I thought they treated QAnon exactly the way it deserves to be treated: look, this is a threat to the country, but also it’s so fucking stupid. PJ’s laugh at the “The first password was Matlock, what was the second one?” “Matlock.” exchange was life-giving.

I recently re-listened to “The Case of the Missing Hit” and it has a certain bittersweet feel to it now, because it’s like the last thing that seized the internet’s collective attention (at least the corner I frequent) before covid sucked all the air out of the room.

I always assumed the original Father Malone left the church because he didn’t feel worthy of it after, you know, all the murders. It’s not the mob, you’re allowed to leave. 

I thought the first season of The Vow was a lot of self-indulgent white people tosh and way too long—an AVC commenter pointed out that it was the same length (9 hours) as Shoah, and these narcissistic dummies (most of whom were happily grifting right along with Raniere until they got branded and suddenly it wasn’t so…

I’m apparently on some kind of weird exploration of Austin, Texas’ most famous unsolved crimes: I’m reading Skip Hollandsworth’s book about the 19th century Servant Girl Annihilator, The Midnight Assassin; and on audio I’m listening to Who Killed These Girls?, about the 1991 Yogurt Shop Murders. The former is pretty…

Did he drive the bus through one of our state’s many fine daiquiri shacks?

Oh boy, I hope it involves Dexter somehow coming to terms with the fact that “blood spatter analysis” is junk science. What does the Code of Harry have to say on helping send innocent people to prison and possibly death row?

random inclusion of songs by the jazzy late ’60s and early ’70s folk-rock band Pentangle

Oops sorry, turns out SpaceX was actually about developing weapons for the US government. https://tinyurl.com/y652dccm Also his Tesla factory in California is an OSHA nightmare.

My pop culture was limited to watching The Weather Channel all weekend while evacuated from Hurricane Delta. (We returned yesterday afternoon and everything’s fine. There’s debris everywhere, but the roof is intact, the shutters did their job, and the house generator held up. We were incredibly lucky.)

He’s an immigrant, he fought Nazis, and he’s actually a decent person

The description of this movie plot sounds like a joke about Woody Allen. Good lord.

It also explains why Helen refused to leave the island when any halfway-sane person wouldn’t be able to ignore the giant red flags flapping in her face. I appreciate there was a reason for that other than “well, the plot requires her to stay” lazy writing that is the bane of so much horror film.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone thinks the the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories stated with PEZ? They predate the Protestant Reformation even, with Jews poisoning wells being blamed for the Black Death, etc. They just use “PEZ dispenser”, because... PEZ. It works.

Pretty much all conspiracy theories are just anti-Semitism pizza with weird toppings. The podcast Knowledge Fight (which is primarily about debunking Alex Jones but also goes into other right wing grifting bullshit) calls conspiracy theorists “PEZ dispensers”. PEZ standing for Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but also…

I didn’t either, but once you know, you can go back and see the signs, which is fun. Helen’s freakout over her daughter talking to a strange man was more than just normal parent paranoia (her son was taken and murdered by a stranger); the whole “we’ve been through a lot” attitude; and not to come across like a…

This is just rehashed David Icke “the world is run by shape-shifting alien lizards” nonsense. Which is itself just rehashed anti-Semitism.

we get a little explanation from Dick about his personal beliefs—he’s a Mormon, so he doesn’t have much fondness for swearing, drinking hot or cold caffeinated beverages, or, if I’m understanding his monologue correctly, Black folks.

I know “Perez Hilton is still a thing?” is something you’d say when you wish to seem dismissive, but... really, is Perez Hilton still a thing? I associate him with that early-naughts/pre-Kardashian era in which Us Weekly breathlessly reported on Brad and Jennifer every day. I’m mildly flummoxed to see he’s apparently…

Yeah, I’ve never heard it either; granted I’ve also never referred to myself as a “cinephile” or suchlike. Horror is probably the genre with the most lopsided actual good movie : barely watchable garbage ratio, so if the term is meant to be “condescending”, it seems like kind of a weird self-own.