That was a weird detail, too. As of 1984, Ross Township was a fairly prosperous and well-populated Pittsburgh suburb. I grew up there about this time in the show, and I don't recall ever seeing a scrapyard anywhere in Ross. Shaler or Hampton or West Deer? Yeah, sure. They were a bit more working-class and grotty.…

Enormous commune farms without any land-expert, committed farmers who give a shit about the output of their work… lack of non-perverse financial incentives at every step of the production and distribution chain… a broken research and extension system to support all of it. But yeah, primarily? The Soviets never quite…

I'm waiting for that sucker to start turning brown and drying out. They're leaves and vines, for the love of fashion! "Nature Girl" Ashi.

Why time-travel with consequences is an abomination: you're obliterating entire worlds of existence with your changes. And the future outnumbers Jack's proto-medieval world by orders of magnitude. Not to mention he's lived the bulk of his adult life in this peculiar, vast future-world. To 'fix' the past is to murder…

Points for the Chesterton reference (although I tend to read that book as religious allegory rather than a straight-up spy novel), but the FBI's relationship with domestic extremism usually doesn't get to the actual violence stage, outside of Whitey Bolger. If you google around, you'll find plenty of news articles…

The KKK has been a shattered joke since the late Seventies when they were systematically dismantled by the FBI. There are active and dangerous white supremacist groups out there, but none of them are actually an organization calling itself the KKK. Even David Duke left the Klan when I was still in elementary school.…

He was more weird than fun for his five-ten minutes on Justified. Oh, wait - apparently that was his character on Con Man? I'm not sure if that's too damn meta, or if it crosses the meta line three times.

If you assume that laughter is driven primarily by surprise, it's difficult to be surprised that often, that fast. After a while, the beats become a meaningless tattoo instead. Part of the reason why I used to find Dennis Miler's routine a little wearing, despite having similar politics. Too much too fast, and it's…

If by "too old for the part" you mean "walking strip of venison jerky".

Phillip's cuckolded sniping about the elder Porchey having perhaps fathered half the titled bastards of the United Kingdom strongly implies that they're the sort of overweening, striding lords of the manor who are capable of making Burke's Peerage their personal little black book.

It's vaguely appropriate, given Churchill's American roots, and mild obsession/rivalry with his overseas partners.

I honestly didn't know what to make of it. It was catchy as hell, visually striking, and incredibly offensive at the same time. Like a beautifully-framed collision between a bus full of nuns and an orphanage.

The Moster of Florence case was what got me on board with the "Knox is almost certainly not guilty" case. I mean, the latter case, I don't know the details intimately, I might be getting sold a bill of goods, etc. But the way Mignini went absolutely apeshit over the Monster of Florence case and shat all over the…

Anytime your favored interpretation of events requires satanic cult rituals, you need to step back and question your choices. The prosecution's case is an apophrenic witch-trial nightmare of batshit proportions.

And only pretend to drink coffee.

How much of a premium hit will they take for picking it up this long after cancellation? Creatives, equipment, and manpower tend to scatter to the four winds once a show goes into the can cancelled. I mean, I didn't watch it while it was airing, but I'm one of the people contributing to its current numbers on…

After a couple seasons, IIRC. They brought Buffy over to the UPN, leaving Angel on the WB. Checking… yeah, for the first two seasons of Angel, they were on the WB together, then Buffy got shifted over to UPN. Was a real pain in the ass at the time, since it wasn't a network that was easy to get up here in the…

If you read the books on their own, Bond began as a sociopathic lower-middle-class brute with pretensions above his station and a bad-boy proclivity with the ladies. The movies tended to glamorize what started off as an unsentimental portrayal in the books. Daniel Craig's dead-eyed ghost was, indeed, the closest to…

Elba kind of sticks out too much. He's too tall, too striking-looking. Craig worked as a back-to-basics Bond because he was kind of bland in a rough sort of way, not too tall, kinda virile but not muscle-bound. Spies, and especially the actual Ian Fleming Bond, are supposed to be forgettable and unobtrusive. This…

The sickening thing about that line of argument, as blackly amusing as it is, is that those people don't live in those places voluntarily. The socialist regimes of Tanzania and Ethiopia deliberately uprooted peasant populations from their traditional areas and resettled them in artificial, oversized communal villages…