The whole red pill/blue pill thing has been super influential, even traveling back in time to influence works that came out before The Matrix.

Influential != good. Or lasting as a work.

Easy to say, of course, but I don't think it would have sounded insane to me. It (the original anyway) was clearly both zeitgeisty (it even made Nokia cool in the US) and breaking new ground technologically in ways that were obviously going to be imitated. The movie was a massive cultural phenomenon right away (5th biggest US box office that year and made two thirds of its revenue abroad). Everywhere you might find a movie parody, you found a Matrix parody.

Maybe if the article means before the movie's launch, but that doesn't seem to be the point: "It was obvious even in 1999..."

Or if there's a symbol for "is orthogonal to", that.

I see it mentions "Devil's Advocate" which I rather enjoyed - I remember at the time some film critic writing a moan about the ridiculousness of Oscar season, when all sorts of no-hopers were being pitched, including "Charlize Theron for Best Actress? Really?"

I don't buy the link between The Matrix and the revival of superhero films at all. As it says, it came after "Superman" and "Batman", both of which were tremendous successes. And it was released only months before Columbia started the ball rolling on the current superhero boom in "Spiderman" - I doubt it had much impact.

Bullet time was an interesting development, sure, but the films that made everyone sit up and realise just what you could do with modern CGI were "Terminator 2" and "Jurassic Park", not "The Matrix". Jackie Chan had been bringing Hong Kong action to US cinemas for years before 1999.

And my recollection of seeing "The Matrix" in cinema wasn't that it was intellectually ambitious; it was that it was so damn shallow. The "humans as batteries" idea should never have got past the first read of the script; it's ludicrous. It would never have made it into print if "The Matrix" had been a novel rather than a film, and the fact that they went with it showed how little respect they had for their audience.

Nor had the American action film run out of steam in the late 1990s - at least, not compared to where it was 10 or 15 years before. That's a ludicrous suggestion. The late 1990s had "Heat", "Mission: Impossible", "The Rock", "Ronin", "The Siege", "The Long Kiss Goodnight", "Desperado". That's not the output of a genre that has run out of ideas.

Another thing The Matrix did was finally crack the problem of "how do you make computer hacking seem cool visually?". Movies really struggled with this, often in pretty clunky, awkward ways through the 90s.

The Matrix came up with a clever solution: "make it look like something else entirely (like gravity defying kung-fu fights and bullet dodging)".

I'm still afraid of Hugo Weaving.

Another thing: "The Matrix" definitely did not mean the end of steroidal action heroes. The best way to show this is to look at "X-Men" - which, I now note, actually came out before "Spiderman", in 2000, meaning that it was in production long before "The Matrix" was released. Look at Hugh Jackman in that film; he basically looks like a fit normal human being. Like someone you might know who works out a couple of times a week and maybe does triathlons. By "Wolverine", more than a decade later, he's this ludicrous wedge of gristle.

I thought that happened naturally with age.

I recently heard on a podcast that the Wachowskis' original concept for why the humans were in the Matrix struck the studios as too complex, and the note came down "just make them batteries".

Of course ever since then, the problem with the Wachowskis' works has been too little studio interference.

ISTR the first draft had brains serving as wetware CPUs, and executives thought that was too complicated.

I totally added value there. Three whole letters.

I don't buy the link between The Matrix and the revival of superhero films at all. As it says, it came after "Superman" and "Batman", both of which were tremendous successes.

There's a visual style of the Matrix that was absent from Superman and Batman.

But is it present in revived superhero films? Or do they have the same visual style as essentially pre-Matrix films like "X-Men"?

Jackie Chan had been bringing Hong Kong action to US cinemas for years before 1999.

Eh, that's a different kind of HK action, really. It's not even wirefu, for the most part. The Matrix is more in the John Woo/Ringo Lam tradition of "cool action" and of course Yuen Woo Ping's 90s output.

7: No kidding. One of the great movie villains of all time. Because of Smith, Elrond scared the hell out of me, which I don't think was the intended effect.

11: Thanks! I I had forgotten that part but it is what I had heard as well.

