Ah, but that little look up and down she gives him, as if to say "How are you still a virgin???", it was great!

Avoiding spoilers from later, but suffice to say... Dougal has reasons to pick Jamie.

I think they were trying to show how she's still thinking of Jack Randall as Frank, her husband. She wants him to be a good guy, despite all the evidence. And—I didn't come up with this, but I saw someone else talking about it and liked the sentiment—there's also the fact that she's just come out of World War II and…

She didn't say it about Wasilla, Tina Fey was the one who said that. Palin said you could see Russia from some Alaskan islands, which is entirely true.

Come to Michigan! Beautiful beaches, freshwater lakes, and the busiest Michigan beach I've ever been to was nothing compared to the beaches out East I've visited.

Accepting the initial premise that you could actually get every single person on Earth to speak the same language all at the same time, my point is that it wouldn't stay that way. You talk about regional variations—well, where do you think different languages come from in the first place? First, you've got a little…

The reason is because a universal language isn't realistic. It wouldn't work in the real world. Language change happens, whether we like it or not, and dialects and then languages diverge from one another despite all efforts to the contrary. No matter how much high-speed communication there is, at the end of the day,…

And there's several dialects of Quenya and Sindarin to boot, though we don't have a lot of documentation of most of them. (And there's actually several other related Elvish languages, to boot!)

Oooh—caught a snippet of an episode we haven't seen yet in there. Only recognized it because I was just rereading the first book today, but (SPOILER, of course) there's a quick flash of the scene where Hugh Munro first shows up.

Nah, I figure aliens must've adopted Ithkuil by now, for when you really need to express just how you feel about the subject of rugged mountain ranges trailing off.

Unfortunately, Cosmos is guilty of sacrificing history in service to a good story. Galileo was not persecuted because the Church was scared of his ideas—they had all of zero problem with all the people before Galileo who hypothesized that the Earth revolved around the sun. Galileo was persecuted because he was an…

lolwut? You're trolling, right? Nobody who actually read the books would claim that "the first thing she does after traveling through time is have sex with a stranger". Claire is extremely resistant to the idea of marrying Jaime, and is initially very uncomfortable at the realization that she's going to have sex with…

Oh, religion has held "actual science" back for 1000 years, has it? Do tell. What areas of science were held back by religion? Medical science, astronomy, and mathematics, studied by Muslims? Calculus and the laws of motion, studied by the Christian mystic Isaac Newton? Perhaps you mean the development of the modern…

Some people are just so obsessed with a topic that regardless of how irrelevant it is to the subject at hand, they just can't help bringing it up.

This gets discussed a lot later, actually (for example, what if she saves a life with her modern medical knowledge?). The general conclusion she comes to is, without being able to go back to the future and find out, she has no idea what could happen.

Aww... but that's the first time, I think, that it really hints that Claire traveling through time is not the only supernatural thing in the world. (and—and I suppose this could be considered a vague SPOILER: it's the first time it's hinted that Claire's not the only time traveler, isn't it?)

Ned is great.

I watched the sub before watching any of the dub, and couldn't agree more—the ending was really emotional and put together really well, and the dub version was just destroyed. I know they wanted to avoid the D word, but having the other sailor scouts just captured kinda defeated the whole point that Sailor Moon had to…

Ancestors, yeah, but your parents directly?

You raise a good point re: animals. I suppose I don't actually know whether or not most varieties of Christian believe they have souls.