My no-prize for the Jedi thing is: 1. The average person never saw the Jedi. There weren’t that many of them (compared to the number of people in the galaxy) and they mostly just interacted with elites. If you were an ordinary person who happened to see a Jedi once, it was probably just some person in weird robes…

Nicely done. I’d have still kept all the new characters from the sequel trilogy (I think Rey, Finn, Poe and Kylo are all good when they have good stuff to do), but I love your setup. Also, watching the rise of neo-fascism around the world, or say the rise of Putin in Russia [matching up with the post-Empire time scale]…

Never heard this song before, but listening to it now: it’s not just the piano, but also the sung verses (especially the first one) that sounds a lot like “No Surprises.” But if we go down that route, then Radiohead might have to go back and pay the Beatles for borrowing the opening of “Karma Police” from “Sexy Sadie”

I’m very familiar with the actual Seinfeld theme, yet every time i try to hum it or play it in my head, I end up doing the Sanford & Son theme instead. Is my internal radio just broken?

I got into a big Twitter debate with somebody last night who claimed that the 1619 Project was full of errors, and when I asked them to name specifics (refreshingly the person who was on the other end was actually willing to discuss in good faith), the British abolitionist thing was one of their big areas of…

Hmm, a copy of the Declaration of Independence belonging to Charles Carroll just sold at auction for $4 million. I can only assume the buyer is looking to make back many times that amount in secret treasure (and/or the buyer is actually Nic Cage).

Clicked on the article for your picture, surprised and disappointed at the picture chosen actually for the article, scrolled down to see if anyone else had the same reactions I did: all-in-all, I was not disappointed.

Yeah, the (*SPOILER FOR SEASON 1 AGENTS OF SHIELD*) Ward is Hydra reveal is one of my favorite plot twists of all time. Not only was it utterly surprising (I don’t remember anyone speculating it ahead of time), but it was one of those twists that not only made him a much more interesting character, but it made the…

Don’t have a strong substantive opinion here (haven’t seen FatWS or Luca yet), but I really like your distinction here. It clears up something that I’ve been guilty of doing. I’ve written articles in the past, for example, of how both Bird Box and Rise of Skywalker could be seen allegorically as then-President Trump’s…

Yeah, I’ve always remembered the Becky and Darlene were with the opposite guys twist, as that along with Dan dying were incredibly frustrated. I also remember coming up with my own version of the finale after having watched the real thing: go back to the episode where Dan and Roseanne get high off their old marijuana…

Funny, One Tree Hill had a season finale that would have worked really well as a series finale, but then came back the following year with a time jump to adulthood and (imo) was not nearly as good as it had been.

In this same franchise, one of the things I’ve most liked character-wise about the MCU was how Steve and Natasha were always just friends. Yes, they did the fake-out kiss in Winter Soldier, but they didn’t go down the path of “wait, now they actually have feelings for each other.” Instead, they develop a mutual admirat…

While it does sound like Whedon was universally an a-hole, that doesn’t mean that everyone was impacted equally. From what we’ve heard, he was a major jerk to Gal Gadot as well, but coming off Wonder Woman, she had enough clout to have him put in check. Fisher, meanwhile, was the least famous actor playing the least…

I don’t love everything of Nolan’s, but the Dark Knight and the Prestige are two of my favorite movies of all time, and I think the Prestige is criminally under-acknowledged. Like TDK, it works on lots of levels without hitting you over the head with “this is deep.”

Probably unrelated, but I vaguely remember an arc of (Mighty?) Avengers where Hank Pym was named “Scientist Supreme” by Eternity. IIRC, it was during a time when Marvel (or at least the writer of that book, Dan Slott maybe?) was doing a big Hank Pym push. It even had an in-universe explanation for why Pym would get…

“Something about the game translates to film narrative better than most other sports” I wonder if it’s the combination of baseball being a stop and start kind of game (unlike, say, basketball) and fairly individualistic (unlike football). It’s easy to build up drama (the batter eyeing the pitcher, determined to hit…

Yeah, I think Harriot is right that Perot is the main reason for the white male Republican dip in ‘92. I’m just old enough to remember that his campaign was really popular, and certainly siphoned off a lot of Bush voters.
Secondarily, I think Clinton appealed to a lot of white male Republicans. He was a “centrist”…

As best I can tell, the disappointment behind The Dark Knight Rises has soured people on the Nolan Batman trilogy as a whole, but not so much on the Dark Knight itself; most people (like me) now see it as a great movie in the middle of an uneven franchise, and the people who thought that the Dark Knight was full of…

I thought killing Soleimani was another huge blunder by President Trump (like the Syrian withdrawal that abandoned the Kurds), but it seems like he might have stumbled into a short-term victory. If this is really the end of the tit-for-tat, Trump essentially took out one of the major players in Iran and suffered…

Was contemplating the same joke; you beat me to it ;-)