I am Ginger Yellow and I approve this comment

Ajay generally: among that Vulture series are an interview with Chad Stahelski, who says, IMO indisputably, that post-Matrix films came rapidly to center on fight scenes as much as stunts, with fight coordinators becoming equal to, or more important than, the stunt coordinators; and another piece on how The Matrix successfully combined and elevated* various pre-existing trends, some of which you mention.
*In Hollywood terms, setting aside the artistic value.

The visual style of The Matrix is what impressed me. I wouldn't call that "shallow," because it was clearly a thought out plan, but I don't think the story itself was particularly great. It didn't need to be anyway.

The Matrix is more in the John Woo/Ringo Lam tradition of "cool action"

But nonono, because when John Woo himself does a very John Woo Hollywood film with "Face/Off" apparently there's nothing new about it and it's just more of the same tired old 1980s steroids and nitroglycerine stuff.

post-Matrix films came rapidly to center on fight scenes as much as stunts,

That, on the other hand, definitely rings true.

Though I wonder how much it has to do with the fact that post-Matrix films are also superhero-boom films? Tricky to have a Hulk film without a fair amount of SMASH.

Face/Off wasn't bad or anything, but I barely remember it and most of what I do remember is being squicked out by the 'father/daughter' interaction.

Cosign 23, with the addition of the "magnetic escort boots" that everyone in the prison wore and which I am pretty sure were stolen from "Red Dwarf".

14: I can't claim to have really thought this through, but yeah, I'd say so. It's possible that I am merely responding to the superior technological possibilities today -- but then again, the use of technology was one of the places where Matrix was super-influential.

So here, for instance. Is there anything like it in X-men?

And the bit starting at 1:30 in this one is pure, unadulterated Matrix.

The visual language of Matrix was so memorable - especially the rotating camera bit - that this from Shrek (starting at around 1:50) isn't even exactly borrowing that idea - it's a parody of it.

Bullet time had precursors in Sam Peckinpah (think "The Wild Bunch") and a bunch of John Woo films as well as the 1960s Japanese anime "Speed Racer." There's a reason the Wachowskis did a live action version of it.

I can't think of any taglines from the movie, the way I can from Speed.

"I know kung fu" is the only direct quote that comes to mind, but Agent Smith's monologue when he's torturing Morpheus and the closing scene where Neo flies into the camera are both memorable. The "What if I told you" scene with Morpheus is a popular meme.

The thing about hacking reminds me of Captain Marvel, the last movie I saw in theaters. There's one scene where the protagonists have found a CD with a bit of important evidence on it. They're at a computer getting ready to listen to it. The "Loading..." progress bar is filling up. One character is more familiar with an interstellar alien civilization than Earth culture and she gets impatient and assumes something's wrong. All the other characters are like, no, it's just supposed to take this long. A bit of anticlimactic humor in a 90s period piece.

very few of my students have seen it (and I know this because I did a short thing with first year students where we read Plato's Cave and then watched it, and it was new to nearly everyone).

I thought Heebie was a math teacher. Did I misremember, or is this an unusual amount of interdisciplinary teaching, or is this a usual amount of interdisciplinary teaching and I'm out of touch, or what? (Multiple choice question, of course.)

Or what 15 said.

For my money the early third generation superhero movies - X Men, Raimi's Spiderman - just weren't very good. They did good enough business to set franchises in motion, but they were clunky, repetitive, their CGI often looked like shit*. The Matrix spectacularly raised bar for production values, and showed the studios semi-auteur blockbusters could make money. Would Warners have given Batman to Nolan if they hadn't made so much from the Wachowskis?
*And IMO The Matrix has aged infinitely better than those movies, or indeed any of the MCU movies.

The sequels failed on a lot of different levels, but their biggest mistake was setting large amounts of action outside the Matrix. The entire fun of the first movie was its exploration of reality-as-dream.

Yeah, it's probably unfair to lump it together with True Lies and Con Air, but there's no denying that Woo's Hollywood output is toned down and I would argue aesthetically compromised. If it weren't for Cage's/Travolta's bonkers performances, I don't know that Face/Off would stand out, and it hasn't influenced all that much. Whatever criticisms one might have of The Matrix, it's not toned down.

