There are wonderful interviews with Jenette Goldstein, Ricco Ross, and Carrie Henn about their roles in "Aliens" in episodes 2, 11, and (I guess, depending on how they're numbered) 41 of the podcast "I Was There Too". Well worth listening to, all of them.

A lot of music gives me goosebumps, but mostly classical and opera. If we're limiting it to popular music, then two guaranteed goosebump generators come to mind, both by Coldplay, and no, I am not ashamed of that: I'm not their biggest fan (I like maybe eight songs of their entire output) but don't understand the…

I'm not sure that "I regret if anyone found offence" means "I'm sorry you got offended" so much as it means "I grudgingly acknowledge that you were offended, you pantywaist," because anyone who crafts a would-be apology using that general template clearly doesn't care if anyone was offended or not. As a good general…

DivX was only sort of evil, because you'd buy the disc for $4 or so and you could watch it unlimited times in the next 48 hours, after which you had to pay to watch it again. But you could watch it again. (And you could upgrade it to "watchable forever" by paying a larger fee.)

"Jessica Jones" was very sloppy and padded: if felt as if they were given 13 hours that they then had to fill, when it could have been six or eight tightly scripted ones. I'm worried that this will be more of the same. I'm willing to give it a couple of episodes but I don't know how likely I am to stick around for the…

Pretty sure his eyes are also bulletproof. In an episode of "Jessica Jones", they had to go into the orbit of the eye (not into the eyeball itself) to drain out some fluid from his brain, so my guess is that the entire surface of his body is bulletproof, which makes sense: the cornea and the sclera are basically…

The Carnegie Deli was the first place we ate on our first-ever trip to New York about a decade ago, and it was a huge disappointment. Montréal has much better delis, although the best of them, Ben's, gave up the ghost in 2006 (and had been in decline for a while before that).

He was neither insufferable nor pinched in "Much Ado About Nothing".

He loves Woody Allen's "Interiors", and rightly says that if it were filmed in black and white with Swedish actors, it would be acclaimed as a masterpiece.

Would your questions be answered by "The name comes from a word for an eighteenth-century word for a kind of oarlock also known as a thole pin, from which the sex toy also apparently got its name due to its phallic shape"?

Yeah, my husband felt exactly the same way. When we got back from our first trip there I tried making it a few times from various recipes (one of them called for a half-cup of sugar — WHAT?) and I just couldn't find a version that he liked.

In postwar Berlin some inventive woman, limited to the foods she could find at hand and what she could get from the British GIs, created currywurst, sliced bratwurst drowned in ketchuppy tomato sauce laced with curry powder, and dusted with more curry powder. Berlin is completely riddled with currywurst stands, where…

If I had to pick one of her songs as the masterpiece, and it's a hard choice from a crowded field, I would go for "December Will Be Magic Again", which is glorious, the Katest thing she ever did. I've been listening to her since 1980 and that's the one I've listened to the most: I know I've racked up hundreds of plays.

I always thought it was a weird, misguided sort of insult, though, because who doesn't think Sharon Needles could go into Party City, come out with a few bags full of stuff, and then create fabulous outfits from it? The Phi Phi of Season 4 would have been lost without glamorous gowns and polished makeup: Sharon…

She is possibly the second least introspective person in America (Donald Trump obviously taking first place). Just read the Vulture interview. Nothing is her fault, nothing she did is wrong, she slayed in the comedy challenge, everyone conspired against her, the producers tricked her, the whole thing was rigged, it…

It doesn't hurt that Adrian Lester is extremely attractive, but I've never seen him give less than 100% in every role he plays. He even elevates the inherently ridiculous "The Day After Tomorrow" and the (very fun) Branagh film version of "Love's Labour's Lost". If he's in a movie, I'll watch it.

I loved the first season but the second really doubled down on the awfulness of every single character (with the exception of Kathryn Hahn, flawless, and Anjelica Huston), and I just came to despise them more and more with each passing episode: the cartoonish Christian birth mom and the deeply unpleasant poet didn't…

And take sides as extreme as possible! "He probably molested them too" versus "the shrewish bonebag drove him to it".

The evolution of "Lundinium" into "London" is pretty obvious, but its voyage to becoming "Londres" is very complex though perfectly logical when you take into account the differences between English and French phonology. In a nutshell: the "uhn" sound didn't exist in French and so was replaced by nasalized "on". The…

Fair enough: they do seem particularly reluctant to accept foreignisms of any sort. But as I mentioned, we've done it with countless place names: we turned Florence and Rome and Milan into English words, not to mention Bombay and Nanking and Saint Petersburg and Cologne and so many more. I can't think of a whole lot…