You find violently perturbed eddies of viscera and bloody water adorable?

Ah, you can understand my uncertainty, given that I have no idea what Dawkins looks or sounds like, and they've made a practice this season of stuntcasting political celebrities.

I would object to characterizing atheism as "uncertainty". There's a word and a belief for that, and it's agnosticism. Atheism is the conviction that there is no god; doctrinaire atheists can and will object vociferously if you point out that their disbelief is itself an act of faith, and claim knowledge of the…

What, and end up strangling Diane in a hospital bed?

I wrote the Will-in-the-shadows down as a sort of naive instinctively-pagan equivalent of Izanami-no-Mikoto or Persephone or Eurydice, Will in the afterworld, rotting and dead, but still there in a half-way sort of way. Not to be looked in the face.

That definitely was supposed to be funny. At least, I took it as such. Was that actually Dawkins? Because I can't believe he actually started in on priestly molestation given his recent embarrassing stumble in the press about defending "mild pedophilia".

After skimming the AV Club's Ringer recaps, and reading this one, I had a really banal epiphany - we don't watch the shows they make, we watch the shows we're interested in. A lot of the recappers have character or soap plotting on the brain, and so they review their shows as character pieces and soaps, respectively.…

And yet he avoided violating the girl by instead getting her to serve his emotional needs in a duplicitous manner. He needed someone to pray for his boy, but he couldn't do it because he had no claim or relationship with any entity or power or presence that he could hope might hear. Like a heathen villager asking…

If Al Swearengen is any kind of masculine model, it's got to be of the existential heroic variety:

That's one badass baby, if she got over Niagara in a rowboat intact.

I read that as him looking to put his "horse" out of its misery, before coming to his senses.

My friend who lives up on a mountain over the interstate exchange at Breezewood, PA (which is to say, she's pretty damn Appalachian, while living in spitting distance of a fair number of Amish) watched the two shows, and was amused by Justified but thought that Banshee was obnoxious. I took her word for it on Banshee.

I… don't own a razor. My old one broke and I never replaced it. It gets trimmed when I get a haircut.

Tribal reflexes. One wants ones own tribe to be large and strong and respected. Most cultural behavior is driven by this sort of sublimated chauvinism, in my opinion.

The show's biggest problem is that they tried to build it *under* Coulson instead of around him. He's an Ascended Minion. He should be a Working Minion. He should be the Oswalt character. He can be omnipresent, but the stories can't be *about* him. They have to be around him. He was the Almighty Janitor of the…

We didn't see it, it didn't happen. Like villains' corpses. Knowing how weird that place was, and its resistance to electronics, how did they know it wasn't going to just seal off the blown section and pump itself dry? I guess I'm vague on just how Magic the city is, exactly.

For some people, that's a selling point. Of course, they're made of money, not mutation…

I was actually good with all the yelling, because after about thirty seconds, I was with Skye freaking out, and the rest of the cast was just yammer-yammer-yammer in the background, like a bunch of squalling brats. It helps that Justified was playing with a similar dynamic, with one of their characters freaking out…

I don't know, it seems like the whole showrunner-as-pimp-svengali perverse approach Whedon took to Dollhouse kind of required an indifferent actor at its center. I still say that show is the most searing inadvertent portrayal of Hollywood I've ever seen.

Hell, that murder-SUV that Hunter and Bobbi used wasn't much different except in scale.