Pleased to announce that mgkdotcom is now the sort-of-official tabulation site for the 2012 rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards, the oldest and awesomest wrestling fan-awards tradition going on the internet.

Nominations have started now and we are open for business there; voting begins January 1.

DECEMBER 8 UPDATE: Due to overwhelming response, we are publishing the first iteration of the current nominations list ahead of schedule! You can see it here. (Now please, stop nominating CM Punk for Best Wrestler. We’ve got it covered. Believe us.)

EDIT: of course I typo the image URL the day I’m in court for five hours. Fixed.

So this teaser poster for Man of Steel is making the rounds:

And of course there is nerd rage because nerds are all “why is Superman letting them put him in cuffs” and “this is so stupid, Superman can bust out of the handcuffs whenever he wants” and “this better not be some stupid thing where they have Kryptonite bullets.”

This happens because so many nerds fundamentally do not get Superman, because Superman, when written properly, is not your traditional power fantasy. Instead, Superman is an ongoing morality play, where every question he must pose himself is “is this the right thing for me to do?” Of course Superman lets himself be put in handcuffs, even if he can snap the handcuffs at any time, because Superman understands that the rule of law must be respected in order to protect everybody less powerful than him (e.g. everybody ever). He is not allowing himself to be cuffed because he is weak or he is afraid. He is allowing himself to be cuffed because he is strong.

This is why Superman is such a great hero. It also gives me more confidence in Zack Snyder’s film than I have previously had, even if Superman is wearing the awful no-red-briefs costume variant.

MGK’S BROTHER JEFF: Hey, did you watch Saturday Night Live last night?
MGK: No, I was out.
JEFF: I meant “did you watch it later, like Sunday afternoon or something.”
MGK: Oh. No.
JEFF: I wouldn’t want to suggest you aren’t a social dervish.
MGK: Of course not.
JEFF: Out at the clubs. Working the lines. Making connections.
MGK: You can stop now.
JEFF: Hitting the dance floor. Getting digits. Exploding the pass.
MGK: I’m pretty sure that last expression is just something you made up.
JEFF: I’m ten years younger than you. I know all the hip new things you don’t. I bet you don’t even know about flanging.
MGK: Now I’m sure you’re making stuff up.
JEFF: Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it will be something you wonder about, late at night. You know, when you think about death.
MGK: What does all of this have to do with Saturday Night Live, anyway?
JEFF: Oh. Jeremy Renner hosted.
MGK: And?
JEFF: He sucked.
MGK: That’s too bad.
JEFF: No, I mean he really sucked. Like, Lindsay Lohan levels of sucked.
MGK: That’s surprising. I mean, I like him in action movies well enough. He does a good sort of quip.
JEFF: I think nerds just like him because he looks like a young Nathan Fillion before Nathan Fillion got all fat.
MGK: Well, he does fight people really nicely too.
JEFF: But getting back to my point. He sucked.
MGK: Well, not everybody is Anne Hathaway.
JEFF: …no, but I don’t see your point.
MGK: Anne Hathway is like a switch-hitter –
JEFF: – maybe in your fantasies.
MGK: Nice, but let me finish. She is like an acting switch-hitter – do you want that one?
JEFF: Nah. Not in the mood to expand on a theme.
MGK: Okay. So she is like an acting switch-hitter in that she can go all “actual acting” and be good at it, or alternately switch into wacky sketch comedienne mode and not miss a beat. Not everybody can do this. Hugh Jackman can do it. James Franco, not so much.
JEFF: I get your point. But this was not just a failure to be Anne Hathaway. Jeremy Renner was bad. Like, during his monologue, it was like he actively did not want to be there. I felt bad for him. But also I felt scorn, because he was being paid a lot of money to be there.
MGK: Well, maybe he was totally hyped to do it and then got there and started work and was all “wait, I am not meant to be doing this at all.” That happens. And then he can’t just bail out.
JEFF: Sure he could. They’d call up Alec Baldwin or John Goodman and be all “save us” and they would do it because they are SNL gods.
MGK: True dat.
JEFF: Anyway. For the first time in my life, I appreciated Matt Damon. Because the more I see Jeremy Renner, the less I like him. I mean, I saw one Bourne movie with Renner in it and it made Avengers, like, retroactively worse. Matt Damon never did that.
MGK: Wait, you don’t appreciate Matt Damon?
JEFF: Come on. He’s just sort of there.
MGK: But he’s always good. At everything. I mean, at worst, your argument against Matt Damon is that he’s not flashy in how he’s good at everything.
JEFF: Name three movies that Matt Damon made that are not Bourne movies, which he didn’t really make anyway because he was just sort of there.
MGK: Rounders.
JEFF: Just sort of there. Just because he’s the lead doesn’t make him not just sort of there, you know.
MGK: Good Will Hunting.
JEFF: It sucking was totally his fault. It was his fault. It was his fault.
MGK: Saving Private Ryan.
JEFF: Tom Hanks’ movie. Adam Goldberg and Barry Pepper and Jeremy Davies were all more memorable than Damon. And don’t even bother saying Ocean’s Eleven.
MGK: The Adjustment Bureau. The Informant! The Departed. Contagion.
JEFF: See, I didn’t see any of those, so your argument is irrelevant.
MGK: That’s not terribly fair.
JEFF: Matt Damon has a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I think he can handle it.
MGK: Fair enough.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

