I hate Chuggington as much as the next dad, arguably more. But for the record, I'm not sure that dubbing the British voiceovers with American ones qualifies as "dumbing down." The (despicable and derivative) content doesn't change, just the accents. I suppose you can argue that, this way, kids are spared the mental…

Well, except LBJ. And Lincoln. And Columbia professor Joel Spingarn, who helped create the NAACP. And newspaper editor Ralph McGill, called "enemy number one" by the KKK. And the Freedom Riders, including the ones who got shot for it.

Parenthetically, don't knock those old pencil sharpeners. There were a lot of substandard knockoffs, but the best of them did a fine, fast job, lasted forever, and (obviously) required no electricity at all. Great piece of design.

They barely existed, and the ones that did were the size of a shoebox. I lived in New York, and I don't remember ever seeing anybody speak on a cell phone until well after Die Hard, except in movies.

Not so fast. What's missing here is the impact on a workaholic's family life. Yes, throwing yourself into work, body and soul, 24/7 is indeed a route to success and, if you enjoy your work, to a great deal of personal fulfillment. But, although the spouse and kids may be well provided for financially (assuming…

I've been married 17+ years to a woman I love madly. After all this time, we do still, sometimes, make each other sandwiches. And, despite some tough stretches, I happily recommend marriage to friends, people contemplating a wedding, or strangers on the subway. But always with a lot of qualifiers, on the order of…

Batman. Also, Galactus v. Batman? Same result.

I'm very short, for a guy, at 5"2". My wife is about 5'8". It has never been particularly odd for us, although every once in a while I stand on the stairs to kiss her, just to see how the other half lives. (The last woman I dated before marriage was 5'10" — eight very solid inches, to stick with your cheesy double…

Great picture — the glossy dress reflects (and maybe helps deconstruct) the oiled-all-over shininess of traditional bodybuilding photos.

So ... did Benjamin Franklin really help them use S&M as a tool to greater self-actualization? I didn't really think so, but it was still a memorable episode.

A Rockette and her boyfriend dropped by my parish on a Sunday morning, years ago. They seemed swell, and I wish they had come back. It was the sort of place where artists often felt at home. Plus, I don't get many brushes with fame.

Avatar: the Last Airbender can be streamed on Netflix. My kid and I are both loving it, and if I were going to be alone at Christmas, I'd just watch the series straight through.

That one line — "I can't wait to meet my second wife. I hope she likes me better than this one" — rings stunningly true with regard to conversations among my middle-aged-married-man cohort. Its not that we want our wives dead — far, far from it. They're awesome. It's that, midway into a lifetime of marriage and…

What I love about Samuel L. Jackson is that he so clearly loves the world of comics and science fiction, and takes such pleasure in being a part of it. It's a big contrast to some actors, who drop hints that they are slumming when they make a superhero movie. (There's a lot less of that these days, to be sure.)

Yes, Carol Danvers has deserved to be Captain Marvel for a long time, and I don't grudge her the title one bit. But do you know who else deserves to be Captain Marvel? Billy Freaking Batson, that's who. Only now, courtesy of some bad decision-making by DC's creative and/or legal teams, he's know as "Shazam." …

You've made your point, and its a good one. But now can we talk about the real danger, which is letting Jim Lee redesign the DC universe, costumes and all?

Little-known facts: Frankenstein's Monster is now a chiropractor in Tuckahoe. Countess Marya Zaleska is a yoga teacher. And I've heard that Kharis the Mummy was running self-empowerment workshops in California, but I can't find his website.

Second that on John Noble. He brings a level of subtlety to his various iterations of Walter that is simply astonishing. In a genre filled to capacity with mad scientists, his is both the maddest and the most achingly human.

I don't see what the fuss is about. They've already told the stories of Khan and the Squire of Gothos and Q; there's really no point to going there again. (If Flaubert had written a sequel to Madame Bovary, she wouldn't have just had more sex with the same guy, would she?)