Brussel sprouts. My mother, who is not a picky eater, hated them, so I never had them as a kid*. And they seemed to be so universally loathed that I didn't bother trying them until I was well into my 30s. I can't remember the circumstances that led me to try them—I think it was during the Bacon Craze of 2008-ish and I…

Holy shit, that's a real thing? It sounds AMAZING.

I always want to smack people like that. Picky eating is one thing, but acting like the thing(s) you personally don’t care for are objectively terrible and the billions of people who like them are just deluded and wrong is practically psychopathic behavior. Not to mention hating ALL fruits, or vegetables, or cheeses,…

I grew up in an area with a lot of Indian immigrants, with parents who worked in a profession (medical) shared by a lot of them, so I had tons of experience from an early age with all types of Indian food and found all of it delicious. So even at 10 years old, watching that scene angered and annoyed me. I knew Indian…

There's a scene in an Amy Tan book where one of the Chinese characters eats cheese for the first time at an American army dance during WWII and thinks it's something that has rotted. That blew my mind, because I've always loved cheese, and even as a youngun would happily devour funky cheese like feta or gorgonzola. (I…

How can you live off of potato chips and white bread and NOT have health issues? Even if you avoided stuff like scurvy by taking boatloads of vitamins*, wouldn't you still be at risk for diabetes and other disorders??

Moira is essentially sold off to a brothel because she keeps running away and causing trouble, but in the beginning of the book she's in the same handmaid re-education school as the narrator. In the preview Wiley is wearing the red cloak/white hood combo that only Handmaids wear, so she's definitely one, or in…

Well, the infertility didn't create the Republic of Gilead so much as provide one justification for it, "God is punishing us for our wickedness", and in a society where women were property anyway, the handmaid system was a logical end point. Certainly I'd like to think infertility alone wouldn't lead to that scenario…

There's a scene in the book where Offred sees the bodies of nuns who refused to become handmaids hanging from a wall as a warning to other former Catholics, so the book anyway is definitely not anti-Catholic. It's made very clear that the power structure of Gilead is evangelical Protestants, basically modern day…

When we do burgers on the grill at home I like mine with BBQ sauce, cheese, and a pineapple slice. My family thinks I am weird and my insistence on referring to this as a "Big Kahuna Burger" does not help.

Oh, fuck off, you smug shithead.

I tried it when one opened in my hometown in California around 2000. I had some kind of hamburger with a pineapple slice or something and was less than impressed. As was my brother's girlfriend, who was an actual factual Filipino, although raised in the US, so nostalgia wasn't a factor. There was quite a large…

Smith isn't a true believer in the Reich's ideas about Aryan purity. He's just willing to swallow and regurgitate it on demand in order to keep his family safe. If the Reich is going to become a danger to his family, well then I guess we'll see what he does about that. (I'm not defending him, I just don't think he…

South Louisiana, Deepwater Horizon, same. This director is beginning to seem rather ghoulish.

Growing up, my father and stepmonster got almost everything about Christmas wrong, because he was lazy and she hated me and my brothers. The food was terrible, they never gave us anything but gift certificates, and they had a fake tree. But that fake tree was covered in vintage bubble lights from the 1960s. It was the…

"Christmas cake" is also a not-at-all insulting term used by the Japanese for unmarried women that are approaching "unfuckable old hag" status. So like, mid-twenties.

Didn't Durst actually contact Andrew Jarecki after he saw All Good Things? How was he "tricked" into something that was his idea in the first place??

It keeps showing me the same notifications from last night and nothing from today.

Everyone do what the rich white man with nothing to lose and who is now working for the President-Elect says, I'm sure he has our best interests at heart.

For me he'll always be Big Mike from Reno 911! who delivered the never-not-funny line "I got $2, we can buy a poodle!".