With the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney (which I discussed last week, of course) the Internet has gone pretty damn crazy about the possibilities of the already-announced Episode VII. Some people are even looking past that to VIII and IX, since those are virtually a given in the post-Lucas, post-Lord of the Rings cinematic landscape. Let’s face it, why greenlight one movie at a time when you already know they’ll line up for the sequels? But something that nobody’s discussing, probably because nobody really wants to think about it, is the possibility that we’ll see a remake of the original trilogy.

Surprisingly, I’m all for it.

Look, whether I’m for it or not, it’s going to happen. The original ‘Star Wars’ came out in 1977, approximately 35 years ago. Since that time, we’ve seen remakes of ‘Dawn of the Dead’, ‘Halloween’, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’, ‘Clash of the Titans’, ‘The Fog’, ‘Friday the 13th’, ‘Fright Night’, ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The Karate Kid’, ‘Piranha’, ‘The Punisher’, ‘Judge Dredd’, ‘Red Dawn’, and we’re staring down the barrel of remakes of ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘Robocop’. Clearly, the 70s and 80s have moved out of the realm of “recent past” and into the realm of “nostalgia”. That means that someone’s going to remake ‘Star Wars’. (It also means we’ll see another ‘Jaws’, but that’s another story altogether.)

And that’s okay. Because despite the commercial intention that lurks at the back of remakes, they have a real and useful purpose beyond just keeping some studio executive from freaking out. (Making remakes and sequels is the movie industry of blowing on the dice before you roll them. It might not do any good, but given how much you’re gambling, it helps keep you sane if you believe in it. To quote John Rogers, showrunner of Leverage: “If you are an executive, this is your day: a scruffy man in a Hawaiian shirt walks into your office and says, “I need you to be personally responsible for giving me one hundred million dollars so I can go to Ireland and have people who pretend for a living act like they’re fighting imaginary dragons.” “Will I get to see the dragons first?” you ask hopefully. “Oh, no the dragons won’t exist until after we’re done shooting. The professional pretending people will be yelling at sticks. Occasionally, they will flee from a mop.”  And your job, as the exec, is to write him the check. Any sane man would break.”)

The purpose is simple: Any good movie is going to be about something more than it is about. It’s going to be a reflection of the culture it was created in. And even though a good movie will be relatively timeless, there’s no such thing as a truly timeless film. Everything comes out of the zeitgeist. ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ is a film about identity, memory, the fear and horror of not knowing who you really are…but that doesn’t mean it’s not key to the original film that the brainwashing was done by evil Communists, and that it’s not just as important in the remake that the brainwashing was done by an evil multinational corporation. The grand thrust of a film is about the elements of the human condition that never change, while the details are expressions of our particular fears and tensions.

This is why I fully expect to see a remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ every twenty years for the rest of time. The paranoia, the conspiracy, the main plot all speak to something deep within the human condition; but the details come out differently with each generation and each adaptation. We feared Communism, we feared urban alienation, we fear authority…and each time the story is told, it’s worth telling. (Another good example would be ‘Dawn of the Dead’. The original, a polemic about mindless consumerism creeping over the idealism of the 70s. The remake, a harrowing evocation of the events of 9/11. Every generation finds something new to say with the same story.)

