If you’ve been looking for a good summary of scholarly opinion on the political future of Iraq, you could do a lot worse than this post by Marc Lynch. Warning: the conclusions derived are, for the most part, not good. But they’re thorough and well-written. UPDATE: Also, this thorough explanation of whywaterboarding is torture and […]

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The Frighteners. Six years or so ago, it was slightly more obscure, but those movies with the hobbits in them mean that Peter Jackson’s earlier movies have received more attention. Of course, most of that attention went to Heavenly Creatures, which is excellent and deserves it and that’s all right, but The Frighteners is a […]

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Dozens of lobsters escape a supermarket in Germany.

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After a skip week due to dental pain issues (like “being high on codeine for most of a week”), my TV column at Torontoist is once again up and running.

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What the fucking hell is up with PvP? Look, I’m not so naive as to think that the strip is as good as it was three or four years ago, when Kurtz was arguably at his peak, and when the comic was genuinely good. The art’s gotten worse, Kurtz has gotten lazier, and nowadays it’s […]

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Your daily “life is getting more like Paranoia all the damn time” link of the day: FEMA sets up fake press conference where all the “reporters” were in fact FEMA staffers asking pre-planned questions. (I’m not even kidding a little. This is exactly the sort of thing you would expect to find in a Paranoia […]

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#32 in an increasingly-innumerate series of thirty: One of the things that fascinates me about Legion as a concept is that it is one thousand years in the future, and the variance and similarity with which the DC Universe of “today” would reflect upon its future one millennium later would by necessity at least reflect […]

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From JLA/Hitman: One of the things I like about Garth Ennis is that, as a writer, he steadfastly refuses to write slow, lazy arcs around potentially offensive subtopics. What we have here is a fairly subtle and just simply well-written example of this. The subtopic in question here is “Superman is a Christian.” (And, given […]

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McDonald’s foods as pizza toppings. The horrific thing is that, even though I do valiantly try and usually manage to eat in a healthy manner, I found myself wondering what this would be like with A&W or Wendy’s.

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Sorry for the dead-time on the site; in between extremely major dental issues, not one but indeed both computers flaming out and requiring repairs, and everything else I normally have to deal with, this past week has been hectic. I’ve got a lot of stuff hopefully getting this site back up to speed in the […]

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Wisdom teeth being removed. Back in operation hopefully by Tuesday.

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No, seriously: Turkey invading Kurdish Iraq is very, very, very bad. On a scale of 1 to 10, it is Bad. It is a recipe for Bad Sandwich, preceded by Bad Salad and finishing with Bad Cobbler. It’s not Strong Bad, it’s just Bad Bad. It’s Baddosity-level is plus-twelve. Cinematically speaking, this is a Gigli-equivalent […]

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Blame Church.

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So let me get this straight: 1.) we have discovered another, Earth-like planet, potentially capable of supporting life; 2.) it orbits a red sun; 3.) it’s a larger planet, and the gravity there is stronger than it is here; 4.) it is twenty light years away, so it could have exploded nineteen years ago and […]

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