Another week of pop culture comes to a close. What have we learned?
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I can’t even come up with a pithy way to sum up the story of the boy who we thought was trapped in a balloon, but actually wasn’t, and it turns out the family has a history of grabbing the spotlight anyway.
Question: wasn’t this, more than anything, a job for Superman? Seriously – what element of the U.S. emergency response infrastructure could deal with rescuing a young boy from a Mylar balloon other than “human with VTOL capability”?
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Several anticipated movies opening this weekend: Where The Wild Things Are, New York I Love You, Black Dynamite (in NY / LA and some others). And several less-anticipated movies, like Law-Abiding Citizen.
Question: has Gerard Butler ever made a good movie?
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And finally, Happy Birthday to Angela Lansbury, a smokin’ 84 years young today. We can thank her for updating the genre of Nosy Civilians Conducting Police Business from the early 20th century (Agatha Christie) into the late 20th. Of course, she also voiced Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, the witch Mrs. Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Anne of Austria in George Sidney’s The Three Musketeers and the conniving Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate.
Question: if a friend or family member got murdered and a mystery author helped apprehend the killer, how would you feel about her writing a novel which (just) fictionalized the circumstances?
Answer these and other questions in this week’s Open Thread!