My bad, but a third of the projected run of a successful show is still plenty of time for Connor to start showing some leadership.

He had three seasons to make progress.

The best analog for Carnivale is probably the collected works of Tim Powers, especially Last Call. No it isn't about a carnival, but the creators of the show openly drew on Powers' work.

Bill.

Spoilers Ahoy! See it before you read on:

I liked Dale and might stop watching now that he and Shane are dead. "Nice guys" like Dale are the antithesis of the idea that in tough times the heartless, mercenary bastards come out best. That works when you are on your own, but having friends to watch your back in the zombie apocalypse are going to be worth a lot…

This would go great with my Terra-Nova-themed bathroom!

I dunno, read all of the news that I can about it on the internet? Enter into the universal consciousness? Join the resistance and betray it? Die in a ray fired by a tripod-mech? It all depends on the exact nature of the contact.

Or, possibly, our planetary Galapagos just hasn't met Captain Cook or any Polynesian canoes yet.

Eh. In a hundred years I bet we could launch a probe that wanders to a star, replicates itself, and sends probes out to nearby stars. All we would be sending is a message in a bottle, but it would be pretty cool to find such a thing in our own system.

Whedon figured out that the Hulk is ridiculous/funny. If the other movies had had a sense of humor and starred actors who could do funny they would have been much better.

If it is 2 minutes of hulk quips, I am in.

Because it may not be the overall "best" version of the film. Fans will want to see the extra footage, but if the pace had been slowed there might have been fewer fans to be attracted by said footage.

I am pretty sure that 5th graders are so profoundly uninterested in such things that their teachers must be quite proactive in their application of prescriptive linguistics.

Descriptive linguists do not believe in bad habits. They see their function as the analysis and understanding of the speech patterns that people employ. They leave whether you should or should not use these patterns to 5th-grade teachers.

What about Hmmm? As in "Hmmm. I am not sure that you are hearing these fellows' "Ums" in the same voice in which they intend it. Perhaps that is a limitation of textual communication."

I tend to be of the "we don't know enough about it yet" camp regarding uploading. I consider Turing tests to be useless for actually determining self-consciousness because something not conscious could simulate it very well, while something that did not seem conscious could be conscious but with thought patterns that…

Yep. Because our current technological development tends towards more advanced and powerful computation they assume that that must continue for a long time, that the power needed to do so will not be reduced by advances, and that they will have the motivation and social conditions necessary to allow and encourage such…

Hmm. What if they colonize their outer planets, and then the inhabitants sue to block construction? Litigiousness is surely a universal constant.

Okay, so I am cancelling my DNR and stating that I would like public radio played to my vegetative self in such an instance. Except when Keillor's on, of course.