So yes, despite the fact that it could be awful, I’d welcome a ‘Star Wars’ remake. Because I think that while Lucas made the best ‘Star Wars’ he could make, that doesn’t mean we could never come out of the creative process with something else just as good.

Torontoist thought it would be a good idea to go nutpicking in the wake of the Rob Ford ouster, so I did.

Guys, I have totally had it up to here with the whole “fake nerds” thing at this point, which just refuses to die and just keeps getting stupider and stupider as otherwise generally rational people insist on clutching whatever ostracization they have suffered previously like it is some sort of precious jewel or something. However, because I am brilliant I have found the perfect metaphor to describe all of this.

Sadly there is no embedding on Youtube allowed of my brilliant metaphor because Youtube is THE MAN, but you can all go to the link and figure out the metaphor for yourselves, because I am not going to explain it or who represents what. Is Tony Harris Stan Gable? Are “fake geek girls” represented by Poindexter’s violin, or perhaps they are the synchronized handclaps? Does Booger represent the fantasy football nerds who are apparently not for-real nerds? Is the fact that Takahashi is dressed up as a stereotypical Indian chief subtle commentary on nerd tokenism in multiculturalism, or is it a clever inversion of that, reinforced by Lamar’s prominence in the clip?

NO EXPLANATIONS. It is simply a perfect metaphor for the entire mess and you all have to accept this. I leave it to the huddled masses to parse this bit of received wisdom.

To start off, I want to make a quick plug for Pro Wrestling X, a video game that’s been in development for over ten years, whose developers are doing a Kickstarter fundraiser to for the money needed to complete the project.  I don’t know if they’re gonna get up to 75 grand by next week, but I believe in what they’re trying to do, and I hope they someday address some of the issues I’m about to list.

Anyway, like many wrestling fans I’ve spent the past month playing WWE ’13, and it’s been a lot of fun.   Still, I can’t help but notice that my “wish list” for features in the next game is virtually unchanged from last year, and the dozen or so years before that.  The progress from Wrestlemania Challenge to War Zone to No Mercy has stagnated, and fans are left to basically buy the same game every year with a new roster.  I could probably be okay with that, if not for the following thirteen sticking points:

13) I need new foreign objects, and a cup of soda isn’t good enough.  Steel chairs, kendo sticks, and sledgehammers are fine, but it seems like we could add in some new stuff one of these days.  It’s been years since I’ve been able to waffle a guy with a fire extinguisher, let alone spray it all over him.  Other weapons that would be awesome: chains, baseball bats, thumbtacks, and Mad Dog Vachon’s artificial leg.

12) Apparently midgets and giant fat guys are too unrealistic for pro wrestling.  I haven’t yet tried to make Giant Haystacks, but past experience suggests I won’t be able to get him any bigger than Husky Harris.  The minimum height for a create-a-wrestler is around 5’2″, which is a bit silly since the game is based on a property that heavily features a little person playing an insane leprechaun.  I realize allowing extreme sizes plays hob with the grappling animations, but since those haven’t changed much in 15 years you’d think the developers could experiment a little.

11) I guess nobody at THQ has ever seen facial hair.  There are dozens of bears, mustaches, and sideburns available in the game, and most of them look like your wrestler’s face was dusted for fingerprints.  If you’re trying to make “The Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant he’s gonna end up looking more like one of the Fabulous Ones.

10) Why can’t I walk to the ring with my title belt hanging out of my pants like a penis?  Credit where credit’s due, WWE ’13 has a very nice interface for creating your entrance in exacting detail.  You can customize the lighting, the music, the pyro…but if you’ve won a championship, you can’t see any of that stuff.  Instead you walk out with one of a dozen fairly bland entrances that allow a belt to be rendered on your waist.  Actually, the belts float in the air in a circle five inches wider than your waist.  Yeah.

9) Minigames.  I hate these.  If you want to kick out of a pin, refuse to say “I quit,” or answer a ten-count, you have to get your timing just perfect and press the X button at the right time.  Either I can always get the timing right (meaning I could survive being hit by a car) or I never can (meaning I could get beaten with one armdrag).  It’s stupid because the experience in no way simulates the feeling of overcoming adversity to keep fighting.  On the other hand, the submission hold minigame–which as near as I can tell involves frantically mashing buttons–feels very much like I am struggling to survive, and I’m a big fan of that.

