a significant portion of my country thinks William Shakespeare is alive and Obama was president during Katrina. help.

the U. S. Office, especially the first three seasons, was much better than it had any right to be.

that's possibly the thing I find most appealing about Christianity. we've had so many conquerors and sociopaths; it takes a very rare person to forgive his murderers.

what have been your favorite TV surprises? I still get shivers every time I watch Locke screaming 'don't tell me what I can't do!' and the BBC's Inside Number 9 has had some of the greatest anthology twists in recent years.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes remains one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. Charlton Heston stumbling around in a white suit, fighting off face-peeling subterranean mutants who worship the atom bomb - and reportedly he only agreed to be in the film if they killed him off at the end. the fact that the movie ends…

the original film, especially the final twenty minutes, is still one of my favorite films. Rod Serling's script is so eerie and unsparing in its bleak view of humanity. but overall the new series is leagues ahead of it.

I maintain that The Prestige is his most perfect movie.

I forgot about that one. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than Return of the King, and I'm hoping that the new Planet of the Apes film retains some of its apocalyptic moodiness.

'Plus, Nolan is the kind of director whose clumsiest work still holds plenty of interest.'

really looking forward to War for the Planet of the Apes.

I'm pretty sure Shakespeare had inscribed on his tombstone, 'cursed be he that fucks my bones.'

I'm sympathetic to the argument that Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, and A Day in the Life were the three best songs they ever wrote. It's tragic that two of those songs were written for the album but taken off at the last minute. George Martin reportedly said it was one of his greatest regrets.

Fixing a Hole is one of my favorite Beatles songs, along with Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, Eleanor Rigby, Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite! and the last half of Abbey Road.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of Sgt. Peppers' has a crispness and clarity that was lacking in previous versions. It also includes Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, which it should have done from the beginning. If those two songs had been on the album fifty years ago, it might deserve its reputation as the best…

I'm halfway through the Pevear and Volokhonksy translation of War and Peace. I love it because it's not as stodgy and mothballed as the Garnett version, and because reading it one has the sense that these are real people, very young people, shambling through that time of life where every event is either a crisis or a…

here's the review I wrote of the first book for my blog. it's reminiscent of Neil Gaiman and Laini Taylor, although reading it one has a feeling that she's distilled this subgenre of fantasy to its essence and created something perfect. https://thetalkingllama.wor…

Vicki Schwab's Darker Shades of Magic trilogy - the rare fantasy series that's worth seeking out. She's only 29, which kills me. I'm midway through the second book, which, like the first, is compulsively readable.

the third one was objectively terrible, including a moment where a strangely old-looking Legolas runs up a bridge of falling stones like freaking Mario. but by that point my expectations for the series were so low that I was impressed it wasn't a total atrocity. there were even a couple of moments where I found myself…

I've seen worse movies in my life, but none that made me as actively angry as the second Hobbit movie. I fell asleep in the theater and awoke to find the dwarves trying to melt gold all over a CGI dragon. whereupon I said "forget this" and promptly returned to sleep.

Mr Collins from Pride and Prejudice
Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove
Andy Bernard from The Office