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ME: What now? FLAPJACKS: Did you see this? Some crazy guy put together a replica of a vintage first class airplane cabin in his garage. ME: Because he’s crazy? FLAPJACKS: You just spent actual money on old board games from the 1960s like, last week. ME: You can play those. FLAPJACKS: And he can play […]

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THREE EXAMPLES OF SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE‘S BRILLIANT “FIX WHAT ISN”T BROKEN” STRATEGY 1.) The new stage, which is large, impersonal, with a dark background so the dancers tend to fade into the background if not lit exactly right (and it’s hard to light constantly moving people exactly right) and difficult for the […]

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My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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A pretty strong effort from Terry Pratchett this go-around, in part because he’s mostly left his usual formula behind in a way. Which is appropriate for what’s an interesting combination of sports novel and nontraditional hero’s journey, while still part of Pratchett’s overall continuing Discworld metastory of a fantasy-world Industrial Revolution. Unseen Academicals has no […]

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Blake and Luther, unsurprisingly, are judges for top 4 night. All four: cabaret. Bland Tony-n-Mel ™ routine that was pretty straightforward and therefore should have been pretty easy for the dancers to execute, which makes Everett’s weak performance here all the more glaring. Vincent and Everett: hip-hop. Everett kicked it up a notch towards the […]

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Okay, so Santa Claus is a trucker, and he asked Spidey for help. This is because Trucker Santa wants to make sure that kids everywhere get the chance to buy a fishing rod (and it has to be the right fishing rod, so the kids need their dad’s help, because no way would Mom know […]

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So the guys who did that Carl Sagan autotune have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, and given their second effort – a mix of Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Feynman and Bill Nye – I’m not sure that extending this into a series necessarily works. The first song was brilliant for two […]

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Not as bland as season 5 (AKA “So You Think You Can Dance Contemporary And Not Much Else”), but still – it seems more than ever that female hip-hop dancers are effectively dead on this show, despite that whenever they make it top top 20 they invariably do reasonably well. (Comfort top 8 season four, […]

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“We’re from the phone company.” *holds up phone*

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This column by David Mitchell1 isn’t wrong per se. Yes, people are hypocritical about their stated wants versus their expressed political desires, and they always have been. (Granted, sentiment of this sort is much more a form of liberal-bashing than it is a free-ranging slam against people of all ideological backgrounds, not least because somewhere […]

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Oh my god look at this shit. I think my favorite bit is where he asserts that “Libertarianism is where young adults live and breathe“, partially because it sounds like a shampoo commercial and partially because it’s so fucking stupid given that every bit of polling available shows that young adults in the United States […]

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