No, they were pretty explicit that the damn helmet was because the biological material had to be entirely enclosed by inanimate or inorganic material to avoid going tiny little blot of protoplasm like all the cute little doomed lambs. And seriously, how goddamn kick-the-dog can you get, when you're turning cute…

Not in the Avengers stories I'm most fond of - "Yes, Virginia, there is an Santaron" for instance. But then, the MCU version of Pym Particle superherodom seems biased towards the very small rather than the gigantic.

Am I the only one who finds those commercials weirdly hypnotic? They last just long enough to just *start* to break the fourth wall, - the guys in their wire harnesses start to wave in the breeze a bit, the dog eating off the table starts cracking one of the child-actors' composure - and then it's over. Utter crap…

That's "He's got a voice for print", which I've said about Mark Levin. And I share both men's politics… well, aside from being dead-set against any more Senators in the White House. At this point, I think we've established that they're generally terrible at anything that doesn't involve endlessly gassing on in…

My understanding wasn't that Haley made shit up - Roots was technically a novel supposedly based on his family history, not the family history itself - but that he plagiarized another novel.

In Lebanon, the crazy is well-labelled and properly, even excessively advertised, so that you know what to avoid, like the Bekaa and Tripoli. Apparently in Italy, the crypto-religious psychosexual crazy lurks like a coal-seam fire underground, ready to burst out at any moment beneath your feet and incinerate you.

NBC, could you please take him back? We don't want him.

From what little I've read of the case, I'm more likely to re-visit Lebanon than Italy. Weird, weird scene. Is that maniac of a prosecutor still in office?

Hulu bought by Turkmenistan, all shows replaced by 24-hour coverage of the 12-metre tall rotating gold statue of President Berdimuhamedow on top of the Arch of Neutrality. Subscriptions, defying all predictions, go through the roof. 2016's legalization of marijuana in a dozen states thought to be related.

The Norton Hulk gets crap it doesn't deserve. There are some fine moments, mostly in the first third in the scenes in that Brazilian favela, admittedly, but still - a good comic-book movie. Especially in comparison with the terrible Ang Lee version.

Jack was only nominally the main protagonist of Lost, it was truly an ensemble show. And, as lost in the weeds as it often got, it still had much better structure and writing than either season of AoS. At times, I liked what they were trying to do in season 2 more than what they actually put on the screen. They had…

It's liking Iron Man 2 that is grounds for ostracization. IM3 was just more of the same, and had some redeeming Tony-being-misanthropic-towards-kids moments. That, and getting an interesting performance out of Gwyneth Paltrow, which ought to be rewarded when it happens.

Back in the Eighties, a number of the Humanists wrote supernatural fantasies with Jesus characters - Jim Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter, wasshisname's Waiting For The Galactic Bus and its sequel (Google saith "Parke Godwin"). Admittedly they were pugnaciously culture-warrior novels, and it's a different time now……

I've found myself drinking triple sec because I ran out gin tonight… I may have a problem. Although my "Slender Billy' cocktail actually tastes better with triple sec than with gin. I guess I have a sweet tooth…

Really? Odin seems to be a typical Aryan pantheon-father figure, complete with striding-lord-of-the-manor manner and cranky alpha-female goddess in full jealousy mode. Basically Zeus/Jupiter with a teutonic fate/doom wash of pessimism and gotterdammerung.

Damn, I didn't know. I've only read the original American paperback edition, I think… Isn't it unusual to have so much textual variance in a modern text?

He's flexible enough to work in most Americana conceits, but I would like to see him outside of that hick-accent milieu. He feels like he could do things we haven't seen yet, and I'd like to see that. Casting him in American Gods seems more likely to bring his stereotypical outlawry into the new franchise than to…

The sadness that follows in its train.

American Gods, like all of these urban fantasy/Supernatural-type stories and shows, has a weird lacuna in the midst of their gods-and-angels-and-magic-in-America structure: they all seem to feel the need to de-Christ-ize their mythologies. Look at Supernatural, for instance: it's got all the trappings of high…

OK, then, TCC was the show I *wish* Blue Bloods would be. More honest, less PC (for New York outer boroughs Catholic law-and-order conservative values of politically correct), less reliant on lazy-production family dynamic drama, etc. Blue Bloods has the worst case of "we need to do something with these actors this…