8) There are more championships than wrestlers.  THQ is very fan-friendly when it comes to providing alternatives to the current championship belts in WWE.  If you don’t like the WWE title with the spinning logo, you can use Steve Austin’s custom belt, or the old school ’80s version–or you can make your own belt with a lavender strap like the Ultimate Warrior did.  The only problem is that now you’ve got fifteen world champions.  What they should have done is set it up where there’s exactly one WWE championship, but the champion can wear one of fifteen belts.  They actually did it that way a few years ago, so I have no idea why they screwed it up this time.

7) Demolition isn’t in every game, but Jack Swagger is.  This is more a beef with the sorry state of wrestling than with wrestling video games.  Every new game has the current roster in it, and that used to be a selling point because the latest roster tended to be the best roster.  Nowadays, though, WWE ’13’s biggest selling point is that half the roster is made up of legends from 1998.  Which is great, except that it makes you wonder why the other half of the roster can’t be all-stars too.  Who the hell is buying these games to play as David Otunga, or John Laurinaitis, or Santino Marella?

6) The commentary sucks and you can’t turn it off.  There are sound options in the game, and I immediately turned “voice volume” down to 0.  Doesn’t help.  You still hear the same robotic lines that Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler have been reciting for years.

5) “AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, HE IS BROKEN IN–and he’s back up!”  Nobody stays down.  Ever.  You can be wrestling frigging Hunico, hit him with your finisher, throw him off the top of Hell in a Cell, and do a Superfly splash onto him from 20 feet in the air…and he will still be back on his feet within thirty seconds.  There’s no room to breathe in these matches–you have to stay on the offensive constantly to stay alive–and that makes it overly difficult to do any really fun spots.  I’ve always wanted to beat down my opponent, throw him onto the announce desk, and then do a crazy dive on him from a ladder set up in the ring.  But I’ve never been able to do that because as soon as I set up the ladder he’s knocking it down, and as soon as I get him on the desk he’s coming around to jump back off.

4) They still can’t do group entrances right!  You can set up Road Dogg and Billy Gunn as a team in the New Age Outlaws, but you can’t set up the New Age Outlaws as a part of D-Generation X.  Of course, if you could do that, Road Dogg and Billy would do their team entrance acting like Triple H and Shawn Michaels, because DX can only do one team entrance regardless of which two guys are entering.  The game has a few custom entrances designed for a male tag team and their female valet, but those only work if they’re all wrestling.  This is kind of a nitpicky thing, but it baffles me that after all these years and all these souped-up consoles, they still couldn’t do Randy Savage and Elizabeth’s entrance right if they tried.

3) It is entirely too hard to write “DUSTY SUCKS EGGS” on a T-shirt.  All right, so my brother broke his leg last month, and I came down for Thanksgiving to play WWE ’13 with him.  So being the loving sibling that I am, I wanted to make my create-a-wrestler a shirt that says “I BROKE BUTTDAWG’S LEG,” in the tradition of Greg Valentine’s feud with Wahoo McDaniel.  So I go in to edit the shirt, and I add lettering.  “I…” nuts, I can’t make a space, I have to stop and make the next word a separate layer.  “B-R-O-K-E…” this is so tedious.  “B-U-T-T-D-A-W-G-,-S…”  Wait, I can’t even make a damn apostrophe?  I’m not even getting into the hassle of resizing the text to fit in the shirt.  Suffice to say it would almost be easier to go to the mall in the ’80s and make an actual tacky custom shirt.

2) At no point do I feel like I am in a real fake wrestling match.  WWE ’13 has some real improvements in chain wrestling and reversing holds, but it still feels nothing like wrestling a match, in the fake world of WWE.  My finishing move never finishes the match.  Big dramatic high spots are exactly as effective as doing a simple suplex.  Nobody taps out to the anklelock–you have to do it nine times before the other guy even starts to sell his leg.  Ladder matches never see crazy stacked-up-ladder spots, because the ladders always get knocked down before that can happen.  If I hit a guy with a steel chair, he always gets right back up, and the ref always sees it.  I read the game has a special referee mode, and if you’re the referee and you don’t follow the rules, you’re ejected from the match, which has happened approximately zero times in the history of special referee matches.  In many ways THQ’s wrestling games have done a fair job simulating a real combat sport, but since this is pro wrestling, that kind of misses the point.

