We haven't really spent much time with Maurice, and when we have, he's been glowering at Elizabeth and Lisa. Hard to make an emotional connection with someone just doing stink-eye 24/7.

Don't waste your time, Boardwalk Empire as a one-and-done single-season show is pretty OK. It gets progressively worse. I still haven't gotten more than four episodes into season 4… the DVD set is mocking me from my "in-progress" shelf next to the TV.

Not simply surveillance, combing through hundreds of hours of indifferently-transcribed transcripts. I have to wonder what their storage medium was on these bugs. Surely not reel-to-reel? If that thing is going "beep" every five seconds, a sound-activated system would quickly run through the entire stock of tape, I…

[To slap down yet another instance of the internet's bottomless capacity for aimless libel, the above is a totally unfounded googlebomb hoax dating from 2012 when James unsuccessfully ran for the Senate. I have no interest in superannuated football players, but bald-faced libel is something that ought to be…

I can't help but wonder if the Jenningses conspired to make sure the marriage license paperwork never made it to the relevant courthouse. It can't be hard to forge a license for the benefit of the officiating clergy, can it?

I've never heard of a whisper of nostalgia, ironic or otherwise, for Warsaw Pact candy of any sort. This in a world where there was a brief ironic fad for Trabants.

Everybody knows Wonka was recruited through Operation Paperclip after spending the war running candy-themed concentration camps for orange dwarves in Austria.

Being a wayward Soviet asset would explain *so* much about Donald Trump's otherwise-inexplicable career…

If Mail-Bot has a hard drive, I'll eat my hypothetical hat. He's almost certainly running on a few kilobytes of ROM.

There was very little casual tourism. Some journalists, some politically-fraught junkets, etc. About the same as visiting Cuba up to the last year or so. For an American, it means you're either a journalist, on government business, or a hard-core ideologue.

"Everybody remember to bring a copious supply of toilet paper!"

Well, it's a theory. Except Blaine seems to have been a drug-born zombie, since he was the dealer? Or is the theory that he likewise was scratch-zombified? The timing doesn't seem to work.

More likely they were seriously dim, and hadn't thought about making their own customers, just riding on Blaine's customer list. I have a reseller who does that - just keeps raiding my other resellers' customer bases. It's infuriating, and if we didn't have some fairly hungry competition, I'd be pushing a lot harder…

I was wondering about that spectacular blood-spray all over AJ's face.

Every subculture will become the mainstream for fifteen minutes in the future. Which is now.

I'm a little freaked out because the original outbreak was a full-service zombie apocalypse event, and yet Blaine has created a little criminal underground of somewhat-cognizant zombies, with no apparent spontaneous devourings. Was there something special about the outbreak which has receded? Or are all these…

Only drug in Seattle, you know.

Seriously, the opening credits *are* a flat-out only mildly ironic premise recap, why waste the time and our patience?

If he has, it was on a show I don't watch.

I still haven't gotten more than a half-dozen episodes into the first season of that show. It's just… not that good, despite the presence of Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park. I may try again later this summer, but I've still got lots of Veronica Mars and Nashville to watch before I fall back on a time-waster like what…