And Stahelski went on to direct the John Wick movies.

27.1 "There is no spoon"

I thought Raimi's Spiderman looked good. Of course Sam Raimi directed one of the best and most visually distinctive movies of the 80s.

I really disagree on the value of the sequels. They deepen the world-building both in the Matrix and out, show somewhat-believable societies and politics among both humans and machines, and in the process deliver at least three setpieces equal to those in the first film: the Merovingian foyer fight, the freeway sequence, and the Zion rave.

22: Point. OTOH, I don't remember a lot of fist-fighting in Donner's Superman or Burton's Batman. I do remember Batman shooting people and burning them with flamethrowers.

Is there greater or richer trans subtext in the sequels? Because those were terrible, but now I feel potentially guilty for having found them tedious.

The sequels weren't all bad, but large parts of them made me feel like I was watching somebody else play a tedious videogame.

29
For my money the early third generation superhero movies - X Men, Raimi's Spiderman - just weren't very good.

What are the generations of superhero movies? I'd guess first generation is the Golden Age serials like with George Reeves as Superman, and second generation is Christopher Reeve Superman to George Clooney Batman, sound right? Where does Blade fit? Are we still in the third generation or has the fourth started?

they were clunky, repetitive, their CGI often looked like shit... And IMO The Matrix has aged infinitely better than those movies, or indeed any of the MCU movies.

I almost want to call this trolling. I'm really tempted to argue with it, but there's a lot to unpack. No, I can't say that the specific movies listed, early X-Men and Raimi's Spider-Man, were better than The Matrix. And as for whether The Matrix has aged better than MCU movies, when I personally haven't re-watched most of them in years and some MCU movies are too new to have a meaningful opinion of that, it's hard to be sure. But "their CGI looked like shit"... compared to what, Buffy? The aforementioned Blade? Jurassic Park, which only actually had about 3 minutes of CGI and mostly relied on animatronics or not showing the dinosaurs at all and just shaking cups of water and stuff?

Personally, I remember realizing that certain wall-crawling and web-slinging scenes must have been basically all CGI hours if not days after the seeing first Spider-Man film. I'd call that a sign that the CGI was not shit. Clunky and repetitive are fair descriptions of the plots of the Raimi movies but the first two were visually stunning. Then there's Thor, which looked almost Biblical and almost inverted the stock superhero origin story.

I'd say that some more recent superhero movies were just firing on all cylinders. Maybe no superhero movies have been as influential as The Matrix, but you can't reinvent the wheel. Some of them have definitely been as good as The Matrix, or close enough that it depends on the grading system.

in the process deliver at least three setpieces equal to those in the first film: the Merovingian foyer fight, the freeway sequence, and the Zion rave.

I agree with two out of three, though I liked the freeway sequence more than the foyer fight. The Zion rave is pretty emblematic of what I thought was wrong with the latter two movies. I mean, it looked good and everything, but who cares what happens in the material world?

I recently ran across a quote from Michael Eisner, supposed to be an internal memo 1981, that while not surprising at face value, also seems to tidily encapsulate the blockbusters especially of the past couple decades, both Disney and superhero.

We have no obligation to make Art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, art, a statement, or all three.

I'm pretty sure that educated film-watchers would disagree, but I really enjoyed the multiple-Smiths fight in Reloaded.

As someone who grew up reading Chris Claremont era X-Men, the first Bryan Singer X-Men movie seemed like a watershed moment in how comic books were portrayed on film. Not in terms of special effects, but in terms of the choice to eschew camp entirely. The movie impressed me in that it really felt like the comic book.

40 explains why so many Disney movies came to feature men getting hit in the balls.

I think the Vulture piece (now that I've read it) overstates the case a bit. I don't think the Wachowskis pre-figured Lord of the Rings in any important way, but Lord of the Rings set a precedent for multiple movies with one over-arching story that was a necessary precondition for the the Marvel Comics Universe.

I think Kill Bill stole from a lot of the same folks that Matrix stole from. I don't think it was really a meaningful descendant of the Matrix. And Kill Bill, as two movies, owes everything to Lord of the Rings.