1) It’s two-thousand twelve and I can’t get seven people on the screen at the same time.  I don’t mean to be unfair–I realize that there are technical limitations that cause the program to slow down when too many guys are moving around in the ring.  Thing is, I realized that in 2001, when it was a technical limitation on the Playstation Two.  You’d think at some point somebody would invent some awesome graphics chip that would let you do a ten-man Survivor Series match, or at least do a six-man with an actual referee in the ring.  I’m pretty sure other sports games would not be content to settle–I don’t hear about Madden NFL featuring only two offensive linemen because it’d be too difficult to render all eleven players in a team.  And yet THQ seriously wants me to believe I can get by with just Three Horsemen.

My weekly TV review is up at Torontoist.

Also, Torontoist asked me to do a legal review of the decision which got Rob Ford kicked out of office, so you can read that too.

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

For those of you who have only just discovered the Internet today, perhaps after emerging from a years-long coma, Disney bought Lucasfilm a few weeks ago. And unsurprisingly for a company that just spent four billion dollars to pick up what amounts to two worthwhile intellectual properties and the rights to ‘Willow’, they’ve said that they’re going to start work on ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’. Because with the rights to the Indiana Jones series tied up with Paramount, it’s either that or do a ‘Howard the Duck’ reboot, really.

All that sounds like a deeply cynical disdain for what is, at heart, a thoroughly mercenary sequel with two strikes already against it: One, there hasn’t been a good Star Wars movie produced in almost thirty years, and it’s not for lack of trying; and two, the general track record of revisiting iconic projects after decades of inactivity has been mixed, at best. (The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Tron: Legacy, Prometheus, Before Watchmen, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and yes, Episodes I-III.) And yet…and yet, despite the fact that there is as yet no cast and no director and no script, I am tentatively interested in the upcoming sequel to ‘Star Wars’. Why?

Honestly, I wish I knew. My wife suggests that it’s because I’m a masochist on the level of TV’s Frank, but I don’t think so. I’m not looking forward to it in the sense of it being a complete trainwreck that I can point and laugh at…I’m thinking it actually has the potential to be genuinely good. Part of it, I think, is that at some point I believe the change of creative hands to be a good thing for any long-running series; eventually, we all run out of good ideas and can be persuaded by the people around us that it’s worth trying the bad ones just to see what happens. It has been a long time since Lucas received any kind of serious editorial scrutiny, and a long time since he had to do the kind of feverish rewriting that marked the original ‘Star Wars’. Handing the series off to Disney (which, whatever else you may think of it, has a pretty good track record of taking care of its intellectual properties…there’s never been an equivalent to ‘Identity Crisis’ for Mickey Mouse…) might reinvigorate the stale ideas of the franchise.

Which is, actually, another point…I’ve never been a big fan of the Expanded Universe. The Thrawn trilogy was pretty good, and the X-Wing series was fun in an action-movie sort of way, but after a while I feel like it really devolved into an endless slog of book after book after book of “A new Dark Jedi/Imperial general holdover/Dark Sun crime boss rears its ugly head, and the fledgling Republic has to deal with this menace or else!” Which always seemed to translate to me as, “Let’s bring back the Emperor/Tarkin/Jabba with the serial numbers filed off!” Combine that with the militaristic insistence that this was the True Canon, the Word of Lucas, and I’m about ready for someone to stick a potato up that particular tailpipe.

And I think I’m up for it because I never stopped loving the original trilogy. ‘Star Wars’ is, I insist and will continue to insist, one of the most important and influential pieces of art in the 20th century. Anyone who doesn’t see that is missing just how big its impact was…it’s like someone telling you that a giant monster walked by, and you not noticing it because you can’t see out of this weird foot-shaped canyon you’re in. Lucas transformed the entire idea of what science-fiction could be on film, with a meticulous, shot-by-shot devotion to creating a universe so immersive that it feels at times (quite intentionally) like a documentary. The sequels, while arguably less good (and I’m sure there will be arguing) were also amazing, immersive glimpses into a world the viewer was invited to inhabit. I’m interested in going back there. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s masochistic of me…but the goodwill left over from 1977 is still enough to buy them at least an interested look from this fan.

