Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the division of the Academy allowed to vote on nominations for that category? So, the only people who voted on the nominations for actors were actors themselves? And, if that's the case, why isn't there more holding actors and actresses accountable for this vote? It seems it's not…

We usually do that by faking an unspecified Native American ancestor.

I have no conviction nor did I ignore context. In fact, if you look at my OP, I provided the context that death/dying roles for straight characters were honored last year. So Oscar's mawkish obsession with suffering might not be limited to race, gender, or sexual orientation. I further granted the premise that the…

How is that moving the goalposts? I took a list from a third party source and you objected to it. I conceded your objection because, well, I don't want to quibble over the details. It's not that important to my argument (7 of 64 is not fundamentally different than 8 of 64). So I granted your premise and stated how…

I got the list from indiewire. Fine. Cross it off. 7 of 64. Is that really all that different from 8 of 64?

Well, not the actors themselves, but the character played was LGBT.

Since 2000, eight different people have won an Oscar for playing an LGBT character. So, out of 64 possible awards, 8 have been for queer cinema. That's one out of every eight awards. I don't see how it's possible to argue it is being systematically excluded from the Oscar with a straight face.

I'm unreasonably obsessed with the ABA. Loose Balls is the best sports book ever written. Jeff Pearlman is starting a book on the USFL, which I'm quite excited for.

Though it predates this era, I always liked the idea of the "Beer and Whiskey League" that was the American Association.

John McGraw was a genius at crooked play. I love reading stories about his creative ways to cheat. He used to hold runners' belts for just a moment on sac fly attempts. He had such a rep for it that a player once unbuckled his belt so when McGraw inevitably looped his finger in there, the runner scored and McGraw was…

My favorite tidbit about Mordecai Three Finger Brown is that he had another nickname, "Miner". Why on earth did a guy with a nickname as cool as Three-Finger Brown need another nickname? That's just overkill.

Harumph. I've read the book.

That's a fair review. It did peter out towards the end but the accumulated weight of evidence shows that Publicly Shame is bad for everyone involved.

Violence is part of the appeal of football. The players are well-compensated and the risks of the sport are disclosed to the participants (the real problem with the concussion scandal is not that football causes concussions but that the NFL tried to hide the fact). I don't think guys should be allowed to intentionally…

Jon Ronson's recent book So You've Been Publicly Shamed changed my online behavior, and I've largely quit Outrage Twitter. There's still some public figures I will still campaign against but I try to limit that the political sphere. The way we tear people apart for their sins is soul destroying, not just to the target…

I don't take fashion advice from Jeremy Piven.

Another major problem of the remake is that it was always clear when we went into the dream world. The original Nightmare works so well because the whole movie takes on a surreal edge and you're never quite sure when Nancy is awake or dreaming.

And those are pretty valuable media centers. You think if MTV played black artists in the mid-80's, they would lose viewership in Kansas City, New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta, and the like? And when MTV did start playing black artists, they got huge ratings. It was white kids in the suburbs who helped make Yo! MTV Raps…

You know what states have the highest percentage of African-American population? The deep south. New York has a pretty high AA population, about 17.5%. Here are states with more (in 2013), by your argument the least racist states in the nation:

While true, that's a shame. One of the best things about MTV is that it served as a national radio station, and exposed a young Poseur to all sorts of music from across all genres which he may not have encountered. Everyone retreating to their own youtube list is kind of sad, as it breeds boring playlists. Now, there…