I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a good thing, but for whatever reason, I’m far more upset by dogs (and other nonhuman animals) dying at my virtual hand than I am humans. 

It is so weird to me that what you said here can seem hateful to people. On the other hand, I was listening to a talk where a speaker said, to a trans woman asking a question and kind of taking umbrage with the talk of biology, that the mismatch between biological sex and sociological gender is what being trans is.  A…

To be fair, it’s kind of like referring to your cousins as “cous” rather than “cuz” in text. The few times I’ve done it, the response has been confusion.

I actually don’t think most people are aware that alcohol is a carcinogen, at least not on the level of tobacco. They may have heard that it’s linked to stomach and esophageal cancers, as I have, but I’ve never thought about it as a carcinogen, really.

That parenthetical at the end of the penultimate paragraph makes me curious about how much they knew and how early and why they stuck with it to the point of extolling the virtues of a nonessential product on TV that could instead just be discontinued when they found out. Tobacco companies had a lot of science denial…

I think I’ve heard that, too.  I was just going off Snooder87's tip, and apparently, it was spit and image originally.

To save someone from having to Google, it’s from the Bible and God using spit to create Adam in his image. It kind of makes me wonder if this is another example of hendiadys, like “shock and awe.” It seems slightly different than “fear and trembling” which is meant to be interpreted as “fearful trembling,” but it…

I still think their best gag was Peter’s extended grimacing when he bumped his knee in season one or two, and it was the main reason I thought it was a good show worth having around early on.

I guarantee you that Mindy Kaling has hurt someone’s feelings when it comes to their physical appearance, although it may not have been about weight. I wish people would acknowledge that when they’re coping with these minor infractions in public.

What did she say about what “jellicle” meant? Wikipedia says it’s originally from an unpublished T.S. Eliot poem “Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats,” which were corruptions of “poor little dogs” and “dear little cats.”  Quite droll, I say.

It would be really hard to make a version of Superman as virtuous antagonist who is faithful to the core of the character, though. In Man of Steel, because he was still the protagonist, he was inching toward antihero. I think that didn’t go over that well because collateral damage is something Superman is usually…

It would make him the antagonist, not the villain. It seems like it’d be hard to really pull off well, because Superman would still have to be like Superman (and attempts to show how destructive he would be never really go over well with audiences because he’s such a revered character), but protagonist/antagonist only…

 I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed. Can you ever just be whelmed?

Honestly, kids remember these moments, though, and usually hold on to them as something concrete to mark a generally bad situation or relationship. I mostly remember my father being a dark cloud whenever he was around, but I only have a handful of really bad memories that I can really point to to help someone who…

You can cut about 20 minutes out of your commute.

I was definitely super excited for the possibility that he might take over Jeopardy, enough that I spent more than the usual two minutes on Facebook and ended up reading and commenting in one of those huge Facebook threads in which a friend had voiced their support for him. I was getting notifications for a week from…

Yeah. They were basically the same age because Eddard’s betrothal to Catelyn was pretty close in time to his relationship with Jon’s rumored mother, but I don’t think Jon’s parentage has been definitively addressed in the books, even now. I stopped watching the show after they started lapping the books, but I heard tha…

It makes sense that Jon Snow seemed boring in the show to some people, but it’s kind of interesting to contrast it to the book. Robb was a nothing character who basically only existed to have Jon’s status as Eddard’s firstborn, but in the show, he was much more a typical fantasy hero than Jon. It makes the Red Wedding…

we know it takes place thousands of years before the actual Lord Of The Rings loses his favorite piece of jewelry in battle

My grandmother’s husband talked a lot about the King Cyrus comparison before he died (after the precipitous onset of dementia right before COVID hit, incidentally), and I thought that was unhinged enough. It seemed cleverly designed to suit their agenda while still holding Trump a bit at arm’s length, though, so it…