As far as little kids, adults should always be teaching them things, but it's not worksheets or phonics, it's things like how to approach a strange dog, how to tell a funny story, how to call a grandparent on the phone and talk to them, how to buy ice cream. Hopefully that's the approach of that book.

In a lot of non-Christian religions, the gods weren't supreme — they were just really powerful. So you might well have a bunch of gods who interacted with people and caused the seasons and all that, but under it all was an entity like the earth who was more basic and elemental.

I think the whole idea of the Valar being angels was a retcon (is that the word? I'm not so up on the terminology) he came up with to appease a sense of piety. There is simply no way to make them fit into a Christian framework — they really are gods in the books. They created the sun and moon and living creatures,…

Farmer Giles works as kid lit, and I wish Tolkien had written more like it. He pretty clearly got bogged down trying to create his world, and I think he would have made life easier for himself if he had written a bunch of works that were like real folklore — contradictory and overlapping with unreliable narrators…

I'm not a physicist or even a physician or a physical therapist or phys ed teacher, and nobody has ever asked if I watch the show, and yet I agree 100% that it is rancid garbage. How can that be?

He's been trying to go fast enough to pulll a water skier but hasn't managed it yet.

I think the translation and subtitles kind of kills it. A really great actor might sell it, but Emilia Clarke isn't Toshiro Mifune.

I think she wanted to break the Lannisters and figures she can bring back her family later. I agree Marge is trying to play the High Sparrow and I think they both know she's faking, it's just two cynical strivers making a power play hoping to betray he other when the coast is clear.

My feeling is that the execs realized they had a limited time to get to the final war and a huge number of loose ends to tie up, and they're in same situation as sailors on a boat who realize they're running short of time to make it harbor before the hurricane hits. So they start throwing stuff at random overboard to…

It felt about the right length to me. I can understand the point of view of people who might argue differently — For instance, I think there is too much time spent on Arya and the Waif fighting, but I don't think someone's off base if they love Arya's character and wishes she got even more time training and less…

I think where I differ from a lot of people is that I enjoyed it by itself. I liked the fart jokes and all that, so it didn't seem too long to me. The show (for understandable reasons) tends to rush a lot, and I was struck by it showing a bunch of people who didn't care at all about fate of the world stuff and just…

My nitpick with the Hodor scene is why didn't the bad guys surround the joint? That's Bad Guy 101. It pretty clearly wasn't a secret door he was holding, and there were clearly about a million of those guys milling around, so why not have a thousand of them milling around in the woods looking for someone from the…

Zodiac! How are the Lions going to do without Megatron?

It's been a while since I watched it, but isn't it generally true that the more the show gets involved in the civilian ship side of things, the worse it gets? I get the feeling that there are concentric circles in the show, and the stuff in the very center — the bridge of the Galactica — tends to be the best, with…

That Marc Maron piece reinforces for me why I don't buy the sort of revisionist-revisionist takes like this: