In all fairness, the concept of charging extra to let someone use touchtone dialing might be the purest example of gouging out there. It's not the worst or most damaging, but it's an astounding achievement in avarice.

Maybe start with one song and see if that compels you to check out the rest. I'd recommend "Stay" pretty much just because it's really goddamned funky.

I haven't read it since childhood, but I recall that a biblical verse about weakness and wisdom figures heavily into the climax and how it plays out. I think it's a case where it's not preaching, but the moral universe of the book definitely springs from a Christian foundation.

I adored A Wrinkle In Time as a kid too (I'd really like to reread it), and I love science fiction. I think it has a lot of crossover appeal. The bits about the tesseracts are well-explained enough that it's easy to understand what they do, while the real meat of the story is in the surprisingly nuanced take on some…

There's a Random Roles with John DiMaggio from a few years ago kicking around here, as I recall. He talks shop about some of what goes into recording for characters that do a lot of yelling (I think he gets into it when talking about Jackie Chan Adventures, of all things). Basically, if I remember correctly, he's…

Mankind ill needs a saviour such as you!

Billy West had his famous cranky, 100% rant about the issue. I doubt that very many children have ever cared that a celebrity was doing a voice in a cartoon. What they care about is whether or not the cartoon is entertaining, and the voice is a huge part of that. Imagine if Warner Brothers had sent Mel Blanc…

That's a perfect example. Federation space is somehow more familiar to some of us these days than San Francisco in 1986.

There's definitely an aesthetic judgement implicit in calling something dated. People aren't so likely to use the word to describe the parts they liked.

Do you think there's a line after which a movie stops looking "dated" and starts looking like "the past"? I'm thinking of how you'd probably never hear someone say that The Big Sleep, for example, comes off as dated. Maybe it's a question of whether or not you can personally remember the time period. I'm just old…

That is the best possible typo you could have made for that sentence.

Please let there be a universe where Mick Foley and Beulah McGillicutty have joined forces as a successful children's literature duo. Tommy could proudly hawk and DDT people into their books at House of Hardcore shows for extra promotion. It'd be the happiest ending ever.

It's, like, the second thing I was ever told about being in a band. Either you go into the band already in a long-term relationship/marriage or you forswear dating the other members until such time as the band breaks up (which will be sooner than you think if you break that rule).

From the hit album Isoceles Lock?

Every picture I have seen of that hoodie makes it look different. I genuinely can't tell what the hell it looks like in real life. Is the hood covered in paneled pleather or something?

I always have to remind myself that she lives, like, less than an hour away (if she's still in Stratford). She wanted to get some kind of ceili circle going in London a while ago, but she might have been turned off due to people treating it like a show. I think she just wanted to do what basically every person who…

I'm waiting for tasteful dinner parties everywhere to discover Luka Bloom for their playlists. I could listen to him sing "Sunny Sailor Boy" all day.

I think a big part of it is simply that Star Trek looms large in science-fiction fandom and so does conservativism. There's bound to be plenty of overlap.

I bite my tongue when I visit my friends and watch stuff on their awesome TV, as it's their apartment and it seems rude to complain about how the "game mode" or whatever thing they sometimes use looks fucking horrible to my eyes. I still don't get using it intentionally.

Maybe it'd be best to say "bombing runs" or something like that, but I suspect that "drone" still has cachet as an attention-grabbing word and that's why it gets used.