Oh, and a related aspect-ratio rant: Are there really that many people who can't tell that an image has been squashed or stretched? Restaurant TVs are the worst culprits for having the aspect settings wrong, but I've gone to too many relatives' houses (and friends' relatives houses) where they're watching what looks…

In the last couple of months, I've run into a handful of movies that appear to be a 4:3 source that's been squashed to fill a 16:9 frame (this is true even in the browser, so it's not just a screwy TV settings issue). That's even more frustrating than cropping — though I assume it's merely a product of a screw-up in…

Well, an alternative possibility: cassowaries are territorial. Rather than interpreting the pacing in front of the fence as boredom or seeking escape, it could just as well be the male instinctively patrolling the limit of his territory, ensuring that there have been no trespassers. Rather than indicating discomfort…

I know that some reviewers have specifically said they grade a show according to its own standard, but I think the reality is much more like they grade a show against the same class of show. And I expect there is — for regularly covered shows, at least — generally a skew in favor of grading a show according to the…

Where is the love for Ghost Story? It seems weirdly forgotten.

Good, I'm not the only one having this issue. I had resigned myself to thinking it was some kind of incompatibility with one of my Firefox plug-ins — well, and maybe it is, if we're both using the same one. But yeah, it seems to occur on pages where there are embedded videos, but it's the ad scripts that are actually…

I used that clip as my Windows start-up sound for a year or two back in the late 90s.

It would be exaggerating to say it was scary, but I find the Homer's-head-turned-into-a-donut-and-he-keeps-trying-to-eat-bits-of-himself deeply unsettling — especially since, Homer being Homer, he will inevitably end up eating all of his own head off, which is a pretty horrifying scenario.

It seems to me you might be conflating "intellect" with "rationality." Though I must admit I'm struggling to articulate a precise difference, only to say that intelligence and "pure reason" as one mode of thought are not synonyms.

Reproducing Crichton's consciousness in the clones seems like a pretty trifling task after we've just seen entire minds swapped between completely different species.

I understand that since evolution is almost always a response to external forces (though aren't there a few changes that can happen simply due to the very structure of the genes — processes which are basically inevitable regardless of external pressures? I seem to remember reading something about such things, but I…

Not having any inside knowledge, I can only offer my opinion, but I'm pretty confident that all the sketches that appear on the show are meant to represent pretty hacky, broad stuff. And, if anything, they seem to be even more old-fashioned than anything you'd expect to see on an actual 90s talk show — especially the…

I just posted this same basic thing over on the Dissolve, but I think the design on the articles (especially the typography) is quite nice, but the design on the comments section is awful. It seems to be a design constructed by someone who only thinks about comments as nothing longer than tweets. It would be fine for…

Yeah, except it looks like we might be down to just one book review a week…

A later episode pretty well dismisses your latter criticism, in this exchange (where Bobby is responding to Peggy feeling insecure about her big feet):

That may partly explain my bias against KC — I'm not really a ribs person. I much prefer a pulled pork sandwich. Or pulled pork on a baked potato. Or all the other applications it has. Ribs are unitaskers, so to speak.

So, shall we start the BBQ wars?

To follow up on @avclub-87caf7c42aedbada42572e2374eed08d:disqus , in fact in that skit he says he's a college kid from Vermont — which is not where McKinney is from, making even that character a character.

Except a bunch of the gimmick accounts never actually have a dialogue with anybody. They're non-conversational and can easily just turn into thread clutter. I think we're starting to reach a kind of toxic mass of "Reposted" variations at this point, as just one example.

Speaking of a slightly different kind of toilet humor, I regularly hear in my head Hank's tentative "Is esta juan ocupado?" from the smoking episode whenever I have to wait for a bathroom to open up.