Ice T is 57. And we're all getting old.

I liked how they played her situation as Marvel-horror. Chris Sims has pointed out how the Spiderman origin - the original comics one, not all the movie retreads - played as slightly off-kilter horror, complete with grim ironic karmic retribution for the protagonist's misbehavior.

She's got that grotesque-cute thing going on, it's not repulsive. Hey, it could be worse, she could have turned into a hexenbiest. Just ask Juliette Silverton.

Eli's out of the Alicia loop right now, apparently because of the fallout from her blowup with Peter. He might have had a better handle on precisely how obnoxious the Asner character might be, and Johnny's group's youth may be showing.

Eh. I think you're over-estimating how well-known the big moneybags donors are outside of a small circle of campaign professionals. We only know about the Koches and the Soros and the Adelsons because reporters and political activists - but I repeat myself - have chosen them as mau-mau targets for whatever reason. …

I was wondering about that Asner performance. Did somebody tell him he was playing a Republican? I'm not sure how else somebody as doctrinaire stereotypical Hollywood lib as Asner - an actual, card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America - digs so deep into a performance as a malignant…

Why? I mean, I grant you, Prady is a better person. But it doesn't necessarily follow that a better person makes for a better State's Attorney. It's a job that requires a certain ruthlessness tempered by integrity and even temper. Prady lost his shit in the face of that preposterous Asner creature, which doesn't…

Ah, I thought you were riffing on the free-love goofballs who came along for the ride in the Russian Revolution, and found that actual doctrinaire Bolshies were just as puritanical as any other kind of revolutionary. Since all sincere fanaticisms are fueled by thoroughgoing sublimation, fanatics tend to not be your…

I'm pretty sure that swill was supposed to be ginger ale. The scene dynamic would have been completely different if it had been beer.

The way he had that jack half-assed in there, he was pretty much asking for it. I cringed just looking at it when she was walking by on her casing run.

'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' *sounds* like a great motto for the Sexual Revolution, until you get a look at the ones doing the needing.

The details of the accident is what gets me. It was basically the same sort of tunnel that Pennsylvania is just riddled with, and I've never heard of such a… clusterfuck. A tanker collides with another vehicle in the middle of the tunnel, lights off like a Michael Bay picture, and a combination of panic, idiot…

So Stan tries to burn his defector w/ Oleg, and it looks like they have no joy. Of course, Taitiana Evgenyevna may not be the person at the Rezidentura to handle a phony defector, so there's no reason she'd know about it. Hell, Oleg's still part of the technology section, right? Why would he have any reason to be…

The ISI's favored fanatics weren't especially effective on the battlefields, either. The "Afghan Arabs" in particular were rarely of any particular use. In practice, the Afghan War was a horrific slaughterhouse, worse than Vietnam. The Soviets lost some men, but they got way more Afghans killed on both sides. …

The ISI is Pakistani intelligence, and I would say that they lost, too - because the Deobandi fanatics ate them out from the inside. Phillip's asset is not long for this world, and the show isn't shy about telegraphing *that*. The Pakistanis have had too many military schools shot up and NWFP districts in a perpetual…

Despite the protagonist voice-overing his bullshit about spies doing this or that or the other thing, I never really engaged with Burn Notice as a "spy show". There was way, way too many explosions and grifting and Bruce Campbell for me to take it seriously. It was always The A Team in spook drag. And I'm slowly…

Looking at the Northrop-Grumman locations map, in order to make it fifty miles from anywhere in the DC-Baltimore corridor, you'd have to go down to whatever they've got in Stafford, VA. Did they ever say where Elizabeth's mark lived, exactly? The other N-G offices are way the hell down the Eastern Shore or out in…

Given their apparent age and the time-line he had to have been a teenager himself in those flashback scenes, if not necessarily fifteen.

I had a roommate who wore his Members Only jacket well into the Oughts, and for all I know he still has it. And no, it wasn't "ironically", we were a nerd colony, not a hipsters nest.

I watch the show on Amazon Instant, so I don't get the commercials. But Northrop-Grumman advertising on the show is A) suggestive that The Americans is the Velvet Underground of spook shows - only a couple hundred thousand people watch it, but 90% of the military-intelligence complex is following it avidly, looking…