I agree with all except the Wikipedia one, expanding its scope out SLIGHTLY in that it’s quite useful for non-American readers. If there’s a fairly abstruse discussion of American politics, then Wikipedia is good as a basic primer as to who is who. It could be that you have a different perspective, in that things which are just naturally part of your cultural milieu — of COURSE people know why George McGovern hates George Meany, of COURSE people know about Notre Dame University, of COURSE people know why we care what G. Gordon Liddy thinks — aren’t natural to ‘the rest of us’.

“Saying “but I have gay friends” after you say something homophobic is a lie, and you know it.”

Amen, brother.

And, may I add, “You super-cool screen name… isn’t.”

The moment I read the post title I got ready to find something to disagree with, but nope, nothing there.

>Publishers, film producers, television networks, etc., are not trying to spite you.

So true. You should do something on Get Off The Internet about Star Trek fans who keep asserting that J.J. Abrams filmed Scotty’s Engineering deck in a brewery as a deliberate fuck-you to the real fans.

President Obama is a centrist politician who will expend effort & money on big corporation but will most likely not repeal DADT, or explicitly endorse gay marriage or end the Iraq occupation shortly, or enact universal health care or if he does it will involve given a huge chunk of taxpayer money to private insurers.

Also the brewery was not the FU, “Klingon Warbirds” is.

The truth, Binkley, is that you look like a carrot.

british TV has the illusion of being good because you can cherry pick and not watch it according to our schedules. have you ever heard of two pints of lager and a packet of crisps? that’s a sitcom shown almost nonstop on the channel where they do torchwood and all the dr who special bonus stuff. it’s one of the worst things ever to happen on television ever (not that i’m big on dr who, but about 5 years ago BBC3 was showing 15 storeys high, one of the best things ever to happen on television).

there’s loads of american TV i love, but having to watch TV in america might make me want to die – am i right in thinking at least a third of airtime is commercials?

Be fair, even Derrida didn’t know what Deconstruction meant.

Most movie trilogies would have benefitted from just being one movie.

OK, but the one Star Wars movie should have been Empire, right? Or if you need to blow up a Death Star for an ending, the original with Boba Fett added in somewhere.

The only one I am going to say is “wrong” is this:
Film producers will stop making remakes when you stop going to see them.

Remaking older movies pretty much goes back to the very beginning of film making-along with adapting books/plays/comics. People complain like this is new…but it has always been the bread and butter, and even when it fails, it tends to be a safer bet than “new ideas”. And even if every person who complains about remakes stopped going? It would still be more profitable. The internet has made it seem as if lots of people hate remakes. But the fact is, the complainers are a very small subset of the movie going public-and just like “Normal people don’t care what internet nerds think about anything” the general public just doesn’t care.

(Personally, I think a large chunk of the “Remakes Suck” community thrives on remakes, because it is so easy to complain about)

A source of perpetual amusement for myself is the sheer number of people on comic boards hating on remakes and how often they use the phrase, “create something new”.

The same people who slavishly follow characters created before they were born and who are constantly (and I mean constantly) calling for another go at some beloved (and frequently canceled) book.

And I mean the exact same people, not the “same people” in that vague message board way that means “these people over here say thing and those people over there say that, so I’ll pretend it’s the same people saying these two contradictory things”. You’ll watch some poor loon go red in the face complaining about them remaking such-and-such film and how this demonstrates the complete lack of creativity in Hollywood, then his very next post two minutes later is in “WHAT CHARACTER SHOULD PETER DAVID WORK ON NEXT”, where he rattles off a laundry list of 78 beloved characters that he thinks Peter David would be a perfect fit for.

Of course, in the UK TV pundits bang on about how American TV is better because they can tell longer stories.

“Of course, in the UK TV pundits bang on about how American TV is better because they can tell longer stories.”

This was something I found interesting when listening to the new audio commentaries on the Spaced DVDs. The American guests were praising British Television while putting down American Television…but the Spaced crew did the opposite-often sggesting Spaced is pretty much an ode to American television and movies that they love.

While I agree that comics should probably be worth more, of course with the extra money going to the writers and artists, it would create something of a problem for those of us not living in America. Here in New Zealand, I have to pay $10 for every comic I buy, and as a student on a low income, it does make things difficult.