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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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My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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A RANKING OF ALL TWENTY “TREEHOUSE OF HORROR” SIMPSONS EPISODES BY QUALITY 20.) Treehouse of Horror XVIII. “E.T. Go Home” is one of the least impressive Kang/Kodos stories; it’s forced and relies a lot on the fact that everybody loves Kang and Kodos (or, in this case, pretty much just Kodos). “Mr. and Mrs. Simpson” […]

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Can anybody recommend a good organizer application into which I can enter upcoming dates and get reminders that I have to do stuff on those upcoming dates, preferably a week in advance? Not for a phone, because I don’t have a smartphone and won’t for some time. Just a straight PC app.

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Once again, Sarah Palin writes a column saying that the secret to American energy independence is drilling for oil. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the fact that Palin claims energy issues as her particular sphere of expertise just amazes me, and similarly it amazes me that nobody important bothers to point […]

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