The only thing I couldn't figure out was how exactly Eli killed those agents at the beginning— did he materialize more carbon spikes and throw them at them real quick? Or did he cause carbon spikes to materialize from carbon in their own bodies?

Yeah, it's all fun and games until the computer goes all HAL-9000 on your ass. Have they learned nothing from the movies?

I remember enjoying this one quite a bit when it was on. It'd be neat to see how it would look with more up-to-date animation.

I collect dolls, and that's how I heard about the show, too. The Julia doll was marketed as a fashion doll with her own line of outfits that were just as glamorous as Barbie, which was a new thing for black dolls at the time.

Yeah—"only" children, especially ones that read a lot, often can wind up precocious and have oddly large vocabularies just because they're only around adults most of the time. My oldest kid was an "only" child for the first 7 years of his life and he sounds like a 35-year-old.

Me too. I used to take a weird sort of pride in the fact that the typical tearjerker stuff in movies had no effect on me—oh, Jack froze to death? Whatever. It felt like it made me tougher than the average girl.

I lived in the sticks as a teenager—there were few U2 fans that I knew of and I didn't realize that U2 snobbery was even a thing until much later.

Huh. I thought the one in "Toy Story" was based on a similar-looking Fisher Price teapot that was around at the time.

This was really interesting. I'm curious about how one can tell if one of those "vintage" accents are being done right (Daniel Day Lewis in "Gangs of New York" for example)—New Yorkers in the 1870s wouldn't sound like New Yorkers today, obviously, but audio recordings of people from that time are pretty much…

Out you two pixies go—out da door or true da window!

I thought the last episode of Malcom Gladwell's "Revisionist History" podcast ("The Satire Paradox") was pretty enlightening.

The comics did a story about what happened to Skeeter; she goes backpacking around Europe and stuff.

But enough about the election…

Yeah—I saw that bit and I was thinking "You guys know this is how you get HAL-9000, right?"

Sorry, this has probably been said downthread but— Lucy has to un-comafy a dude and mind meld with him just to find out that their necronomicon thingy is hidden IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE WHERE THEY FOUND IT THE FIRST TIME?

Yes—have been in many a "Christian Bookstore" and have been hard-pressed to find anything Catholic or Catholic-ish. (Did go into one once to see if they carried a Book of Common Prayer which is more of an Epsicopal thing, and no one there knew what I was talking about.)

I live in the Midwest. My kid got a Chick tract in his trick-or-treat bag just a year or two ago. I've also seen them pop up in the hospital waiting room where I work.

Didn't he say somewhere that "Citizen Kane" was his favorite movie? The thing is practically about him, although I doubt he knows it.

And I can say from experience that kids brought up in that environment wind up in a bind like that because they have it constantly drummed into their heads that living the Christian faith is SUPPOSED to cause a constant state of discomfort. If you manage to alienate everyone around you with in-your-face Jesusy talk,…

I didn't realize until reading this how much I miss those super-busy cartoon-style posters that had caricatures of the whole cast, like Animal House.