Your ACADEMIC credentials? Where O where did you get the idea academic credentials are necessary to think critically? The Wizard of Oz?

Indeed. Which brings up the question of why the police reaction is worthy of comment.

Child of grace and benediction, there are a great many critical thinkers in police ranks, among them any number of Black and Hispanic officers.

Well, that kind of formulation assumes the answer, doesn't it?

Interesting, given the total absence of critical thought on this page.

Since in a number of cities the police are more Black and Hispanic than Caucasian, the racism is a little strange.

You're a little behind current events, laddie.

Tarantino is entitled to his speech. The various police departments are entitled to their reaction.

You'll miss the Abbot and Costello festival.

If you thrill at the aging Dullea, you got me.

Well, my usage is informal. That's the meaning I give it, and I don't think it is all that removed from ordinary parlance. We are not exactly talking Wittgenstein here

I use the term to refer to any fiction which is not seriously themed. It's not necessarily a derogation. The best writer of the 20th Century in English, by near universal acclamation, was P. G. Wodehouse. His prose is of near unmatchable quality, and his gift for line-by-line humor (not just climactic joke scenes) is…

Contact is a favorite of mine, and I believe handled that issue very well. But recall the plot of Contact does not promise aliens, only a wormhole. Kubrick did promise them, and - not only that - but a rationale for why the beings had left the sentinel in the first place. He then gave us Keir Dullea aging, and no…

Shaggy dog story. The emperor has no clothes.

You are hereby condemned to a Kubrick festival. RIP.

This will brand me a sucker, but I think the scene in the book in which Danny meets his future self is one of the great scenes in junk fiction, and unusually inventive, even for Stephen King.

I liked it, fun story.

Well, I'd say Dr. Strangelove.

That is Christopher Walken at his best. I think in the movie he knows - how could he not? - and yet it is still a Good Thing that it happened.

Oh, yeah. I remember taking my girlfriend to it about two weeks after ir opened, in 1968, at Grauman's Chinese. Graduation trip. A gigantic screen. It opened with the eclipse viewed from the moon. I'd never seen anything like it.