You may be on to something there ...

Character is important, but the key to Whedon is also his ability to take something that seems funny and shallow and imbue it with surprising depth - he sneaks up on you with existential angst and tragedy while you're busy laughing.

The funny thing is, it's almost certain that Romney has always been anti-choice - he just found it necessary (and excusable in an ends-justify-the-means way) to lie when running for governor of Massachusetts. During the primaries, he let the mask slip a bit so that the anti-choice leaders would know he's on their side…

I'll see that and raise you a ....

I eagerly await the touching moment when the last dinosaur - toting his alien-compatible Mac laptop with a virus to disable the mother ship - wistfully bids farewell to Earth before his suicide mission. As a single tear rolls down his scaly cheek, a small mammal will scurry out of the underbrush and the noble beast…

How are they controlling for pre-existing mental illness in the abused children? I have always thought that parents faced with raising dysfunctional children might be more likely to resort to physical intimidation out of desperation. This is kind of like the causation vs. correlation problem, except that it seems…

Senator from New Hampshire paired with former governor from Massachusetts? Not going to happen on a Republican ticket.

Not as a character - she may have been mentioned without explanation (can't remember that well).

Intellectually, I know this answer is paternalistic and privileges my mental comfort over the life of my family - after all, they might choose suffering instead of death, too. Emotionally, the idea of facing suffering myself is so much easier than imagining my wife and kids starving and at the mercy of crazies…

All of Labyrinth is disturbingly sexual - David Bowie's creeping, the masked ball (come on - you know it's a a metaphorical orgy), the Fireys, the Helping Hands, etc.

I know this is completely beside the point and deserves to be buried in the comment section click-fest hell, but: "machete-wielding karate knight with a carnivorous goat sidekick" - is this a real thing (cartoon, comic, or other)?

I think stoprobbers point was that there is a lot of books that deal with feminist themes perfectly appropriate to this site that are not traditional "lady!books" (although I don't feel quite so dismissive of those) - especially sci-fi. Hell, I always figured that the title of this site was at least partly indebted to…

I would think that the robot who thinks non-human entities (corporations) deserve equal rights might be better at dealing with aliens. Think of the potential for out-sourcing!

I do the same thing - my guess is that the counting system used by my immigrant great-grandparents (Italy mostly, but also Sweden and the Ukraine) has been passed down without being influenced by North American norms. I can't imagine this is too unusual, either, given that most people are counting on their hands…

Part of the charm of it for me is that there is no good reason for these movies to exist except as a romantic gesture.

I really love the Resident Evil movies - they just seem so romantic to me. What we have is a director making movies in which his wife is not only a bad-ass zombie killer but also the ultimate apocalypse survivor. In my head I can hear him saying, "no matter how horrible the world becomes, my wife is awesome enough to…

But surely they will see that single parents are 50% less likely to screw up their children. You can't argue with The Math!

The Holy Spirit can also be depicted as flames, which might cover the second image above. There is also the long-standing tradition of the heaven being in the heavens - meaning that saints/angels occupy the planets/stars (see Dante's Paradiso).

When there's no bread, there must be more circuses.