I've always found the idea of "atheist spaces" odd. I'm an atheist because I do not believe in a created universe and therefore do not believe in a creator. That's pretty much it. I don't need to hang around with people and reinforce my beliefs. Now, that said, I also haven't run into any institutional trouble…

It's strange to compare how I've seen this work on the internet to how I've seen it work in real life.

I saw Gord Downie's solo band at a Bluesfest, of all things, a few years back. They lost some of the pure blues people (don't think they cared for the poetry), but the remaining crowd rallied and we got a pretty damned great show. I still really love "Chancellor" from his solo stuff. He's a titan in this country's…

She was absolutely huge here when I was a kid. Her public image has greatly quieted down since then, but she'd definitely get attention for any new music here.

SotW was always one of those bands that was more about a solid and gradually-growing fanbase than about hits. I had three of their albums and listened to them near-constantly through high school. Still trying to get one of my bands to learn "Far Too Canadian" so I can sing it.

I'm in Canada and I've always liked Pizza Hut pretty well. It's much simpler here than the full-on gimmickry of the last time that I ate it in the US. It's basically like other pizza here, but thicker and fattier and with occasional stuffed crust.

I always got the impression that 54-40 had the larger fanbase in the west and the Hip owned Ontario completely. I haven't lived in the west, so I was never sure if that was right or not.

SW Ontario here, and I can't see the Hip ever not selling out any venue they played around here. Throw on any rock station and you'll hear at least one song per hour.

So continue the scenario. Earth's leadership concurs on the idea that withholding personhood from the aliens is a bad move and start commissioning legislation to grant it. What grounds do they use? What is their legal justification for extending personhood to the visitors?

I haven't been to one of his shows, but I've been told that they're generally great, really well-made and performed. He just never seems to actually do them anymore because of health and other reasons.

Understood. No further response necessary on this.

Let me trying posing the first question a bit differently. Suppose that a spacefaring extraterrestrial species makes mutually-intelligible contact with humanity and representatives show up to Earth in person. What laws cover them? Do they not pass the personhood test because they're a different species? If they do…

Seriously, the presence of Saved By The Bell: The College Years or whatever is the most damning evidence. They really couldn't have put literally anything else in that spot?

Yeah. There's a massive history there and more of it gets endangered every day just through the natural corruption of physical media. The archivists have a lot of work ahead of them.

My brother left my mother two voicemail messages in the period leading up to his sudden death. One was rambling and depressed. The other was a drunken freestyle rap about going to the beach. We played that last one at his funeral.

It's even more pressing to get black shows into some sort of modern record. The article was talking about collecting episodes on VHS. Those tapers are not going to last much longer. At least you can get I Love Lucy on DVD. Streaming is the big thing right now, so it seems sensible to make the leap straight to…

Aw, don't break my mom's boyfriend's heart! Man, does Tyler Perry ever have a devoted fanbase.

1. Where do you draw the line between animals and people? Humans fall into the larger set of "animals", so there's obviously a dividing line between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom. Is it just a hard and fast species rule ("people" = "Homo sapiens", basically), or is it based on certain qualities?

Playing live is a hell of a lot of fun for most musicians. It's not really surprising that he'd try to take what opportunities he could.

Thanks. I'm not usually fond of fan theories, as they're too proscriptive; they tend to be expressed like the theorist is trying to establish an alternative canon from which any deviation is wrong, which comes off as immensely hypocritical (though I could just be reading the tone wrong, as fan communities are…