YES! I know Russell Brand is apparently a pretty polarizing performer, but I love him. His comedy is so smart, and he seems like such a genuinely sweet and interesting person.

My younger brother was a hardcore runner with no sense of self-preservation. He once took off while our mother was talking to the teller at the bank, and by the time I managed to catch up to him and tackle him, he was a few feet from the major highway outside (with our mom hot on our heels, of course). Another time he…

I spent a year and a half living in NYC (Greenwich Village, East Village, and Chelsea), and I thought it was a great city to be a woman/feminist in. I walked everywhere - some days I would take the subway up to Central Park and then meander back downtown over the course of 6-8 hours, and I always felt safe (not that…

I'm not sure if American Swing still streams on Netflix, but if it does, then it fulfills all criteria! It's a documentary about the 1970's sex club Plato's Retreat, which relies heavily on both footage from the day and interviews with employees/regulars. It is an awesome and hilarious documentary that features…

79 seconds. Ouch.

Ha - that was the daddy issues event I had in mind. It goes SO FAR DOWN from there. SO HARD. That girl stays *devotedly* in love with him for years, and in each book that follows he goes in to greater detail describing how sexy she is. In spite of the fact that he is close buddies with her dad and has known her since…

I like the musical of Wicked better too! And I actually really like Gregory Maguire's other books (particularly Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister). But the end of the novel Wicked upset me a lot. I was pretty young when I read it, so maybe I could hold up better now. But yeah, that is a rough book. The musical is much…

I would agree with those who have said The Princess Bride (I did like it, but not as much). Sticking with the "movies from childhood" theme, I think Mary Poppins and The Wizard of Oz beat out their book counterparts. For the less kid-friendly, I'd give it to On the Waterfront, The Thin Man, and Barry Lyndon.

How many of The Dresden Files have you read? Because I would agree that description is totally accurate up through a certain number of books, and then things start to go weirdly off the rails sexually. And while it's things you can skate by with an eye roll for a while - a smoking hot teen with daddy issues being…

He was *so* well behaved when it started (which is not always his M.O.). He seemed genuinely interested in discussing some of the more serious ideas behind his current show, world tour, etc. Remember how genuinely concerned/confused he looked when Mika started rambling about all the mental illness she brought to the…

In addition to the kidnapping and assault he's been convicted of, he assaulted, demanded a kiss from, and then made threatening phone calls to an L.A. Times reporter who was doing a profile of him.

I just posted this clip in another thread; I didn't see you had put it up. That show was insane, and yet so marathon-able.

There was a marathon when that show was still on and my best friend and I watched it all in one day. It was insane. We still talk about her attempts to call the Vanity Fair reporter and yell at her.

Aurora's mom has a name (Queen Leah) and at least one line ("Then, you're not offended, your excellency?"). She is certainly a much smaller part than King Stefan, but she's not a total nonentity.

I feel like it's an ongoing thing in Brat Pack movies that people don't use/respond to intoxicants in normal ways. Like John Hughes had no idea how marijuana or liquor actually affected people, but kind of had a vague notion of the vibe around their use.

I probably just came around too late, but I never got the Brat Pack thing. But I feel like I have to vote for them, since any time I see pictures of Brooke Shields from the 80's I can only think about her horrible treatment by her stage mom, and that court case where she tried to prevent a photographer from displaying…

Yeah, I know plenty of people who attended the University of South Carolina (home of the Gamecocks), who think nothing of wearing shirts and hats with "COCKS" written on them during football season. So, you know, with at least one male sports team penises are brought up much less subliminally than the author of this…

I get where the argument for problematic is coming from. But I'm not so sure that this is so much sexist and not sexual. I feel like the final paragraph is treading a pretty fine line in claiming that male athletes are not sexualized in the same possessive way female athletes are. Like in the most recent Olympics: I…

I was raised by a defense attorney, I'm friends with a lot of public defenders, and my husband has spent time working in the public defender's office. So I'm not impartial. But I will say that the attitude people have towards defense attorneys seems kind of skewed. Our justice system is designed with certain roles for…

I think you're really onto something there with the judginess theory. People see a dog or child for five minutes, and if the behavior they see doesn't perfectly match their exacting standards, the parent/owner is just blazingly incompetent. I wonder if feeling so entitled to those snap judgements is somehow linked to…