I have often told people that I have zero patience for bad movies, but this essay reminds me that this isn't really true, since I have seen True Lies, Con Air and Face/Off -- possibly all in the theater.

"Kill Bill" owes more to Meiko Kaji and her "Lady Snowblood" and and "Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion" movies though it does cop a lot from John Woo and Ringo Lam (and Bruce Lee, of course).

Kill Bill annoyed me, but not as much as the LOTR movies.

Lord of the Rings set a precedent for multiple movies with one over-arching story that was a necessary precondition for the the Marvel Comics Universe.

A precedent also followed, of course, by Disney with their "Star Wars" series.

For me, Kill Bill got better with repeat watchings and LOTR got worse. Nowadays, I can't even dip into LOTR when I'm channel-hopping.

I have a limited tolerance for gore and for Caridines.

I have often told people that I have zero patience for bad movies

I've come to the opposite conclusion about myself - I usually enjoy the experience of going to the theatre to see a movie, and it's not especially relevant if the movie is "good".

I'm still upset Tremors isn't on Netflix anymore.

The only film I've ever walked out of in the cinema was "Spiderman 2". But there are several that I've started watching at home and simply given up on. I still don't know what happens at the end of "The Fifth Element" and I don't care.

I tell my kids The Matrix is great and try to get them to watch it, but they say "No! It's rated R!" and literally run screaming from the room. I think "It," for which they somehow saw the preview, is their reference point for R-rates movies.

The Matrix is great, though, and I remember at the time the chatter was that they'd brought Hong Kong-style action to sci-fi.

Is this the movie thread? We watched "Free Solo" last night, and it's probably the most intense cinematic experience I've ever had.

The article is indeed totally wrong about LOTR, which was in production when The Matrix was released. I also suspect Tarantino could have gotten Kill Bill made anyway.
Free Solo is great.

52: They have sex while medical personnel watch.

47: Lucas can talk about how he originally envisioned the story as nine movies, but he got one movie green-lit, and had the story ended with one movie, nobody would have felt deprived of the rest of the story. Certainly the ultimate story, as told, wasn't envisioned by anyone in the '80s.

Sure, the Star Wars prequels were planned as a three-movie series, but had the first one bombed, that would have been the end of that. Lord of the Rings and Kill Bill were essentially completed before the first movie was shown in the theater -- a level of commitment that was really unprecedented.

Agent Smith's monologue when he's torturing Morpheus

This is what I bring up whenever I want to prove to someone that Hugo Weaving was trying to sound like Carl Sagan.

The sequels failed on a lot of different levels, but their biggest mistake was setting large amounts of action outside the Matrix.

Agreed, mostly. The best part of the second movie is the highway fight. The third did have some neat parts where (IIRC) it blurred the edges between "reality" and the Matrix, but it does loose a bit when what you're seeing doesn't look like our day-to-day.

Also worth mentioning that The Animatrix --a collection of animated shorts inspired by The Matrix and fleshing out its lore, done in varying styles--was very good.

The first one of those sucked, but not as bad as the next two.

To 56.last.

54: Kill Bill was planned as a single movie before the success of LOTR.

I like the LOTR movies fine, but it's kind of sad that we never got to see Tarantino's take on Tolkien.

57.last Seconded.

I'm glad to see a re-evaluation of The Matrix as there seemed to be a settled opinion that it sucked. And it does not. Also the Wachowskis are great. I wish they were still making movies.

Face/Off is amazing, what's wrong with you people.

I wish MCU films were more influenced by The Matrix, several MCU films are very good but almost none of them have good action choreography.

45: Those movies are often lousy but MK is an astonishingly powerful screen presence.

Marie Kondo?

53
I tell my kids The Matrix is great and try to get them to watch it, but they say "No! It's rated R!" and literally run screaming from the room. I think "It," for which they somehow saw the preview, is their reference point for R-rates movies.

Heh, how old are your kids again? 8 or so? When I was that age, I probably would have been thrilled by the idea of watching an R-rated movie, as long as I didn't know in advance it was pure horror, and suspicious only of why my parents were letting me.

