The evidence is so clear and unambiguous!

The smoke had barely cleared from the Boston Marathon bombing when I first saw the phrase "false flag operation" on my Facebook feed. In the days that followed, I was treated to all sorts of paranoid speculation about the attack, including people… Read full post »

Ken Levine tells all

A few years ago, a film based on the remarkable objectivism-inspired video game Bioshock was all but certain. Gore Verbinski, the mastermind behind the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, was set to direct, a script was developed, and Universal Studios was on boar/… Read full post »

It's easy to feel like an aberration when you're a stay-at-home father. Sometimes you're the only man in a room full of mothers, and sometimes you find yourself defending a woman whose husband fails to appreciate how difficult it is to keep a home in order. At times,… Read full post »

Chess: the real cause of racism

Though I've focused much of my attention over the years on how politics promotes and exacerbates a divisive view of racism in America, it is important to step back and look at the issue from a cultural perspective. After all, according to a… Read full post »

"Yippee-Ki-Yay, Mother Russia" is at least a better tagline than "Fun With a Vengeance!"

When you get to the fifth movie in a franchise, it's difficult not to be locked into a formula. After all, if the formula worked four times before, it's bound to work again, at least… Read full post »

I've seen the future, baby; it is murder

I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. After September 11, I really believed that we needed to change our thinking about terrorism. When the Patriot Act came along, I read it thoroughly and defended it. I supported the… Read full post »

Uneasy lies the head

This Friday in the U.S., PBS will be running the third and fourth episodes of its Shakespeare Uncovered series, which both deal with Shakespeare's second tetralogy of history plays--Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V--better known as the Henriad./… Read full post »

"Another article about guns?! That makes me just wanna..."

In 1764, before the United States was even a nation, four Lenape warriors entered a school in Pennsylvania, shot a schoolmaster, and killed nine children. Urged to do something as a result of this tragedy, the Pennsylvania Assembly… Read full post »

Presidential election years are always crazy, but 2012 strikes me as an especially nutty year. For the first time since I've started these annual accountings, I've had to trim several people out of my list of heroes and idiots, and settling on just five of each was a difficult endeavor.… Read full post »

Has it been another year already? Damn, I'm getting old. Alright, I guess it's time to assess the last year and account for the things I've learned.

#1. Chuck E. Cheese's Isn't So Bad

There's not a single happy person in this scene

Before 2012, when I… Read full post »

If you give cards like this to people, you are probably a terrible human being

As I was leaving the grocery store yesterday, a man told me to have a merry Winter Solstice. He wasn't an employee, mind you, but a fellow shopper, an emaciated fellow with long hair… Read full post »

As an individual, you are free to leave whenever you like

Every so often in politics, the subject of secession--as defined as the breaking away of one government body from another to make two smaller bodies--comes up. As we have just reached the end of a long and bitter… Read full post »

Final Fantasy XIII is probably the most harshly criticized single-player game in the entire canon of the flagship JRPG franchise. Though much of this criticism may be undeserved (see my own review), it seemed unwise for Square Enix to push forward with a direct sequel in Final Fantasy XIII-2.… Read full post »

At least we know the new RoboCop looks cool

Despite things I've written in the past (and pictures I've used), I'm not opposed to movie remakes on principle. However, as I see it, remakes are usually just desperate attempts to cash in on nostalgia by getting around the whole/… Read full post »

Here we see President Obama asking George Clooney for campaign funds so that he can make sure Clooney's tax rate goes up

For the last few weeks, Democratic leaders--from the president on down--have called on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney to release more than two years of his… Read full post »

There is an awful place where eagerly anticipated films go to die. This is a place where desperation rules, where the increasingly insane decisions of filmmakers, producers, actors, and distributors all conspire to tear a good idea apart. Sometimes, a film will emerge from this development hell, an… Read full post »

These days, whenever a blockbuster film is released, the studio tries to cash in with a cheap video game based on it. These games are often rushed, poorly-designed, and severely lacking in quality control. This list is not about upcoming blockbusters that would make good games, because if you… Read full post »

Al Gore wins the prize for most mentions in this entire blog series

One of the most compelling parts of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is when Gore uses ice core samples to demonstrate that CO2 levels correlate extremely well with temperature throughout climatological history, which he stron/… Read full post »

What is a movie studio to do with a profitable franchise when a sequel is impossible and a reboot won't work? These days, the answer is easy: do a prequel. With the recent release of Prometheus generating so much attention and with anticipation running high for The Hobbit: An… Read full post »

Oh Google Images, you so wacky!

With the Supreme Court set to deliver its verdict on the constitutionality of certain controversial parts of PPACA (Obamacare) this week, it is important to take a step back and look at the entire healthcare debate from a more fundamental point of view.… Read full post »

I have fond memories of playing Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 on my NES when I was kid, and some not-so-fond memories of getting through the original Mega Man. The games were ingeniously simple: you pick and choose which specially-themed stage you want to play, you beat the… Read full post »

The Himalayas

Just north of India, forming a formidable barrier between it and the rest of Asia, two techtonic plates are slowly colliding with each other and building the world's highest landmarks. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Himalaya mountain range, which is the only thin… Read full post »

If you're not a parent, don't be a jackass

In front of my favorite grocery store, beside the handicapped parking spaces, are a handful of spots labelled "Customer with Child." These spots are great for parents, and over the last few years, I've grown accustomed to parking in them.… Read full post »

At least we can all agree that Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich

"Consensus" is defined as "majority of opinion" by Dictionary.com. Though the truth is beholden to nothing, science operates by consensus, by a majority of scientists coming to a general agreement. There is nearly always a minorit/… Read full post »

Perhaps, someday, the file drawer effect will be a thing of the past

Publication bias is a potentially vexing problem for modern science that is rarely ever talked about, outside of scientific circles, due to the bad PR. Put simply, the problem is that experimental results that demonstrate s… Read full post »