A lot of it is either oriented around either taboo or coercion, which are their own fetishes.

It's so fucking creepy. As you point out, it's almost exclusively conveyed through (awkward, terrible) dialog, so if you turn the sound off it can still be perfectly good porn, but it's still deeply weird when I feel like half of the standard-issue b/g porn I see is incest-themed.

I once worked with an endocrinologist who said that if it's the size of a grain of rice it's a medical problem, anything larger is just a disappointment.

Its a great movie. Ditto Rock Hudson's Home Movies, which is currently available as a bonus feature in the criterion edition of All That Heaven Allows - thus making that particular criterion edition the best one by a country mile.

That reminds me of the time that a friend's brother was giving me a ride to college, and we got stopped by the highway patrol. He got REALLY angry, hit I did the whole "my dad's a cop" thing, and they gave us a warning for the broken brake light or whatever. Only later did I find out he was so pissed because the car…

A college of mine had to take a commercial flight with a cooler full of human bone marrow and vertebrae. The marrow is liquid, so they stopped her, but they were surprisingly nonplussed by the vertebrae.

Sometimes this very good show gives little flashes of the slightly different, possibly better show hiding a layer or two down. The cocaine-filled robot is one of them. And then there's this episode - Ruth talks her way into attending a party with a man who thinks she's a prostitute, she immediately gets drunk,…

Ebert had a larger body of writing in the 80s about sexual degradation of female characters, and he also had a larger body of writing about how nudity breaks down the barrier between the actor and the character. The upshot (from what I recall) was that placing a naked woman in a compromising situation is a uniquely…

Jesus… I'm sure they posted signs and everything, but it's still a bus exploding in London.

Can I just take a minute to say:

The first time my wife's Eastern European grandmother met my dad, she referred to him as a "very good Irishman." He said, "Christ, I wasn't even drunk."

You misspelled "Germanyman."

Ditto "imbecile," "idiot," and "dumb."

There's a dark beer in Mexico called "Indio," which is apparently a moderately-to-very offensive term in Mexican Spanish for an indigenous person. We were on vacation and my sister in law was stunned to see a product with that name.

Please, that was a 16-bit game with mouse support and voice acting. This game would bill itself as a "graphic adventure" to highlight that there were images above the text parser.

As an aside, I was at an airport recently where they had a 70s game show on one of the TVs in the terminal, except the TV was broken, so it looked like a game show that had been posterized and stop-printed. At first I thought it was a modern art piece.

There's a rich comic tradition of characters calling each other gay, and a lot of it has to do with context.

Freakazoid did the perfect Johnny Quest parody (Johnny Danger!). I only knew about Johnny Quest because of my Gen-X brothers, but I could appreciate the 60s guitar score, the limited animation, and the fact that the bulky pilot solved every problem by throwing a barrel at it.

Around age 4 or 5 I told my mom that if someone pointed a gun at me I would do the sensible thing and stick my finger in the barrel. But really, in that situation would it actually make things worse?

No shit? They just run together in my brain… and on my TV.