I would think civil litigation could take care of the fraud/deception situation.

...although the original tale has been exaggerated over the years, it still is the American Elizabeth Bathory.

That’s interesting. Sounds like what they try to do with Klingon. ;)

I believe it’s bilirubin, from old red blood cells being disposed of by the liver, that gives stool it’s color. I don’t think Cap’s would differ visibly from the norm.

I can accept either “soda” or “pop”. But that weird section of the south that refers to all soft drinks as “cokes” (not even the favored usage around Atlanta itself, as I recall) really needs to be “cancelled” and kept from influencing our children and culture.

Metaphorically, “shibboleth” is used in reference to passwords and insider jargon. It may just be that Latin cultures never picked up that usage, preferring their own idiom. I’d imagine that in relating the original biblical tale, the word “shibboleth” is used as-is.

Plenty of appropriately gothy stuff on Emilie Autumn’s Opheliac album, but the holiday centerpiece is Dead Is the New Alive:

That definitely sounds like a cool approach they might have explored in at least one of the sequels.

I thought perhaps there was an issue with idiom here -- that perhaps New Zealanders use “sofa” differently than Americans, like the way Canadians call a sofa a “Chesterfield” -- but that seems to be a dead end. I’m guessing the screenplay was originally written for a real sofa, the prop guys built a recliner, and…

“Mocking Humor” isn’t really inherent in so-called “Fortean” events and phenomena, but a reference to his particular style of reporting them. Fort collected stories of odd phenomena specifically as a means of taking academics and clergy down a peg. He didn’t make any attempt to ascertain the truth of the stories he…

Well, it is a Japanese picture of a “hollow” roofed boat. So, not completely a non-sequitur.

Of course, The Wicker Man has had an ongoing cult film life specifically among neo-pagans, for depicting them as triumphant bad-asses.

How do you feel about the 2000 re-release? Cool, or unnecessary?

I really think it succeeds where Holy Grail fails, feeling like a satisfying resolution in spite of all the fourth wall trampling, and not just abandoning its own narrative with a big shrug.

Based on the same historical incident that inspired the Tom Baker-era Doctor Who episode, The Horror of Fang Rock, though that introduced a shipwrecked yachtful of additional characters to pick off one-by-one.

Don’t turn around... oh... oh... oh...

I’m mildly curious, but I’m pretty sure it’s not anyone any of us, or even the Germans, have ever heard of. To befuddle everyone for so long, it must be some unsigned group — particularly from Cold War-era Eastern Europe. Maybe they even heard their moment of fame huddled around a radio behind the Iron Curtain, but no…

The article mentions some kind of group operation that they describe as “like a crowdsourced Shazam”, so I’d imagine that they’ve tried it too, along with everything else.

I don’t recall that being a case of resorting to the enema under duress. I thought the guy just had kind of an exotic enema fetish. I seem to recall a quote from the wife (who was charged with manslaughter for administering it, but acquitted) to the effect of “He really loved his enemas”.

I’ve heard they’re in the habit of grabbing people on jungle trails and stripping their clothes off, and that’s always sounded like they’re not so much into forcible rape, but more like the simian equivalent of “Hey, they didn’t actually say no...”