I think it's funny that you only wandered onto this page after most everyone else had left. Otherwise you'd be getting soooo much shit for this. I'm just imagining the moment at the Egyptology conference where they shoo out the press, close the blinds and say, "but seriously, this 'archaeology' nonsense is great and…

Nah, by most accounts they got paid pretty well. A little pocket money, a hut to sleep in, and some liquid bread at the end of the day. Sure it's backbreaking labor in the hot sun, but hell, so's farming.

Personally, I prefer eating out.

Their depiction of Genghis is basically the worst. I know it's all for the stupid baseball bat joke, but come on. Why would an emperor be carrying a club around?

This is actually a really common issue with racializing history. Often countries were not ruled by locals, but rather the people that conquered them and the prevalence of intermarriage between royal courts confuses things even more. The queen of the UK, for instance, is from a German line, the house of…

Those vacations could have been the main time he saw her though. If you looked at my family photos, you'd see that they're mostly of special occasions and are full of family and friends that I really only spent time with for a few days a year. It's not like he denied having any contact, he just tried to minimize it.…

No one ever talks about the time Laura Bush killed a guy, but I guess she wasn't famous yet so it doesn't really count.

I hadn't heard that story, but it's fantastic. Really the rush to invest in Twitter is hilarious in general. So far, Twitter's revenue stream is more of a trickle — those featured tweets only bring in so much, but the stock keeps rising. I think everyone's hoping they'll figure out a way to turn a profit before the…

Yeah, confidence men, aside from their scams, also betray people's trust in a traumatic manner that often damages their other relationships. Hoaxes are only as harmful as the falsehoods they're peddling. Some hoaxes, like Piltdown Man — which gave two generations of white supremacists "proof" that humanity originated…

I find the early military civs to be unreliable at best. The Huns are probably the strongest of the bunch, but they still have the issue of peaking pretty early. Siege towers are quite strong, but less versatile than plain old catapults (they're worthless for defense, for instance) and you're not likely to build more…

"Good day, I trust you are a friend to liberty."
— Lord Washington the Great, militarist asshole

Actually, Ott played Alfred Pennyfarthing in 1908's Grandiose Adventures of the Batting-Man.

TAKESHIMA OR FIGHT!

The AV Club
*sad trombone*

Except maybe the young ones?

Wait, that's his given name? I always just assumed it was just a goofy pirate name like "Blackbeard" or something.

I think it's a lot like believing in Santa Claus. At first you're told that he's real and you believe it because to a kid a flying fat man with unlimited toys and exceptional time management skills isn't that much stranger than lots of other things you're still coming to grips with like, say giant metal birds that…

Personally, I still like Goldeneye the best. Brosnan's Bond actually has a sense of humor.

I'd say Get Smart was probably the first kink in the armor. It wasn't a straight Bond parody (in many ways Max is more like the uber-serious guys on Dragnet), but the goofy spy antics and gadgets like the shoe phone and cone of silence really hammered home the absurdity inherent in the Bond formula.

No, in the 60s you were allowed to have terrible teeth. Haven't you learned anything?