The part of the US Vietnamese community that's still sore about losing the war still call it Saigon and get touchy if you call it HCMC. I'd imagine some Andrea Nguyen's family might give her an earfull if she used HCMC in her books.

Are his antagonists poor? The League of Shadows and the various mob-bosses seem pretty well funded. I dunno what the pay-scale is for being one of Joker's goons is, but given what they have to put up with, I would hope its pretty generous.

It seems to attract more and more hostility each year, but I always like the WHCD. Watching the Prez try and do a comedy routine is always kind of amusing, regardless of whether they're good at it or not. The "comedy roast light" thing that the invited comedians do is usually amusing.

I keep getting him confused with the Horatio Hornblower actor (Ioan something). Similar looking Brit actors I guess.

It's kinda like the death penalty. I'm against it on philosophical grounds, and if I were a politician I'd vote on legislation to end it, and if I was on a jury I'd vote not to administer it. But I can't say I'm super sad Dylan Roof or Tim McVey won't live to a ripe old age either.

Seems a little weird that a country with no penguin populations has a Penguin Awareness Day. Makes me feel kinda bad for the birds that actually live here but don't get there own day.

I liked the first one. They actually did something interesting with the plot, in making the heroine work for what turns out to be the "evil" side up until almost the last scene. Most formulaic blockbusters don't keep the moral ambiguity up till the very end of the film like that.

I tried to trace it back as well. There was an episode of the Ghostbusters cartoon (written by the Babylon 5 guy, I think) that predates the first Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook by a few months, that had a war between vampires and werewolves. IIRC, it was close enough to V:TM in time though that they probably came…

Depending on your definition of rural, only 10 - 20% of the US pop. lives in such areas. Nowhere close to "most of the country". (and having lived in rural areas for most of my life, I can testify that the need to fend off wolf attacks is…pretty limited).

The Talented Mr Ripley

"Young Indiana Jones" had a bunch of (live action) WWI episodes, if your looking for wartime Indy and will settle for him shooting a slightly different set of Germans

I'd find this theory more convincing if it was explained to me by Glenn Beck with a chalk-board.

I'm going to guess that somewhere, some TV show writer pitches some form of "lets do a show about TV show writers" at least once a week.

Paging Frank Miller

Yea, I was going to say the same thing. I can't think of another franchise that's had better luck/skill at casting the X-Men.

I thought the twist at the end, where we find out the movie is a sequel to Harry Potter, was pretty crazy.

Trump's whole life is winning a stupidly American stunt

Yea, I never got the hate. It was a goofy mess, but it was pretty obvious from the advertising that was what it was going to be. I had fun watching it. Not even in the top five films Smith should be appologizing for.

Yea, especially since its in his obit at age 45, so apparently even with the weight loss, he didn't really get much in the way of extra years of his life.

Has season 4 been any better then season 3? I gave up on it after
Season 3, where they failed to come up with much of coherent antagonist
or plot (seems to be a common problem with these types of shows) while
at the same time were finally hitting diminishing returns on wacky clone
hijnks.