The Forever War is a better meditation on a similar subject.

The only part of the Two Towers movie that stands up is Gandalf's struggle with the balrog. Sweet Jesus's balls, that's a great pair of scenes.

BSG was only and ever at its best when it explored what people think they need to do in order to survive in extremis. 33' was the most focused episode in that regard, the fate of humanity itself being in the balance every 33 minutes, and laid down a marker to which the show, to its credit, lived up to more often than…

@bcfred:disqus "And over the last 30 years the U.S. had tremendous positive mobility across income brackets."

I am given to understand that he had to give his notes for the rest of the novels to the TV show's producers in the event of his unlikely (?) death before completion, so that's at least one good thing that came out of them.

"He's the devil…. He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important, just coax along flash over substance."

Tolkien's writing is… intentionally classical, perhaps? The sincerity and magnitude of the plot almost demand a dry, humble voice, lest it degenerate into melodrama like, say, anything by Eddings.

I read almost all of Wicked. I stopped some 4 pages shy of the ending, and simply couldn't, for the life of me, care enough to finish it.

I don't get TBBT either. It's all lazy, trite stereotype humor that would have felt dated ten fucking years ago.

It is important to distinguish between a dark fantasy and a call to action. It is also important to consider the context of the times. The Fox News crowd was active whipping the country into a war fever. Given the carnage they were about to unleash on Iraq, was it really so silly to engage in a vengeful…

Schism feels dated, but Frame of Mind holds up well. It feels something like stage play, but that's appropriate to the frame of the story.

That's a risk I'd be willing to take, but given the rest of Comedy Central's lineup, if the Daily Show staff infected Crank Yankers and the Mind of Mencia, we would've come up even further ahead.

I can't rank a top 5, but Small Gods is the best. As sweet and profound a meditation on man's relation to the divine as has ever been written. Plus Leonardo da Vinci in a tank. What's not to love?

The Ring got deeply under my skin, my mind had to worry at it for days afterwards. What would I do if I saw the tape? I eventually decided that, if it came into my possession, I would figure out some way to play that fucker on Fox News. Since the set of people watching that horrible channel is pretty close to a…

I have never been able to decide if the visitation was trying to warn him or kill him.