Reminds me of something I've been thinking to myself lately. My daughter is almost 4 and the parenting achievement I'm most proud of is the fact that she thinks all soda tastes like Perrier, which she hates. Someday she's going to find out that sweet sodas exist, but until then her teeth will be so shiny you can see your reflection in them.

Nobody should get grills for their minor children.

it's kind of sad that we never got to see Tarantino's take on Tolkien.

The long digressions into obscure lore do seem tailor-made for a Tarantino film. Also the fact that most of the protagonists spend most of their time barefoot. And do we want to see Steve Buscemi as Smeagol? We do.

54. Agree that "Free Solo" was excellent. There's something about watching someone do something amazing that you can't imagine doing yourself under any circumstances.

Uma Thurman could do Galadriel easily.

Steve Buscemi would make an excellent Smeagol.

It's a shame James Gandolfini isn't around to play Gimli or better yet, Gandalf.

Stevie Van Zandt and Tony Sirico as Merry and Pippin.

Edie Falco as Arwen.

Lorraine Braco as Galadriel.

Michael Imperioli as Boromir.

Help me out here.

I'm dying to see Apollo 11

Samuel L. Jackson as Gandalf.

72: I saw it. I enjoyed it.

Well, sticking with the Reservoir Dogs cast, I was picturing:
Tim Roth: Legolas
Harvey Keitel: Aragorn
Michael Madsen: Boromir
Quentin Tarantino: Pippin
Edward Bunker: Gimli
Chris Penn: Merry
Steve Buscemi: Smeagol

And, branching out a bit to the other films:
Gary Oldman: Samwise
Samuel L Jackson: Frodo
Christopher Walken: Gandalf
Uma Thurman: Arwen

73: yes. And Ving Rhames as Saruman?

Do you know what they call lembas in Rohan?

"Does Denethor look like a bitch? Then why are you trying to fuck him like one?"

Still sticking with the Sopranos casting.

Dominic Chianese as Saruman

Nancy Marchand as Sauron

Tarantino was going to do a Star Trek, too. That seems like a terrible idea, but I'd still watch it.

||
Is there anyone who 1) has access to Scientific American and 2) wouldn't mind grabbing a behind-the-firewall article for me? TIA mucho mas.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-inequality-harms-the-environment/
|>

77: Elvish, motherfucker! Do you speak it?

I can help, also you may find this wikipedia article interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

That would be great, lw! Could you send it to mypseud at geemail?

Have I ever done my Apocalypse Now! as Warner Bros cartoon characters bit here?

Bugs Bunny as Capt. Willard: "I don't see any method at all, doc"

Foghorn Leghorn as Chief Petty Officer Phillips "I see I say right here rabbit, this boat is not going to Cambodia!"

Yosemite Sam as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore: "Charlie don't surf, rabbit""

Sylvester the Cat as the photojournalist "he'th a big man, I'm juth a thmall man!"

Elmer Fudd as Col. Kurtz: "I watched a wascally wabbit cwawl awong the edge of a stwaight wazor. That's my dweam. That's my nightmare" "If I had ten diwisions of those men, our twoubles here would be ower wewy quickwy." "You're neither. You're an ewwand boy, sent by gwocery cwewks, to cowwect a bill hehehe."

There were others but I've forgotten.

74: (Sci-Hub doesn't seem to work for S.A.)

One of my lasting memories of The Matrix is watching it after the second movie, which I didn't like, and realizing that except for a couple sequences I didn't like the first one either.

"The way your dad looked at it, Thorin, this ring was your birthright. He'd be damned if any orcs gonna put their greasy hands on his boy's birthright, so he hid it, in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years, he wore this ring up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the ring. I hid this uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I escaped Dul Guldur. If I've taken my time returning it, you can hardly blame me."

Ok 88 is fantastic

It's pretty much canonical. I mean, where else was Thrain supposed to have hidden it?

Honestly, I don't know everything about the anatomical features of non-human beings in Tolkien.

88 last -- bringing Tolkein back into it -- is what makes it extra-great. But it's map! Not a ring.

Shit. You're right.

I mean, "nerd."

Good point. He lost the Ring but kept hold of the map and the key.

