I never understood why Hitler felt the need to invade southern Russia to gain access to the Black Sea oil when he was already winning in the Middle East, and even a fraction of the forces sent into Russia probably would have overwhelmed the British there. And it's not like he used southern Russia as a diversion for…

Thank you for the reply. It sounds accurate to me. With a determined Britain, and his invincibility fading, Napoleon had to attack Russia to both cut off Britain and bring the rest of Europe back in line. Like Hitler, though, he underestimated the Russian defensive strategies, though in Napoleon's case, the winter…

I can niggle about little details or certain characterizations or missing plots that I liked, but given the scope of the material, I couldn't ask for anything better.

I will admit that I am not as well-versed in the Napoleonic Wars as I am in WW2, so I'd like to ask: at what point do you think that Napoleon reached the point of no return in regards to peace with Britain? By that, I mean the point that he could have retreated back inside the prewar borders of France and sued for…

Something about Asian land wars and Russian winters.

I know! Weren't the vast riches of the Tangut and Khwarezmian empires enough for him? Oh, sorry, different Khan. Without the picture it's impossible to tell :p

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I've never known of anybody who reads TMQ non-ironically (like Drew, so that you can laugh and rip it apart). To have some insight into possibly-declining readership I would first have to know what his sincere readership is/was like in the first place.

So much of what makes the books and the show so good are the personal interactions between particular sets of characters: Arya and the Hound, Arya and Tywin (on the show), Tyrion and Bronn, Cersei and Sansa, Littlefinger and Varys, Hodor and everybody, etc. For such a huge, ensemble cast, both Martin and the show's…

The insidious mayonnaise pandemic has spread to so many countries at this point that I fear you may be right.

I agree with this comment.

You belong on the food equivalent of a sex offender registry. If you ever move in to my neighborhood, I want you to knock on my door and tell me that you put mayo on hot dogs so I know to never let you near my (non-existent) children.

I don't know how you feel about peanut-derived "condiments," but over the past few years I have discovered that either peanut butter or some type of peanut sauce can, and should, replace mayo in all of the situations in which it is typically used. I was first tuned in after getting a peanut butter burger at a bar,…

Most cats are generally bad and the good ones are rare exceptions. Most dogs are generally good and the bad ones are rare exceptions (not including small dogs, which fall under the same rule as cats). Personalities aside, if cats were just able to go to the bathroom outside without befalling a whole range of…

I feel like I remember seeing an awful Indiana Jones reboot a few years back featuring an older Indy. At least, I assume it was a reboot because there's no way that the original producers, director, and stars could have screwed it up so badly :s

As was already pointed out here, they have developed (some might say retconned) a unifying timeline for all of the games, but even without that, the first three games all feature the same Link, with the Adventure of Link a sequel and A Link to the Past a prequel. And Majora's Mask is a direct sequel (both in the real…

A world with no cats, huh?

Unless it's in Alaksa; then it's "drill baby, drill!"

I grew up in a mostly rural town in eastern Massachusetts where basically no one could walk to school. Unless there was at least about a foot of snowfall or we were in the middle of a blizzard in the morning, we knew they would be sending the buses out. Meanwhile, all of the towns around us with sidewalks would be…

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was designed by Walt Disney to be a futuristic, utopian city. After he died, Disney imagineers wanted to use some of the ideas but no one had the singular, driving vision to actually build a functioning city, so they made EPCOT a theme park dedicated to future…