Hurricane Florence Coverage

Back in my day, things were (better/worse)

It turns out that things have actually been worse than you thought they were, after they were apparently slightly better than you remember at an earlier time.

Weekly Mixup

Comedians dying of cancer is funny...right?

Let's talk about Funny People. Note the capitalization, so we're not actually talking about humorous things, of jokes and quips that we find hilarious via our own thought processes.

There's no such thing as mistakes

Every kid, whether it be when they ride their bike right into a shrub, fail to hit a baseball off of a tee or decide that bagel bites belong in the DVD player, is told by their parents that they need to learn from their mistakes.

Only naturally-born U.S. citizens can read this post

Are they gone? Did every single foreign computer user abandon their post and run off to tip over old ladies, or whatever it is non-Americans do?

Who will still be the division leaders in September?

Pam Richter With the MLB midway point past us now, it is time to take a quick glance at the standings and make some predictions in each division.

Spend weeks in your basement playing video games gearing up for this one. I know I will be.

For a while there I really thought there was a betterment in the standards of the movie industry. Obviously there were always exceptions, but the last couple years I've been an advocate for the path Hollywood was taking, producing some pretty good movies on high budgets with big name actors.

One nation, under whoever or whatever the majority in the board of education decides

Kids are often compared to sponges, absorbing everything they see and experience then presumably, scrubbed against the backs of the geriatric or on a crusty plate.

Weekly Mixup

Celebrate with well-deserved fightin' words

To commemorate the 100th post on the blog, as well as pay respects to Walter Cronkite's passing, here's the very first podcast courtesy of the Opinions Blog.

Finish your veggies dear, there are starving robots that would love to eat you

It was reported earlier this week that a military robot, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR, aren't they cute with their acronyms?) would have the ability to feast upon the remains of dead people.

F&%k it! We'll yell at callers live!

Mommy, keep the Glenn Beck away from me... [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGeZQrpZbjI] "KATHY!

The mind says yes, but the eyes say no

Don't get me wrong here, I love Thomas Pynchon and his labrythntine, self-indulgent and completely enthralling prose.

The Ever Expanding Comic Book Film Industry

If you've ever seen some of the old Batman cartoons or that utterly ridiculous rendition with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, you can appreciate the leaps and bounds taken by Marvel and DC Comics over the last few years in the film world. Developed through a sense of actually-decent film making in the Spiderman and X-Men series--at least in comparison to the large budget, non-thought out style of the last few decades--the two comic book titans have started to boast their4 abilities to fund better movies, and it's most obvious in the choice of actors. Alongside a couple serious movies, an Aronofsky film being one of them, Natalie Portman has signed on to do Thor, which is set for release in 2011.

Liveblogging the All-Star Game

To further integrate ourselves with technology (and qualify for the "cyborg" tax deduction) we'll be having our very first liveblog set up tonight, in celebration of this year's All-Star game.

Weekly Mixup

That indie thing was pretty cool...

Every so often, stagnation settles into areas of our lives that were once vibrant. Let's use a pond as a metaphor for my own excitement over music (or hipster trash, if you want to call it that). Now that's what it usually looks like.

Roland Emmerich makes the same movie.. again.

Watching the tralier for the new movie from the director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow I couldn't help but notice the parallels between, well, all of these movies.

When metalheads and commentators collide

Only on Fox News can you hear the following... "After this show is over, I'm walking back down to the Rio to kill everyone." "That's awesome!" [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NQ_bE4xujs] Yes, I know it's supposed to be a comedy show (don't worry, I spoke to a producer and the jokes took a sick day during that particular installment) but I think this is still worthy of a collective, "Huh?" or perhaps a group, "But...why?"

Show bum, hump strangers, mock hicks, repeat

The "Bruno" press assault has finally left town (but don't worry, in a few years when Sacha Baron Cohen disguises himself as a Brazilian woman to expose the prejudices against the opposite sex in "Bertha" the same media blitzkrieg will take place) and I can't help but be simultaneously smug and disappointed in its wake. I was siding more with the, "Bruno looks like a massive, counter-intuitive beast" crowd that held their expectations for the film in check while the rest of the world seemed to fawn over Cohen, with the progressively gaudier premiers and increasingly bland talk show appearances (until he gave up the Bruno act altogether to appear on "The Late Show with David Letterman"). But in the back of my head, I held the expectation that despite my snooty disbelief that lightning could strike twice after the brilliance of "Borat," the film would jump out and pleasantly surprise me. But it didn't.