When I had reached the age of being way too cool for Mr. Rogers, I had asked my mom what the appeal was since the show was so babyish and lame and she said that, for some little kids, Mr. Rogers is the only adult telling them that they're special. (Excellent guilt trip, mom!)

Got me a movie
I want you to know
Slicin' up eyeballs
I want you to know!

I get the sentiment (having a lot of Republicans in my family), but really, the assholes in the party have come to fore now because the "good Republicans" have been giving them a pass for years. Practically every time a Republican politician or pundit is in the news for saying something racist or doing some other…

Agreed on Tron:Legacy. I don't think she fits the trope.

Hells yes—I heard Serena Joy was based on a mix of Tammi Faye Bakker and Phyllis Schaeffly, but I think nowadays we've got quite a few women who have made careers out of throwing other women under the bus so that they can fit in with the conservative boys' club. I'm curious how Serena Joy's background will be handled…

There are a sizable number of people who would punch their own grandma in the face if the right person said God was telling them to do so.

A couple of points-

So, you've never heard of the FLDS church? The Quiverfull movement? Bill Gothard's Advanced Training Institute? Heck, even if you look at churches where women are allowed to wear pants, you've got pastors like Mark Driscoll, who has referred to women as "penis homes" and wrote about flipping out on his wife because…

What also drives me nuts about that is that these people gave exactly no fucks about the treatment of women in Muslim countries until we had to look for reasons to go to war with them.

I dunno. I think in a perfect world, the best response would be to just go ahead and book her, but have everyone that hates her stay home so that the only ones in the audience are the 12 members of the college Republicans. That'd pretty much be the end of it.

Also, I had read that research projects that were being done at places like the NIH got hosed up during the last shutdown—scientists had to scrap projects that they were in the middle of and start over again when the shutdown was over. It wasted a ton of time and money. Plus, the bulk of the CDC was shut down at the…

We already have pockets of very Gilead-like subcultures in our country, with men in government who are very sympathetic to them, and they've been around for a while.

There's stuff that still can treat MRSA, at least. Try googling "CRE" sometime—that shit'll give you nightmares.

I don't know why, but I'm bothered by any notion of Sexy Einstein.

Every time I see Ivanka in that pose (chin on hand or "pensive") all I can think of is "Glamour Shots by Deb" from Napoleon Dynamite.

Oh, but the best way to get girls to save themselves for marriage is to make them deathly afraid that they'll burn forever in a lake of hell fire if they don't! It's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Seconded. The church I attended as a kid was run-of-the-mill mainline Protestant and there wasn't much preaching of the Apocolypse directly from the pulpit, but that stuff was still everywhere (especially in the late 90's when the Left Behind books were a huge deal.) Conversations with friends from youth group would…

The readers of Brio tend to belong to the churches where you only take Communion on Christmas, Easter, and maybe when there's a guest speaker (weekly communion—and calling the bread a 'host', for that matter—is a Catholic thing. And Focus on the Family types are often not sure that Catholics are Really Christian.)

I'd have to Google him. But hers are 1) almost artificially perfectly aligned at the bottom (seriously—I've never even seen dentures do that) and 2) when she smiles there's a space between her upper and lower teeth, like she's about to talk but she's smiling instead. It's really bizarre.

Most of the ones I know don't.