Sean was awesome, no doubt, but in the cool sweepstakes, I would put Edsel and Mirth ahead of him.

MAGE is utterly incredible. At least, talking about the original story under that title; I think it continued at some point but I can't really speak to the "further adventures". I really hope that it's out there in some form, in print, that you can find (particularly the 3-volume graphic novel version, hand-colored…

Kevin? Or Mirth? I'm almost inclined to nominate Mirth for "coolest", although granted, Kevin is pretty cool. Just, at least in the original MAGE story, Mirth and Edsel were cooler.

I don't think Drew means the article header. Rather, the poster shown opposite the Avengers spot in the list is not one of the finest posters they produced. (But honestly, I felt that all of the non-painted posters for Avengers were pretty lacking.)

I am, you notice, not making a value judgement on Hair Metal. ;-) I was in college at the time, so the rise of the 80s flavor of metal in general is something I remember pretty well, and I knew of the split in outlook between the Judas Priest side, and the bands I thought of as, well, more fun. (In later years I…

I love Hemsworth, and I think he's done some good accent work in other things, but man... you aren't kidding. What was that?

Not disagreeing, but I'm also hoping that you aren't classifying Winger, Poison, Motley Crue, and Warrant as "Glam Rock". Glam Rock and Glam Metal aren't the same thing, and shouldn't be conflated. (I always preferred the term "Hair Metal" for that reason.)

SOLIDARITY.

*makes immediate note to fly Virgin in the future*

Well, I will be buying this guy's book at the next opportunity. I'm addicted to watching the landscape from plane windows. I keep bringing books along on long flights, but only read them if there's cloud cover or if it's night-time (and sometimes not even the latter). Otherwise I'm completely glued to the window.

Every time I fly, I am consumed with the thought that — if it's an airline with one of those in-seat-back little screens — that I wished they offered the option of a much more detailed flight map with topography, labels, and a little "you are here" arrow representation. Or something similar for my phone, based on…

Was thinking about this / discussing it recently, and we realized that you could totally put the Dol Guldur stuff at the start of a third movie, without messing up Gandalf's timeline.

Okay, about GOTG, I've said it before, others have said it, but it does bear repeating:

I'm with you. If, as seems to have been hinted so far, the first movie ends with Bilbo and the dwarves escaping from the elves in the barrels, then it could either truly end with "and there's Laketown" or with their actual arrival and greeting at Laketown, but largely leaving the bulk of their arrival to open the…

Not to mention eight billion little plastic souvenir Liberties scattered all over the world. And so on, and so on...

...Yes.? You're right, of course. I saw a documentary about the Essex and its influence on Melville not that long ago, which was really interesting as before that I hadn't actually heard about it.

Everything I've read about it states that the bodies were never found (even fairly recent stuff). At least one wetsuit, possibly both, washed up on shore later, and one was slashed as if from a shark attack. But I don't think anyone really knows exactly how they died. (If, as suggested above, they faked their…

I hadn't heard that part; the last I'd read, people wondered if it was a murder-suicide because of some strange behavior on the husband's part prior to their disappearing.

Sure. Again, I'm not saying that he's a wonderful man. I was saying that you can't slam him for "being in the process of trying to shut down a pub" (present tense) when he is not, in fact, now in the process of doing that, because it was settled many months ago. You can certainly say, "he acted like a dick about the…

It's more being pedantic; in the U.S., "Holmes's" is now recognized as a correct form. So you could run into either form, and both are correct.