Horribly enough, I first spotted the trend when the axe attack happened in Germany. On CNN no less. Repeatedly. Since then I've noticed it every time the word is used. Starting to believe in that Berenstain Bears theory…

From what Joel has said, it's looking like January/February, so hopefully it won't be too long of a wait.

I'd add Black Mirror as something to look forward to, but otherwise, yeah, nothing to get excited about.

Hey, I gotta question! When the hell did everyone drop the "e" in "axe"?

Sensory deprivation tanks are a thing now, you should be able to find one in any large city. Between Altered States and reading a lot by/about John Lilly over the years, I've been very tempted myself.

I want to say Yes, but I don't specifically remember them in grade school, which is where I was in 83. They were certainly there in middle and high school later in the decade.

It'd be pretty cool if they worked in a nod to The Host.

The last time I visited Hannibal it ended in a street full of drunk and methed-up rednecks beating the shit out of each other. It's a dirty, nasty river town.

I lived a block away from Thalia Hall, just off the corner of 18th & Throop, and it was painful to see such a gorgeous building finally being restored, only for signs to go up for a restaurant that no one in the neighborhood could possibly afford.

Yeah, when Thalia Hall was being renovated and converted, that was the "There goes the neighborhood" moment for me. It's not the hipsters, though. They were already around (and I admittedly was one of them). The problem was the yuppies that followed. One thing about Pilsen, though, is that a lot of residents own their…

Like SmudgyBlurs said, it's not much of a neighborhood on its own. But as far as gentrification of the surrounding area goes, Bronzeville (as far as I know) is still mostly middle-class African-American, Bridgeport had aging hipsters move in a while back but everyone I know there has left the city in the past year or…

Oh, absolutely. I'm just used to getting questions like that since I moved. Especially in recent years it seems like anyone not familiar with the city is thinking of it as damn near post-apocalyptic. Or still run by Al Capone.

And I think more to his point, all pretty safe neighborhoods.

I mean, it's not in the "everyone's getting murdered" South Side.

As a former longtime Pilsen resident, that's just straight-up nonsense.

Seriously. Leonard Pierce got fired for one review of a comic that didn't exist yet, but she managed to stick around after demonstrating weekly that she hadn't actually watched the show she was covering.

Are we supposed to leave the Bronx?

Got an Autotune The News flashback during the singing.

Yeah, that's a fair point - nothing leading up to the switchblade indicates they'd go that far. Perhaps the only thing indicating that they're pretty messed up beyond the average school bully is the taunting and laughing about a kid that everyone presumes to be dead.

Given the era and age of the kids, it's not surprising that at least one of them had a dad who was a vet. Not sure how it would really affect his home life, though. My dad was a Vietnam vet and our home life was completely normal lower middle class, no disgruntled vet/PTSD stuff going on disrupting things.