I would argue that the quality of Voyager was predictive of the quality of the TNG movies and Enterprise. Mind you, there were a lot of shared writers and producers during that time, which likely has a lot to do with it.

Yeah...I’m sure it wasn’t their intent with the line, but that interpretation (in a general sense, I wasn’t thinking about their own showrunner specifically) was pretty obviously there.

You may have an overly simplistic understanding of the meaning of “Groot.”

I think a major reason the ratings are down is that they clearly don’t have an endgame.

Zach Handlen

Probably very region-dependent, too. I’m sure it’s much more popular here in the prairies than in the GTA.

Pretty much all of the major Canadian events, yeah. The Brier (men’s championship), the Tournament of Hearts (women’s championship), the Worlds, the Continental Cup, the Olympic Trials.

I think you’re taking the “Big Bang” aspect of the argument a little too literally, or at least giving it more weight than it deserves.

From my point of view, I’d say above basketball and soccer, though soccer is exploding in popularity.

We are so far away down that chain that it is functionally-impossible to trace and we can’t even fully predict all the cause/effect chains that might shape our moment-to-moment life.

Nah, it’s not terrible. You’re right. Competition is good, and should help keep us appropriately humble.

You can’t possibly believe that your choice of what to have for lunch was complete random, and not influenced by any external variables (including your own personal history).

Behaviourist here. There’s no such thing as “free will” - it’s just the sum total of all the variables in your environment, plus your past learning history. If you could somehow account for all of that, you’d be able to perfectly predict human behaviour.

Extremely disappointing results for Canada, but I think it would be damned foolish to think there’s anything wrong with the overall program. Homan and Koe are both world-class teams who had unfortunate weeks.

Per Wikipedia:

I don’t know how this became about her “unusual” name, and not the extremely tired and hacky topics covered by interviewers.

Conform to American norms and values!

That’s what I figured, based on the greater context - thanks.

Last night marked Jimmy Fallon’s first full night back as host of The Tonight Show

To each their own - no judgement here. For me, it was just the point at which I decided I more-or-less knew what was going to happen next, and could do other things with my time.