It is! I'm not sure if it's blind hometown loyalty or not, but Red Hot Riplets forever have a place in my heart. A scorched, smoky, riplet-shaped place.

Do these kids grow up to be the Insufferable Sriracha People?

Same. There was only one thing more popular at my high school (still the best hot chip I've ever had):

I'd argue that the gun is a symbol of violence — the badge and uniform are the symbol of authority, but authority doesn't seem to cut it in the film/TV lexicon without the implied threat of violence provided by a drawn gun. This is tangential to the idea of increased gun violence in films, I suppose, but I think it…

I know it's pretty infrequent that they fire — even without it being fired, the mere presence of the drawn gun communicates "authority figure here, we've got things under control."

Very true. Some other absurd things: the idea a punky blond with a nice computer can sift through piles of data to pinpoint the exact disgruntled postal worker with a penchant for kidnapping young women in the tri-county area! So I'm not sure that it's Criminal Minds's strict adherence to reality that keeps the guns…

That's fair, but I'd contrast it against older films and TV where the unarmed detectives show up with armed uniformed officers to "take him away, boys." Same ultimate outcome, I feel like since the gun is now the visual symbol for "authority" we have writers making psychologists, profilers, computer experts and…

And then I made a comment about TV on a movie stub. Yay.

I know it's atrocious, shitty TV to begin with but I always think of Criminal Minds when this topic comes up. The main characters are all ostensibly psychologists with the ability to defuse violent situations and criminals mentally, without relying on physicality and violence — and yet nearly every episode ends with…

Yeah, I think the problematic element is the language and no one can definitively answer because we're using gay/bi/straight to encompass sexual, romantic, and lifestyle choices that are sometimes related and sometimes not. And while we can eventually put enough words on the page to accommodate all these narratives,…

I've gone gambling a few times in my life — I was with others and I didn't choose gambling as the activity, but I had a decent enough time. I've never felt a desire to go back, I've never really thought about gambling again, but I don't regret my earlier experience. Am I a gambler?

No, not at all! You're only the person everyone hates if you're not honest about those feelings with your partners.

I think the language around this is problematic because identifying bisexuality as being "exclusively interested in binary-identifying persons" isn't something that existed prior to the arrival of "pansexual" as a more-or-less agreed upon term. I don't think bisexual as an identifier was ever that closed, and I think…

Didn't they have some sort of wacky space misogyny that then got reversed into comedic space misandry, too? I may have that backwards but it was literally the conservative panic scenario of the oppressed revisiting the privation they experienced tenfold upon their oppressors.

Yes, please!

Ah, yeah — I haven't been in 10 years. Perhaps they've grown!

Absolutely. It wouldn't be the first tool to try and it wouldn't be employed in a vacuum, but especially when the consequences of the child's continued actions are serious (i.e. running into the street, running away from supervision in public) then I think a pinch or a swat to get the child's attention is not out of…

How recently are we talking? The wings are tolerable, but unless something has changed in the intervening years the other food is awful. Last time I was dragged along I got a chicken sandwich which was obviously a Tyson ChickyDisk deposited lovingly (and sauce/trimmings-free) onto a white bun.

Some children absolutely need the physical stimulus to break them out of the emotional "loop," and a swat on the arm or butt can get a tantruming child's attention when words are not coming through. I think in that case it's not really that the swat is the punishment itself, just an attention-getter so the kid will…

It's been my experience that people who hate vegetables were fed a lot of canned vegetables as kids. Beets and green beans are horrifying (although sometimes the salty-ass green beans hit the spot for me) but I think the worst offenders are canned green peas and asparagus. Both should have a little snap to them but…