Chicago: Where have all the serial killers gone?

Jesse: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22perverted+commas%22+joyce&btnG=Google+Search

—Yes.

xpost Oh that will do just fine, then. Does the Polish buffet have veggie options?

I've never been there before, but it seems like it could be an adventure. I'm choosing the restaurant as part of my duty for Restaurant Club (click for a hilarious picture of me in full beard), which means there could be random people I went to college with in attendance, but it's also a little out of the way and unconventional enough that I suspect most people won't bother.

&mdash

Oh, he was never bad, but why hide that face? Nevermind, it's out of our hands anyway now. His girlfriend gets to decide if he has a beard or not.

Idiocracy was quite funny.

You think so? I thought he shot his whole wad in the first five minutes, and the rest was plodding and, yeah, kinda stupid. It certainly didn't work as satire. Maybe it worked occasionally as dirty jokes ("Go away! I'm 'batin!") but what was really the point, other than that all of humanity is fundamentally dumb, likes junk food, and likes to screw? Was he trying to equate all these things? I take offense, Mr. Judge. I am not dumb, but I like to screw, I watch violent movies, I eat nasty-ass food sometimes, and I even enjoy advertising if I think it clever. I do not feel that I am going to be the downfall of human civilization. Was he saying that I am deluded? That I am at the bottom of humanity without realizing it? Was he saying that everyone in the world is stupid? That's not satire, and it's not clever. It's simple misanthropy. If that's his big statement, it's not likely to win him many friends. And if his whole point was to make fart jokes, why wrap it in such weak social satire?

Pretty bad movie.

I can't get past this sentence. Did we see the same movie?

I misuse en-dashes - I put a space between them, and on the Internet I've made the choice to just use a simple hyphen. As opposed to the proper way--like this.

Satire of what, exactly? Everyone in the whole damn world being less smart than everyone who sees this movie? No wait, maybe his point was more subtle than that. Maybe it was that 500 years in the the future, everyone will see advertising everywhere they look! OMG even on their clothes! The dystopia of it all! I gag at the very thought!

Or maybe his point was something about our ruining the environment. Because 500 years in the future, we will be too stupid to know to water our crops with water instead of Gatorade. I'm not arguing for the plot to be logical on this point, but still. Really now. If this is satire, it's ham-fisted and silly. And so is this movie. At best.

Um, everything?

(watch our for spoilers below, those who care about such things)

I am not saying that this is the smartest, most well-exectuted satire ever. But how could you have not completely lost it at the fat fucking slobby greeter in the city-sized Costco: "Welcome to Costco, I love you." Or the plastic dinosaur wearing a Nazi flag fighting a plastic dinosaur wearing an American flag being presented at a "museum" as representing World War II? What about characters named "Frito" and "Mountain Dew"?

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This kind of shit (people sharing names with companies/products) is already happening in the real world today!

This movie was an over-the-top, ridiculous send-up view of the future. It skewers so many aspects of our current culture so completely, with such an eye for details, that it was almost impossible to take it all in. Corporate culture, macho nationalism, social/political apathy, Arnold Schwartzenegger... you name it, they got 'em good. I also think the movie did a good job of finding fault with the "left" or "opposition" or whatever you want to call it for over-intellectualizing problems, being weak/indecisive/factionalized and cowtowing to big money interests just like the corporate whores do. ("I like money. I can't believe you like money and sex too!") I don't think it's filled with hate for humanity at all, except aspects of humanity like greed and sloth and complacency.

Sorry you didn't like it, Kenan. I laughed my ass off, and so did just about everyone else there as far as I could tell.

Ok, that was damn funny. And kinda subtle, even.

What about characters named "Frito" and "Mountain Dew"?

That's where he lost me.

I also think the movie did a good job of finding fault with the "left" or "opposition" or whatever you want to call it for over-intellectualizing problems, being weak/indecisive/factionalized and cowtowing to big money interests just like the corporate whores do.

Man. I wish I had seen the same movie you did.

racist.

I wish I'd done some god damn research before I willy-nilly applied to law schools. I would have gone to Kent.

En dashes go between numbers (working 9–5) and when you want to hyphenate a multi-word proper name to another word (those Sesame Street–watching punks). Em dashes are the long dashes that come up much more often—most often to separate parts of a sentence.

"En" and "em" are typographical widths—the width of a lowercase n and a lowercase m. I believe that in typewriter (monospace) fonts you are supposed to put a space around the double hyphen that indicates the em dash -- as is usually done around here.

I love the em dash, but back when I was a copy editor I would practically orgasm at the opportunity to put an en dash where it belonged.

You're being hip and retro!