"How many of you just checked this book out of the library instead of buying it? Really? No one? So you're saying there was a sudden run on copies of Mountains Beyond Mountains for no good reason?"

Proponents of longevity research talk about extending healthy lifespans. The point is to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible, then go quickly after that.

While dieting may be "safe" for pregnant women, they're not actually recommending it, according to an editorial that accompanied the research. Many of the studies they examined were "of small size and limited quality."

Interestingly, when fasting is done as part of a religious or spiritual tradition, the point is to stop obsessing over food for a while.

Apparently coffee or tea is okay, even with a little bit of milk.

A lot of people are already doing this, especially within the "paleo" community.

While these articles always mention wine, high-dose resveratrol supplements aren't even made from grapes. They're refined from a plant called Japanese knotweed, or Polygonum cuspidatum (which has a higher resveratrol content and is much less expensive).

I'm finding this argument a little nutty, starting with the contention that trying to avoid chemicals known to be harmful is the equivalent of "freaking out" over them.

If he did stick around, you'd get really, really sick of him.

I think someone at Spider-Man Central must have said, "This is a newspaper comic strip! We have to make absolutely sure that nothing exciting ever happens."

The great Josh Fruhlinger, otherwise known as the Comics Curmudgeon, has been gleefully covering this story line (and all the hilariously violent antics of Mark Trail) for a while now.

"So, tell us what you don't like about yourself."

This episode finally clarified that the former Jane Siegel, Roger's wife, is Jewish. (Her father speaks Yiddish.)

There's a strange 2005 movie called Zerophilia in which a young man has a supposedly real condition that causes him to switch genders whenever he has sex.

When I did a lot of Internet dating, I also occasionally kept notes about details such as where women were from, what their parents did for a living, or what they said in their profiles. I assumed other people were doing it too.

That's... very strange. I'll look for it on American Movie Classics.

I agree, the Marx Brothers were fantastic writers as well.

I'd be a lot more interested in a film about the Stooges' real life story: poor but smart Jewish kids from New York who honed their comedy skills in Vaudeville before making it to the movies, yet who never got anywhere near the respect of the similar-background Marx Brothers.

I always thought of Matt Damon as an actor-y actor before the "Bourne" movies.

You can have good writing in a widely popular movie. Dialogue doesn't have to be "literary" and a story doesn't have to be difficult to understand — just give us people who seem true to life, and who talk the way people really talk.