That was more due to uncle/niece marriages than cousin marriages, since the former is a lot worse.

I watched the last two episodes of season 1 of Veronica Mars with my dad. The finale works just as well now as it did when I first saw it on my own. It has a lot of solid resolution, on an emotional and plot level, but also a lot of peril and drama in its own right.

It's not just quality, but also quantity. This article has the least amount of comments since episode 9 January, despite being a pretty solid and eventful episode. Although I suppose I'm partially to blame, I've never been a prolific commenter.

Frederique's low wager was especially egregious considering it was a fairly easy geography-based category, and she's a foreign service officer. She should have made it a true daily double.

I disable adblock on a lot of sites I really like, as a token of support for the site and to see what I'm missing. Every few months, I decide to do that for the AV Club, only to re-enable it in a day or so when the situation becomes intolerable.

Eh, not really. The Kalashnikov rifles and their derivatives are still the gold standard, and that's an Eastern Bloc design, not a Western design.

I was a bit worried about the season too, but if VanDerWerff says the first 40% of it is rock-solid, then that greatly assuages my fears.

I thought the dialogue was a bit on-the-nose, but it was otherwise a solid and thematically resonant twist. It reminded me a lot of the Calvin and Hobbes arc where he breaks the binoculars, and the guilt is a worse punishment than anything his dad would dish out.

I liked how both Phil and Stan had to pretend to each other's faces that their boring jobs were going normally, while in fact both of them were internally despairing.

I think what Oleg was saying is, it was both. The propeller plans were fake, but if the Soviet Navy had done things competently, they would've just not worked, rather than sinking a submarine. Catastrophic failure like that often requires a combination of huge user error and huge design problems, not one of the other.…

I'm convinced that the emotional brutality on this show is far worse than the physical brutality on most grisly crime dramas. Clark's never laid a hand on Martha, but he's wronged her in ways a typical TV serial killer never would.

Oleg is so, so awesome. He gets mad props for using his connections to help his boss and his organization, not to undermine them for his own benefit.

Mulan is so great. She's the only princess to defeat foes the American Way, i.e. blowing them up with rockets and artillery.

What? That's not what happened at all. Ken was as blindsided as anyone, and got stuck at McCann-Erickson for a while.

Goddamn, this absolutely floored me. I missed it when it originally aired, then saw it tonight in a drunken and sleep-deprived state, but every twist and turn had me fucking enthralled. Mary's speech to her countrymen and their reaction, the one-night stand between Catherine and that random Scot, the mass-murder of…

At the time and now in retrospect, I'm absolutely supportive of the Western intervention in Libya. A little bit of terror and chaos is better than Gaddafi, and Gaddafi's tank rolling into Cyrenaica would have been horrific.

It's a great rendition, but it felt unearned to me. The season didn't deal with Harlan County or Raylan's past at all.

George III was born and raised in Britain and never visited Hanover. He spoke English fluently.

So I went and did some more research. This January, we inaugurated a governor who was born and raised in New York and resides in McLean (the richest part of the DC suburbs, on the Potomac River). He has no cultural or personal connection to Virginia or the South, and his main qualification was that he was head of the…

If you're a progressive-minded person, you can do a lot worse than a state with 2 Democratic Senators, a Democratic state Senate, and Democratic control of all 3 state elected offices.