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Darren (1386)
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Not as good as the original, but I enjoyed it
The Obsolete Man
I always found it funny that David's parents didn't come to London.
Has anybody here read a real book about vampires...
Post-apocalypse people shouldn't have needed dogs to spot terminators
So how did St. Olaf massacre the trolls?
Possibly the most definitively American movie ever made
What is your favorite episode?
An interesting omission from the movie
Steve's '80s fashion scenes.
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And yet he's still your president. Enjoy the next four years.
It would have been very, very unlikely to work. This is why it both irritates and amuses me about the people acting like Trump is the next coming of Hitler. Even if he were -- and he isn't -- it isn't just the Hitler figure that makes for a slide into totalitarian dictatorship, the circumstances are just as important.
A combination of factors made Hitler's rise possible, and without them, he couldn't rise they way he did in early 1930s Germany. Some (but not all) of these are, Germany's defeat in WWI, and the nature of it: an armistice signed without that Allies ever having pushed into German territory -- this was crucial in creating the "stab in the back" myth that was key to the Nazi's rise, the delusion that politicians at home had <i>betrayed</i> Germany to defeat in a still-winnable war. The harshness of the Treat of Versailles, which saddled Germany with almost all the guilt for the war, and imposed crushing sanctions. The fragile nature of the Weimar Republic -- Germany, unlike Britain, was a country with no history of strong representative government; the Weimar Republic has been called "a democracy without democrats." Also the Great Depression, which destroyed the German economy and led to hyperinflation.
Conditions like these set the stage for dictatorship -- a strong man comes along, promises to restore pride to a defeated nation, and convinces people he offers hope for a better future that the corrupt failures currently running things don't. Things are so bad that people will voluntarily surrender freedom for security, and promised prosperity. Without this, Hitler couldn't rise, for the same reason communism never took hold in the U.S. -- life was too good, most people were well off, and nobody saw any benefit in a political revolution.
Smallville was drawn out way too long, and I lost interest long before the end. By contrast, this show went off the air before it had a chance to. I'd rather have it that way. It sucks when shows are cancelled before their time, but on the other hand, that means they never jump the shark either.
Perry wasn't a divorcee; I specifically remember him having a wife named Lucille (never seen on screen however), to whom he was still married, and who chucked him out a couple of time over misunderstandings, but they always got back together.
I also think they should never have replaced Michael Landes with Justin Whalin as Jimmy Olsen. I've read it was done because the producers thought he looked too much like Dean Cain. I think that's balderdash, and the real reason is they wanted an actor who looked somewhat like Jonathan Brandis, who was a the hot teen heartthrob of the day, over on SeaQuest DSV. Kid of the same reason they brought Walter Koenig on as Chekov on Star Trek TOS -- the <i>stated</i> reason was to acknowledge Russian contributions to space exploration, but the <i>real</i> reason was to introduce someone who looked like Davy Jones, who was the hot teen heartthrob of <i>his</i> day over on The Monkees. Copycatting is never a good idea, and it almost never works, sure enough, neither Koenig nor Whalin ever achieved that heartthrob status and lured in the desired legions of teenage girls as viewers.
I agree about John Shea, if they had made him a recurring villain who appeared no more than five or six times a season. You don't want to overuse a single villain, and if he was in the majority of episodes and Superman was <i>never</i> able to bring him down, it risks making Superman look inept.
I agree about the rest.
It came down to casting, and initially they (or I think, specifically, Deborah Joy Levine, who developed the show and ran it for the first season) didn't want Cain because he supposedly looked too young. They came back to him, however, after none of the others who auditioned read as well for the part. IIRC Kevin Sorbo was considered the next best for the role, but it went to Dean Cain. I thought he did great in the role, and I also thought he <i>looked</i> the part as well, and the fact that he has a Japanese grandparent never bothered me in the slightest.
I actually had to take you off the ignore list to come back here and point this out -- and no, I am not too big a man to gloat -- Cleopatra's half-sister Arsinoe IV, the one you rested so much of your argument on. Yeah... turns out the skull is not the that of Arsinoe, and I <i>fucking told you so</i> at the time, pointing out:
<blockquote>...that is conjecture, based on the heavily disputed assertion of Hilke Thür, made after examination of a now-missing skull. The craniometry as used by Thür to determine race is based in scientific racism that is now generally considered a pseudoscience. <i>And</i> the tomb from which that skull came has no name on it, and is <i>not</i> positively identified as Arsinoe's. <i>AND</i> the remaining bones are those of an individual too young to be Arsinoe...</blockquote>
Yet you continued to assert that the skull was from Arsinoe, and it proved Cleopatra probably had black African ancestry, and all this was firmly established fact. And now, lo and <i>fucking</i> behold:
<blockquote>Scientists have demonstrated that an ancient human skull excavated from a tomb at Ephesos was not that of Arsinoë IV, half-sister to Cleopatra VII. Rather, it's the skull of a young male between the ages of 11 and 14 from Italy or Sardinia, who may have suffered from one or more developmental disorders...</blockquote>
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/nope-this-skull-is-not-cleopatras-half-sister/
So not only <i>not</i> Arsinoe, but not even female. This is what happens when you stubbornly cling to bullshit: you end up making yourself look like a fool.
You're an asshole. Stay away from everyone.
Honestly, given he's conservative, and as such pretty much doesn't get acting roles anymore, I'm a little surprised he was still living in California and putting up with the high state taxes and all the other problems there.
It makes perfect sense to me. Eggers included it for the same reason Bram Stoker did. Count Orlok/Dracula is based on Vlad Tepes, and Vlad had a long mustache. He was a fifteenth century Wallachian nobleman, and mustaches were very common among that class. Eggers also costumed Orlok in fifteenth century Wallachian attire. Orlok is the reanimated corpse of a Transylvanian ruler who died in 1476, and apart from the decay, he appears exactly as Vlad would have appeared in life, including clothing and hairstyle.
Wrong in almost every way that matters. A lot of people, myself included, think that Carter was not only an extremely bad president, we also think that the image of him as this great and noble, humanitarian ex-president is overblown. Carter was anti-Israel to an absurd degree, and <i>entirely</i> too chummy with Yasser Arafat, the <i>terrorist</i>, and even his own secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, admitted that if Carter had had a second term, he would have sold Israel down the river. Also, Carter was known to interfere with, and outright oppose the policies of sitting U.S. presidents after he was out of office, annoying Bill Clinton on Haiti and North Korea, and his actions bordered on treasonous during Geo. H.W. Bush's presidency, when he wrote members of the U.N. Security Council urging them to thwart the Bush administration’s effort to build a coalition against Saddam Hussein to drive him out of Kuwait.
All that said, I am not aware of anyone who ever questioned the sincerity of Carter's faith. But you see, people, "MAGA people" included, can think a man sincere in his beliefs and his religious faith, and at the same time hold him in disregard -- without <i>hating</i> him mind you -- because they believe him to be an utter fool. That about sums up how many if not most conservatives feel about Jimmy Carter.
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