I'll disagree a teeny bit. Certain kinds of science can work quite well under totalitarian regimes; note that the atomic bomb project in the US was under many of the same restrictions as their Soviet counterparts and it worked pretty well. Similarly,…

I got to know of this movie through the soundtrack, as I haven't seen it. But the music is simply fantastic in any context. It's like an aural tour of Rio when people are celebrating. That's no bad thing, IMO, and the sheer energy in it is infectious.

Yes, I think you're onto something there. Listening to Meat Loaf as a teenager is a very different experience from when you are much older. A lot of his songs from an emotional perspective to me seem just silly, but teenaged and early 20s me would have responded better.

You can appreciate Meat Loaf ironically, sure. You can do that with any genre. But I think the thing about Meat Loaf is that (as a few people noted below) he's basically musical theater. Musical theater isn't everyone's cup of tea, and within rock-criticism culture it has a weird place. Some of it has to do with…

Probably. Meat Loaf comes from a musical theater tradition, I think. And irony simply doesn't fly in that particular genre (or rather, it's really, really hard to do well). I mean, in musical theater you have people breaking out into song, for chrissake. Ironic detachment is kind of the antithesis of that heavy…

This brought back some interesting memories.

Omissions I thought odd:

Flowers in the Attic, though — didn't that involve relatives who were a mite closer than cousins?

I'll agree on the classist part. I don't think he was a deliberate racist either, just that the way he describes the men of Harad and the East, coupled with his Froissart-ian view of orcs, means that some things bubble up, even if he didn't mean it to.

Also @Drinking_with_Skeletons:disqus and @avclub-83de02c3cfc3634de1279cbc17a8fbae:disqus — I think I'd agree that the gender politics are weird and a bit retrograde, as Jungian psychology is. (Essentializing is a fool's game). In that regard Herbert is of his time and we can critique that well enough; it doesn't take…

Funny what you say about Herbert as a writer; I read his other stuff and he's actually reasonably good, though I agree he seems to work best away from the usual structures.

I think the film is deeply flawed, but I find myself liking it anyway (and Sting plays a heck of a scary Feyd). I think it does capture the alienness of Herbert's vision. But at the same time, to this fan of the books, I feel like Lynch and his writing team needed a better sense of what to hew closely to and what not.…

I think Peter Jackson's ability to stay with the source material and the production design and weirdness of the Lynch version could be combined to good effect.

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…