If you're using iTunes, you can't directly download the older episodes, but there are some really great ones. I especially recommend the one on "Species" (which also does a great job on focusing on just how crazy some of the writing technique is — one of the reasons I hope to see original co-host Jessica back on is…

I love The Book Was Better, and was delighted that it went weekly. And though the guest hosts have been doing admirable jobs, we want Jessica back! Even if just for an episode or two to prove she still exists and hasn't completely evaporated into babyland.

I disagree with these claims about heartlessness, or the cipher-ness of BBT's character. I don't see him as blank or empty at all. He's deeply inexpressive, but he's not unfeeling. You have to get at his feelings through the structure and the imagery — but there is feeling running through it all.

As near as I can tell from various online sources, there is no transatlantic (or transpacific) difference in pronunciation for "speciality." What difference are you hearing?

So, who else caught Pop Culture Happy Hour's Glen Weldon on Slate's Culture Gabfest this week? It was a very uneasy bit of cross-pollination (and, to my mind at least, showcased what makes PCHH vastly superior to CG). Weldon came across a bit too fawning at the beginning of his segment, but the dig at Metcalf (doing…

I believe you'll find it's "Trumpy" and not "Taumpy."

I didn't hear J Elvis Weinstein as Tom until seeing those first season episodes on YouTube just a few years ago, really (despite being a major MST3k fan since Joel episodes were airing on Comedy Central), and as such it was just too different for me to stomach. And TV's Franks seemed a much more interesting Forrester…

Yeah, I was trying to parse that sentence, too. I assumed that maybe Mike meant the widespread use of anti-depressants and prescription mood-altering drugs (that is, medicalized mood-alteration), but even then, the 90s boom in Ritalin and Prozac has solid antecedents in valium and such from decades earlier.

And for something different from the book, you can read Wade Davis's more scholarly version, "Passage of Darkness," that the he then turned into the more mass-market-oriented "Serpent and the Rainbow." If you're actually interested in ethnopharmacology, "Passage of Darkness" is quite interesting, though Davis has been…

I'll add an additional remark that maybe shows so further sympathy with present-day teens. I myself was on the receiving end of another sort of pop-culture syndrome that I suspect remains quite strong today. I grew up with Star Wars. It came out right before I was born and Return of the Jedi was in theaters when I was…

Did I watch a lot of movies of the 30s and adjacent decades? Depends on what you mean by "a lot," but I certainly watched most of the classic Universal Horror movies; I saw a good number of Marx Brothers movies; the Three Stooges shorts were playing on Saturday morning TV. And, biggest of the all, classic Looney Tunes…

So, as part of a paper assignment for Freshman Composition, I've shown MST3k (namely "A Date with Your Family" and "The Home Economics Story") shorts to four different classes of 18-to-20-year-olds, and for the most part they have not really enjoyed them. Very little actual laughter, and when I've asked afterward for…

I started watching the Cinematic Titanic episodes that are up on Hulu a while back, and initially I had the "can't capture lightening in a bottle" response — especially for about the first five minutes of the first film. The riffing seemed weirdly artificial in a way that it hadn't in MST3k. But once the cast was in…

"Mmmm, little wingéd potatoes…"

"What is is about the gates of Hell that compels people to wander into them?"\

It seems rather interesting how the slavery aspect of zombies that is so intrinsic to the original Haitian zombie folklore has been largely jettisoned in modern zombie tales. Partly, of course, that's because Romero's "living dead" were not conceived as "zombies" per se, and are not fundamentally connected to original…

A giallo afficianado I know told me the story that the studios (especially the ones Argento used) in Rome are located under a flight path of a busy airport, which makes pretty much any live sound recording impossible. Which also facilitated getting such international casts, since they knew every single version was…

Right, and Russia didn't become Communist until the elites decided they wanted to be Communist…

Is this the nerd thread where we point out that it wasn't a "hard drive," but rather a CD-ROM tray that the bird's nest was in?

My understanding is that you can own the physical painting, but the artist still has the copyright to it — you couldn't start making prints of it and selling them. The incidental exposure part seems more reasonable, but as far as IP goes, the painting is your physical possession, but it's the artist's IP (unless…