The fake gluten-sensitive folks are ruining pizza as the default option, though. I know it’s a real thing, but I swear 40% of the population claims they’re sensitive, and I’m pretty sure the prevalence is nowhere near that high.

I was a low-level supervisor in a cheapskate company that wouldn’t let me ever expense meals for staff, so on occasion I would buy everyone lunch out of my own pocket. There was one guy who invariably bitched about what was ordered. And not that I told anyone explicitly, but I’m pretty sure everyone knew I was footing…

My first summer job was as unskilled labor at a construction site, carrying various heavy things from Point A to Point B. They made getting lunch part of my duties. I was a sheltered introvert, totally intimidated by all these burly gruff construction dudes who tended to swear and chew tobacco and yell a lot. I almost…

Dadaism was neither the first nor the last movement to have its tenets absorbed and transmogrified by capitalism. It’s the ethos that eats all others.

Oh goody, this is going to piss the right-wingers off so much. And coming on the heels of them getting their precious Tim Allen dreck back on the air. I smell a Disney boycott in 3...2...1...

Well sure, you understand that, but there’s all sorts of dolts flouncing about the Kinjaverse who don’t get things that should be obvious. I’m trying to idiot-proof my comments.

That’s some high quality fanwank. Oswalt is consistently one of the best in that sphere. There should be an award for that, he’d be a contender every year.

I think it’s more Cabinet members making those threats than Congress. Congress can barely put its collective pants on in the morning. But I believe I read somewhere that Zinke at Interior is already using this kind of nonsense to force states into giving up protected lands so they can be exploited by various…

I think every state has laws on the books that say “unless explicitly allowed by law, every form of gambling is illegal.” Then they carve out exceptions for whatever they want to be legal, such as video poker, raffles, casinos, etc.

Is the NCAA’s stance just another example of their predictable tendency toward inane moralizing, or is there a real, tangible harm to college sports if legal betting becomes widespread? I’m sure they’re claiming that things like point shaving and throwing games would increase, but there’s already a massive underground…

The worst is when you’re telling a story you’ve told before, and it killed previously, and for some reason this time it’s not working. You’re never really sure if you’re telling it wrong or if it’s just the wrong crowd or what.

I have a great, longtime friend whose sole flaw is that he adores telling “funny stories.” Invariably, he realizes 3/4 of the way through that it’s not actually funny, or he’d betray a confidence if he finished it, or he’s lost track of who said what. It’s reached a meta level now where we laugh at his lack of…

There was a hint of dadaism to Seinfeld that gave it a gentle unpredictability unlike any other sitcom of its day. Now wacky, over-the-top dadaism is rampant to the point of annoyance, and that makes it hard to see what made Seinfeld different if you weren’t watching when it first aired.

“David Tepper is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

There was already a New Amsterdam TV show just a decade ago. It wasn’t exactly good, but it starred Jaime Lannister and had potential to become good before it got axed prematurely.

I think Cameron was consciously trying to take the series into an entirely different genre, so taken as an outer space thriller it is of course a complete failure. But that’s not what he was trying to make.

I’d seen A3 several times over the years simply because I’m a completionist and I wasn’t going to leave it out of the sequence, but I always got confused by the middle section where all the inmates were running around. Also, I just could not tell the various inmates apart.

Resurrection just has no energy or momentum, and the emotional beats are telegraphed from miles away so they land with a thud. I’m guessing Jeunet assumed that Americans were so stupid that everything had to be spelled out for a 4-year-old’s intellectual level. I don’t think script is amazing or anything, but I do…

A woman already is coaching professional male athletes, you dingus. She’s just not a head coach yet.

Depends on the power structure in a given newsroom. Generally an editor should have the power to spike a bad column, but if the columnist is considered “an institution,” then editors may fear crossing them even if they officially have more authority.