Loved most: Kyle MacLachlan, of course.
Hated most: Kyle MacLachlan's makeup. Also of course.

And without the parody!

I'm not all that concerned with defending a character that was developed to sell a line of toys, but… Who buys the rights to a pretty bonkers 80s cartoon only to suck out all the unusual, fun elements and turn it into a generically angsty, platitudinous thing about "being yourself" that could have literally any name…

"Fewer."

Not that I know of? I thought I'd double-check before replying, though, and other Russian speakers seem pretty confused by this, too. It's possible if you have a speaker uncomfortable with English who's overcompensating (e.g. paranoid about saying things like Vashington or Vestern, so he reverses all Vs to Ws) but…

Heh. I've never understood that particular joke: Russians pronounce Vs just fine. It's usually the Ws they pronounce as Vs, but Star Trek keeps doing it backwards. Heck, there are plenty of Russian words that start with ves-: ves', vesna, veselo, vesely, vesti, vestnik, etc. The English "vessel" is hardly a challenge.

I'm totally imagining this as the final scene of Boogie Nights.

I heartily approve. I've been trying to sell people for years on "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" as top-tier REM and usually get side-eye. Thank you, Slate, for making me feel a little less lonely.

The only post-JLP song of hers I like is "Hands Clean". I like JLP just fine, but the only song I keep on heavy rotation is "All I Really Want."

Tom Hardy can play anything he damned well wants.

On the other hand, she'd have made a better Divine-as-angel than Pearl, because she'd fully believe that poo is disgusting and commit to that role.

This. I don't understand her at all: it's like she gets into drag to muffle her personality.

For all of Margaery's great chat with Cersei, I think I liked her exchange with Tommen best:

I read that as Joe Dante rules in the sense of, say, parameters for a fight. "No shots below the belt?" "Anything goes, man. Joe Dante rules." "Damn!"

His quiet panic at being assumed gay is one of my favorite things about Dog Day Afternoon.

It made me think more about the way that gay guys listen to music. I think for us, it’s not about how, if we focused on the things that made us sad, we might never be sad. Our suicide statistics are high enough already. For gay guys, reminding yourself why you’re on this planet and why you need to keep putting one…

Favorite moment in the series so far - nay, favorite moment on television so far this year - was D'Onofrio's little monologue about being unable to meditate. All of those character tics and quirks came together perfectly in that moment, and I had to rewind and watch it a couple of times before moving on.

Wonder Woman's Bondage Girl Slap Party.

I loved the hell out of the first third of the movie, because I thought Monica's emotional rollercoaster in dealing with a not-quite-real child was riveting stuff… so as soon as she's out of the picture, my interest dropped to zero. The rest of the film was a godawful chore.

I'm kinda fascinated with this topic because I just finished Gilbert Seldes' The Stammering Century, about the 19th century cults and movements that grew out of the Great Awakening - and locking your kid up to experiment on language would fall pretty low on the scale of crazy, given some of those movements. But the…