Once inside, they befriend tattooed Yakuza and form the basis of a hilarious sitcom.

Recently I stumbled across this eyebrow-raising article. In Japan, a country with the world’s oldest average age, the number of senior citizens committing crimes is on the rise — primarily because they are lonely. It seems that socially disconnected seniors would prefer the stability and community of prison over the more metaphorical solitary confinement of their later years.

Boy, those grandkids must feel record-breaking levels of guilty.

Would you choose living the rest of your life effectively alone, or living the rest of your life in prison?

What could change your answer? Do you think you’d feel differently as you age?

The only legendary actor brave enough to let his final role involve serious bowel trauma.

Phantom Thread: didn’t love it. I’m sorry! Lots of people did, and that’s cool. It was certainly pretty.

Generally I’d rather not try to review a movie that didn’t do it for me. But okay, just a little.

Maybe because in a love story where the love feels unmotivated, it undercuts my investment in the whole story –like The Shape of Water, but from a darker perspective.

Maybe because the movie seemed to both celebrate and have contempt for its main character, portraying him as a foolish blowhard but also lovingly praising his brilliance, which left me confused and even a bit angry — much like Wolf of Wall Street. (Man, I do not like that movie.)

In fact, that made me think that in particular, I’m pretty well over movies about terrible men that we are supposed to be entertained by, and that the films seem to glamorize for the majority of their stories, but that, *wink*, all us smart viewers know in our hearts are awful, so it’s ok to spend hours laughing at their misdeeds. I’m not really buying that argument.

So instead of talking about the deep themes of a movie I didn’t like, a simpler question:

Who’s more over-rated, Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson?

You can answer this even if you love both! I personally like several of the movies by both of them. But… definitely not all, nor would I call either “The Best Living…” anything, based on my tastes.

Controversial!

Terminators? Ha. Any AI worth its microchips knows: they never see the cute ones coming.

As computing power rises exponentially, the singularity approaches. In our lifetimes, it’s very possible an artificial super-intelligence could essentially become a god on earth — our fates bound to the hope that new god we’ve created is a benevolent one.

Meanwhile, due to centuries of man-made destruction to the earth’s climate, temperatures rise and water reserves dwindle, while mass migration and war over resources lay just over the horizon.

Which end-of-the-world scenario would you rather face, AI takeover or climate catastrophe?

Assume you are indeed going to live through it, not die immediately as it kicks off. (Nice try.)

Bonus question: if this toss-up is too easy a choice, which two doomsday scenarios would be harder to choose between? 

Most “best ever” Super Bowl ads are just sexy girls, according to dummies who take surveys on best ever Super Bowl ads.

The Super Bowl is getting close, which always brings back the weird habit of people who don’t care much about either team saying, “Who cares, I’ll just watch for the commercials,” which doesn’t happen during any other day of the year.

But on all those other days, people hate ads; meanwhile lower TV viewership is making it harder to sell the ads that pay for the shows. So if both are true, we can’t be far from a breaking point, in terms of actually sustaining television as a business.

How would you rather TV creators and networks get compensated?

Either: New technology makes skipping ads or changing channels impossible, so you have to watch the ads to see the show?

Or: Cable services, Hulu, and anything else you use to watch television cost double or triple what it does now, with no more ads, ever?

This “sassy” tween rapper makes my skin crawl every time.

An easy either/or question today inspired by a recent plane trip.

Which unbearable crap that is somehow allowed to be forced down our throats on a regular basis would you banish from this earth:

The nearly FIVE MINUTE LONG Virgin America music video about safety?

Or the seemingly-on-every-channel-all-the-time-despite-being-willfully-unfunny Big Bang Theory?