Writing the article now. Three of the Pirates movies are in the top five. And yet they all earned their money back many times over. Two of those three made a billion dollars. It's insane.

That's why we went to the moon. A) Because it's cool, B) to spite the Russians. Can we spite someone by going to Mars? Putin? The Chinese? That high school math teacher who said we'd never amount to anything? Then fuck it, we're going to Mars.

I love the idea that we could have bases on multiple moons of Jupiter. Because they do this weird orbital thing where three of the biggest moons' orbits sync up, so they all line up at one point, making travel between them easy. I also wonder how big Jupiter would be in the sky, viewed from one of those moons. I…

While I am a huge nerd, I write them a week in advance to make editorial's life easier. I took a guess that we wouldn't hit 5 million until after this ran. I was close, dammit!

Amen. That was his big issue when he was in the Senate, too, and he's been very quietly effective over the years.

I vividly remember having the "what would you do if the nukes come" conversation over the cafeteria table in 4th grade. A bunch of 8-year olds debating whether it would be better to be incinerated by the blast, or to live a bit longer and die from radiation sickness. And people wonder why Gen-Xers are cynical.

Woohoo! Job security!

He's not, though. There's a white cop who helps him all throughout the film. It's not a full on partnership, and the other guy's very clearly a supporting character. But the black/white buddy cop dynamic became more or less standard after Shaft, and it comes from that relationship.

It's well-established science that the quality of a blaxsploitation film and its soundtrack are inversely proportional. That being said, Shaft seems like it's full of clichés, only because it invented all the clichés. It really created the modern buddy cop movie.

Exactly.

Well, you need both things, and both men played their part well. I wasn't trying to ignore Malcolm or the Black Panthers, I was just talking about how King was so effective in his role because he didn't do idiotic crap like trying to levitate buildings; his message was disciplined, his presentation was disciplined.…

Care to elaborate? That's an interesting idea, but I don't see the connection.

I didn't think you were, I just felt the same way as you. It's easy to snark, and that's more or less what we do here. But once in a while you just have to admire someone's genuine love for what they're doing.

Uh, it can be two things?

Well, don't give them anything to shift the reporting to. If you don't want them to be distracted from your message, don't serve them up ready-made things to be distracted by.

That did help a lot. And Malcolm knew it.

I think part of the reason the Civil Rights Movement was so successful in the 1960s was that they were incredibly disciplined. Dr. King told people to march in their Sunday best, so it was clear that these were respectable people speaking out against an unconscionable situation, and not an angry mob. A bunch of…

Honestly? I think if Hoffman and Rubin showed up today and said, "we're gonna levitate the Pentagon, man!" people would say what they said then: "Look at those fucking idiots." It's not effective satire if there isn't a clear underlying point to make. What's the underlying point? "We don't understand how gravity…

I was all ready to snark when I wrote this, but it's such a sincere (and pretty well-made) homage to something that I loved as a kid, it was really hard to find any fault with what this guy's doing. There are a lot of pretty shoddy fan-made films out there, but if you're going to do it, this is the way to do it.

That's cheating.