George Thorogood became the King of Rock and Roll in 1977 the day Elvis died and held the title until REM killed rock and roll in 1988 with Green.

Pat Benatar doesn't get enough credit because of all the synth. There should be a whole album of cover songs of straight guys doing chick rock. And it should include "It's Raining Men".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGLZqDXau98

Question marks and exclamation points stay attached to the question or exclamation.

However, in linguistic writing, words-as-words are more usually put in italics rather than quotes.

Last, apostrophes never form plurals.*

* Anymore. That was common 20 to 30 years ago, along with indented paragraphs.

That new press room link is spiffy.

Good work, guys! This was a terrific movie. The opening prepared me perfectly well. I don't buy that we'll be mining the moon for energy or that there will be good AI for a long time, if ever, so human cloning fits with that just fine. The magic beans are that this is a future where stuff you've heard about on NPR Science Friday maybe being possible has been made practical (altho what they're doing is really human copying, as you point out, which is less believable even than good AI).

I had a problem with the amount of sunk cost in the clone depository, tho. If you count the bays, there seems to be about 150 pods. There's no way they'd need that many clones before figuring out how to eliminate the need for a human operator. Given how difficult it is to move around and stay alive on the moon, it makes far more sense to remotely operate semi-autonomous robots from earth.

Top 5 excuses to not attend school today.

1. Already attended a different school today.

2. Got the day off for helping the police catch some counterfeiters.

3. Going to Space Camp at NASA, only they said that we are really going to the moon.

4. Uncle died, and I have to go to the funeral and pick up his Ferrari, which he left to me.

5. Donating part of my liver today so they can clone it and give it to Steve Jobs, because the doctors said I have the best one they've ever seen and his old one is rotting because he swallowed a spider and it was pregnant and laid eggs in his stomach and the baby spiders ate his liver.

Top 5 top science crap Hollywood keeps getting blatantly wrong.

I always figured that guy had a weird porn collection.

Some substances need to be controlled because they are severely addictive, because addiction takes away the free will that allows you to exercise good judgment and remain a responsible and productive member of society. It's one thing to be stoned for a couple of hours in a location of your choosing; it's something else to be sober but desperate for a fix and willing to do anything.

Anything that is not especially addictive—including marijuana and alcohol—should be legal. Anything that is highly addictive—including Oxycontin, cocaine, and heroin—should be illegal.

I'm flexible about nicotine on principle because hardly anybody ever went in for prostitution or armed robbery to get cigarettes, but as a product you sell to consumers that takes away their ability to choose not consume it, it's a comically bad product that amounts to purposeful fraud.

It is. It gave me high hopes for something in the Belgian to Japanese range, as I have come to expect from Down in Front. But once I got to "There's not much to say about this movie" and "Now we're just quoting lines again", it was pretty much over. It wasn't bad; it just wasn't French, and nowhere near double-French (yes, my scale of 1 to French has a bonus rank).

"Restaurateur" is like that. No N.

This thread seems to have brought out the true level of nerdism of its posters.

Count me as another pot teetotaler (teepotaler?) who supports legalization. I don't have a vision of what a truly marijuana-tolerant society would look like but it can't be worse than one with beer commercials. ("Try Lucky Strike Green! The natural choice of discriminating smokers who appreciate a great-tasting mellow! Please smoke responsibly.")

Well, then he's actually in a Mandelbrot set, then isn't he? And, as a wise man once said, that's one bad-ass fucking fractal.

Seriously, tho, I'm totally on board with any version of Matrix 2 and 3 that brings the sexy back: computer hacking, parasitic bugs that are tracking devices, running away from things....

Also, as I see it, you have three choices as to what to do with Smith:
1) Make him the same super-villain as before
2) Make him a super-duper-villain
3) Make him turn friendly
bonus) hand-wave him away as deleted or corrupt

All these choices have problems. 1 and 3 are too easy on the protagonists; you pretty much have to amp up the danger for the heroes in act 2, and the sequel generally becomes act 2 in a larger story. So the villain of any sequel is almost always more powerful than the one in the first movie—but of course it doesn't have to be the same villain.

DoctorSubmarine chooses 1, and the Wachowskis chose 2. Lucas chose 2 for Vader. The Pirates movies chose 3 for Norrington, then changed to 1. Cameron chose 3 for Terminator.

I think 3 would work best for Matrix, provided that you actually had Smith be reassigned or reprogrammed and Neo went to him instead of going to the Oracle (which was all BS in the first place and which the sequels don't need), and Smith was actually weirdly neutral and basically harmless. How freaky would it be to see your nemesis from the first film essentially lobotomized in the sequels? Of course, Neo then needs a different foe in 2 and 3, and that, of course, is Smith's boss.

Aw yeah. Timothy Hutton is all "You loved Brain Bug more than me!" and Mary Tyler Moore is all "Yeah! Why can't you be more like Brain Bug!?" and Judd Hirsch is like "M.I. does the dying. Fleet just does the flying."