The difference between a kid from Missouri who served in the US Navy and a kid from the Netherlands who watched Nazis march through the streets.

That was me in the theater watching Jackie Brown. "Is that the guy from Black Hole?"

1997 was one of those years when I actually went out to the movies fairly regularly, and I've only seen a fraction of these. Man, I suck.

That's where I jumped ship. I got to the end of the third book, having read a total of about 3000 pages or something in which nothing at all had happened. There are leisurely plots and there's world-building, and then there's just pointless padding. Williams is good at padding.

It was very well written. It took a long, long time for the various threads to come together, though. I enjoyed pretty much every page, but I didn't feel any urgency to get to the next page… until those threads finally started to coalesce.

Besides what rev_skarekroe points out, the Ring Wraiths fly giant lizard beasts - an easy deterrent to flying the ring into Mordor - and its also established that Sauron and Saruman use birds as spies. Anything in the air would just draw attention. I mean, the Fellowship doesn't even really use horses. Nine walkers…

That's most fantasy/sci-fi authors, though. Don't even get me started on Tad Williams…

Did we send the "We're Pathetic" signal yet?

It wasn't just a bald cap. Hey's kidneys were threatening to shut down from all the body paint.

Someone around here once described Farscape as Doctor Who before we got Doctor Who back. And with all the running around Moya's empty corridors, I had to agree with them.

I've told this story somewhere in these reviews before: I was mildly interested in Farscape when it started, but I didn't become a tape-every-episode fanatic until I happened to watch a mini-marathon one Sunday night, after which I immediately turned over to the reliable 11 pm Next Generation repeat on WPIX.

I think I've watched it twice - once broadcast, once on DVD - and I remember liking it. I can in no way be objective about this show, though, and I know I was just thrilled beyond all capacity for rational thought when it came back, even for a little while.

"Hot Flesh" is what they called the makeup they used to create Scorpius and a few other alien types. It meant Wayne Pygram didn't have to spend quite as many hours in make-up every day as it might otherwise have had to, with other kinds of prosthetics.

I saw all three in the theaters. I went back to see Empire a second time. It was fun, but by then I had all three films memorized (in college, we would watch them so regularly that we had an unofficial contest to see who could say the next line first), and I really just went to see what the new CGI crap looked like. I…

I finally finished The Golem and the Jinni! The last hundred pages flew by. Now I'm working on some David Gemmell while I sort of look for something more interesting and meatier to read.

I don't remember who wrote the review for Patch Adams, but I read it in the print edition and it was so perfect that it actually got me to check out the website, although up until then I preferred the Onion .

The secret is, we're ALL weird nerds that everyone kind of just tolerates.

I think the staff is aware (or hypothesizes, as we do) that the comments are as much of a draw as the articles. That's why the staff is trying to keep all the old comments around and why they're trying to find ways within the totally in-your-face paradigm of kinja to keep some of us around.

They are working on that. There will be instructions when the time comes - although those instructions may be "Register with Disqus, shmoe!"

I'm going to register and see how things play out. I expect it will be kind of a ghost town pretty quickly, though.