The one criticism here that I agree with is that museums, aquariums & other educational nonprofits shouldn't be charging 40-60 bucks a ticket for ordinary people to attend. In Monterey Bay's defense it's in a tourist destination where most people are already paying to be there.

Anyway, the replies are where I'm realizing that as much as the American left has alienated me these past several years, I'm not actually right wing. Welp. .

If you're an LA parent with young kids I highly recommend annual family memberships to the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park. We spent so many weekends there my kids could navigate the exhibits with their eyes closed.

When my kids were little we spent several years between jobs and broke as hell, so I became very attuned to which of greater LA's cultural institutions had free & discounted admissions. We also asked family for museum & zoo family memberships as Christmas presents.

My most bleeding heart opinion is that it's good for society to give poor people free or heavily discounted access to culturally and intellectually enriching experiences.

I picked that toy name at random but IMDB tells me that at one point Lena Dunham was supposed to write the Polly Pocket movie for Lily Collins to star in. See, writer? That was time wasted. You never stood a chance.

I get that we all need to spend time in the IP mines, but damn does it feel better doing the thing that made you want to do this for a living instead of being told that after all that time you spent working for free you came in second on writing the Polly Pocket movie.

Screenwriters, I cannot recommend enough the experience of spending some time blowing off every "Hey, will you work up a take on this book/IP/half-baked concept for free?" request you get in favor of putting your head down and writing something that belongs to you and you alone.

Did the Sopranos writers ever explain why they made Ralphie a Gladiator superfan? Did it just seem funny or were they making fun of a specific person the way they took shots at Santa Monica's Crossroads school by having Meadow's douchey college boyfriend be a graduate?

Apparently they omitted a shot of a giant elephant getting an arrow through the eye as too upsetting and also added more shots of horses getting stomped out & flung into the air to help viewers get over their instinctive sympathy for elephants.

In the audio commentary for Return of the King, Peter Jackson talks about how carefully they had to edit the horses vs. giant elephants battle because when they showed too much violence against the elephants, audiences started feeling sorry for them.

I also like how the orangutan has a little bit of the Andre the Giant "no, no, no!" expression going on.

"Why don't visual effects look as good as they did in 2000s movies?" takes have to ignore how consistently fantastic the last four Planet of the Apes movies have looked. and on relatively thrifty budgets compared to equivalent films, too.

"Sir, this is a Wendy's.".Yeah, so? Like Wendy's employees don't deserve to know about Freemasonry's ties to Archduke Ferdinand's assassination and the outbreak of the First World War?.

I really hope they find those kids in Texas safe and sound.

We checked out Heads of State hoping for a couple hours of stupid fun and it delivered. along with an unexpected endorsement of NATO and western multilateral engagement.

It's fascinating how you can see the sibling resemblance between Michael and Virginia Madsen despite him having had an extremely masculine presence while she has always come across as hyper feminine.

RT @JenniferTilly: Michael was one of my favorite actors I ever worked with. “The Getaway” was very early in my career and he made me feel….

If super producer Lauren Shuler-Donner @ShuDonner is still on this website, I wonder if she could speak about the process that led to an actor better known for his menacing roles getting cast as the film's tough but loving blue collar father figure.

Also, did they change the title Free Willy for the UK release because, uh. .