Peyton, over in John Seavey’s post about the Fake Geek Girl bullshit which I am glad he wrote because honestly at this point I just do not have the energy to engage with that bullshit for what feels like the tenth time, writes:

As a complete aside I also wanted to thank MGK, John Seavey, and Jim Smith for this site. As someone said upthread, it’s one of the few places, along with Scalzi’s Whatever, Evanier’s blog, and Jim Hines blog and a few others that, as a female nerd, feels safe and supportive.

I’m just gonna say that I feel very proud to have received this comment, since I decided quite some time ago (like, years) that this was going to be one of my primary goals for the site. As I get older1 I find myself getting more liberal rather than less, which is a pleasant thing to realize, and John and Jim and everybody else I’ve invited to the site were invited, at least in part, because I knew they had no truck with all of the bullshit that nerd-dom encourages in celebration of the straight white guy norm. And I say that as a white guy who mostly invited straight white guys, which happened mostly because whenever I’ve encouraged guest bloggers to apply, they are usually straight white guys.2

This really isn’t just about the blog, either, but what I do generally. I mean, I’ve said before that Al’Rashad is adapted from a screenplay I wrote about a dozen years ago, but the simple truth is that the comic is much better than the screenplay ever was. The big action beats are for the most part the same thus far, but:

– Originally Rayana was much less proactive as a character. Even then I wanted her to be kick-ass, but as written in the screenplay, she was not nearly at the nigh-Brainiac-Five level of intelligence and competence which she is at now, and she works, I think, so much better now than she did previously. Having Kahal be her personal engine of destruction adds a new twist to their relationship which I like quite a bit as well; I like that Kahal takes his lead from Rayana whenever it isn’t a “right now we fight desperately” moment.
– Apali was originally male, and moreover was not nearly so important to the story as she is now. Making her female actually broadened her quite a bit and let me do more with her. The fact that she has essentially been Rayana’s surrogate mother isn’t something I’ve explicitly written in a page yet, but I think it’s pretty obvious, and that simply wouldn’t work as well if she were male as she was originally.
– Also, Joro really should have been a girl, as I’ve written previously, but the ship sailed on that one. Sometimes you realize things too late.
– Finally, there’s one more major character aspect that hasn’t been revealed yet (and might not even be revealed in the first story arc) but to which I gave serious thought, then discussed it with Davinder, then discussed it further with a few people whose opinion I respect in order to make sure that it would work with what had been written already. I think when it gets revealed people will accuse me of pandering (as always happens in these instances), but again: it’s something that makes the overall story simply work better. This is because different races and genders and sexual orientations and all the rest: they’re not checkboxes you have to fill in to pass a test. To blatantly steal from Pratchett: they are all different metals, and alloys are stronger.

I’m drifting a bit here from my original point because I started talking about my comic (which you should all read and adore, of course), but to get back to it: it’s a damn shame that the internet needs places that are “safe and supportive” for female nerds and gay nerds and non-white nerds and all of the other nerds who are not typical nerds, because everybody should have the right to act like a goddamned overgrown child about some irrelevant piece of pop-culture if they so choose because that is what we are all doing, really. The question should not even have to be posed. More people who I can argue “but Superman would TOTALLY beat up Thor” with is always going to be a benefit. More people who will argue whether the Enterprise could blow up a Star Destroyer are always welcome.3 I really don’t care if they have tits or different amounts of melanin – I care that they have fresh perspectives and new ideas, because more ideas is always better.

But so long as those places are necessary, I am determined that my place will be one of those places. This is not an ironclad promise that I will always be perfectly enlightened, because we are all works in progress and nobody ever gets it right one hundred percent of the time. But I think it is important that I try.

Okay, soapbox mode over, and tomorrow if I have time I’ll write the essay about Wreck-It Ralph that lots of people have been demanding for some reason.

1. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: I AM NOT OLD OLD, JUST, LIKE, OLDER AND STUFF [↩]
2. Unless Jim Smith is actually a pseudonym for “Laverne Washington,” which it could be. You never know with Jim. [↩]
3. Right answer: The Battlestar Galactica nukes both of them. [↩]