Last night, I took my son out to a revival of the…classic? Yes, let’s say classic, for a given value of the word…1980 ‘Flash Gordon’ movie. I was enjoying the heck out of it, as I do every time I watch it; the movie hits that exact sweet spot of camp and sincerity, where everyone […]

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I’ve thankfully never been in a position where someone in my family withdrew all my life savings and entrusted it to a sweaty guy in a cheap suit who promised to triple our money but whose name autocompletes to “con artist” in a Google search, all because of a number of vague and shifting rationales […]

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Okay. It is, officially, the last fucking Friday I will have to think about this fucking election one way or the other, and my blood pressure is through the charts and I’m jittery and I can’t even fucking look at FiveThirtyEight anymore without having a panic attack. So let’s take a moment to make the […]

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There’s been (and I know this will kind of surprise you, but it’s true) a lot of analysis of the ways that the historical arc of the Republican Party has finally led us to a living elevator fart loudly arguing that we just shouldn’t bother holding the election because he wants to be President. People […]

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After a long stretch of being wrong about how far naked and unashamed xenophobia could take someone in the current iteration of the Republican Party, it seems like I’m on much firmer ground in predicting Donald Trump’s path through the general election. I was right in saying that the media have no real interest in […]

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So let’s say that you (or more likely, your friend who sent you to this webpage and is dragging you to the Doctor Strange movie, or maybe the Google search algorithm that directed you here) want to get a quick handle on what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is before you go see the movie that’s […]

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It’s been too long since I talked about comic-book related stuff that just tickles me pink. And I want to rectify that by talking about one of my favorite comic-book villains, Doctor Demonicus. No, really! I’ll admit, I love Doctor Demonicus a bit more in concept than in execution. He’s only appeared in a few […]

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Despite my statements last week, I did wind up finishing David Cross’s book ‘I Drink for a Reason’. I finally found a way into it by reading it as an educational study in why “edgy” comedy seems a lot less funny to many people than it used to, and why it’s growing gradually less popular. […]

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So I’m currently reading ‘I Drink for a Reason’, by David Cross. And it’s bad. I mean, it is shit-the-bed bad. It is is-this-actually-meant-to-be-an-ironic-douchebag-persona-he-created-for-this-book-a-la-Colbert, change-the-name-of-the-show-retroactively-to-“Mr. Show With Bob and That Guy He Carried On His Back for Four Seasons”, oh-my-god-did-he-actually-just-put-in-a-chapter-explaining-that-while-he’s-not-bitter-or-angry-about-bad-reviews-they-are-“bordering on libel”-and-he-must-respond bad. I am 82 pages into this 236-page book, and there’s been exactly […]

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As we get closer to the election, I will probably be doing more political posts, especially because this is an absolutely unprecedented election. My speculation on 2008 and 2012 was things like, “What if McCain has a health issue on the campaign trail?”, or “What if Romney’s tax returns reveal a historically low tax rate?”; […]

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A lot of people will, as part of the ongoing debate about how miserable and grinding the current election is, talk about how frustrating it is that in America we only have Trump and Clinton as viable options because “we live in a two-party system”. (Usually, this is right before they talk about writing in […]

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I was thinking the other day about how odd it is that political campaigns are treated mainly as conflicts in ideology, personality, and party affinity, when they’re basically job interviews…and before I could really get into that idea, even in the privacy of my own head, it struck me how absurd this political campaign has […]

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I’m pretty much sickened to the point of inarticulation by the events of the last few days. I live in the Twin Cities. I’ve driven along the same road where Philando Castile was pulled over and murdered by a panicky idiot with a badge. I have African-American friends and family who drive up and down […]

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Everyone loves a good fan theory, right? …um, right? ….can we just pretend they do, for the sake of my introductory spiel, here? ……..so some people on the Internet really love a good fan theory, while others are indifferent or unaware of them, and still others find them tedious and annoying. There are plenty of […]

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Let’s start out with the obvious: I, like many others, was woefully wrong regarding the Republican electorate and their love affair of Trump. In retrospect, I can see where I went wrong; I knew that the Tea Party crowd was going to hijack the process somewhere in the next few elections, because they’ve been pushing […]

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