I didn't see The Matrix when it came out, but I do remember seeing in 1999 a marquee in downtown Madison that had been set up, with obvious glee, to read

ANALYZE THIS
MATRIX

. The "What if I told you" scene with Morpheus is a popular meme.

Oh yeah, I forgot about this one.

I thought Heebie was a math teacher. Did I misremember, or is this an unusual amount of interdisciplinary teaching, or is this a usual amount of interdisciplinary teaching and I'm out of touch, or what?

Nah, it was a one-off Intro to College course that I did once or twice early on, which I loathed and haven't done in years and years. (Yikes, it might have actually been 2008, because it was election season for Obama's first term. Time flies when the country is in the shitter.)

96: Sometimes it takes a pun just to get to normal.

I looked it up and see that 10 Things I Hate About You opened up the same day as The Matrix. Why isn't that getting any 20th-anniversary-buzz? I remember lots of parts of it.

Obviously, it didn't result in fundamental shifts in movie making, but it did result in Australian actors getting leading roles that weren't limited to hunting crocodiles.

Speaking of which, why hasn't there been a Steve Irwin biopic?

The stringray's agent keeps asking too much for the story.

||

Cleaning out my departed grandmother's stuff in storage, my family has apparently found the saved job advertisement from my widowed great-grandfather for a governess/housekeeper, which space was filled by the woman who would become my great-grandmother.

|>

Did they find the clothes made out of curtains too?

Also, my condolences.

Would you buy a car without a test drive?

ogged's Tesla was last week.

This thread didn't make me feel old, but the notice that gmail is 15 years old really did. It's all there, from before the second time I dropped out of graduate school to now.

Here you go, Mobes.

Jesus Christ I picked the wrong day to be too sick to be online. Bravo to 88 and 85, among others.

110: Thanks.

OT: Can't you just go to a wig shop, buy some hair, wash it with a nice shampoo, and then sniff away in the privacy of your own house?

Will my life be enriched by knowing the context for that comment?

I think it's best to find ways to enrich your life from within.

I'll take that as a no.

113: Are you talking to me?

117 brings knowledge, but not enrichment.

Enrichment should come from without.

Update to 104: I now have the ad, pasted to an almost-as-old letter talking about it. It demands an imposing list of household and child management skills, then personality traits like "sunny, responsive, spontaneous", and later "not too religious".

Apparently it was the "talk of the town" for its unsavory frankness. The letter speaks of it being read aloud at a society Dinner.

120: The implication being that he was hoping to find a spouse?

Or a live-in mistress, perhaps.

122: How dare you! Impudent youth!

Not to mention ungrateful.

||

So the mayor of Baltimore is taking an "indefinite leave of absence" over a scandal that somehow involved the University of Maryland purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of children's books that she authored.

Lamest scandal ever?

|>

|| Trump said last week that Venezuela's electricity problems are especially bad because "they have a lot of electric cars."

It doesn't surprise me that he will tell the most outrageous lies to make himself look good, but this -- where does he even come up with this nonsense? |>

He has a colon, but not in a way we can understand it.

Not the University of Maryland, the University of Maryland Medical System, a private, for-profit (how did they get forced into being for-profit? their peers are usually non-profit no matter how ruthless and profit-hungry they are) corporation founded in 1994.

Maybe people were able to demand they paid taxes?

Which is made up of hospitals almost entirely in Baltimore and the Eastern Shore, because the University of Maryland medical school is in Baltimore. Barely even related to the large university in the DC beltway.

Apparently the board of the hospital system has a lot of corruption with board members running companies that sell things to the hospital. The mayor of Baltimore, not having a business, sold the hospital 100,000 copies of children's books that nobody wants. This is the most hilarious branch of UMMS corruption but I would guess there are much worse cases of UMMS corruption that are boring and not masterminded by controversial black women.

128: Stlll, it sounds pretty tepid. I mean, maybe it will turn out to be part of a money laundering scheme to cover up payoffs to hit men hired to assassinate her political opponents; that would be a proper scandal. Otherwise, children's books? Lame.

I give it one and a half Teapot Domes out of five.

Feels more like the kind of scandal you'd get in Finland.

The book-buying thing is a fairly ordinary form of graft. I remember Jim Wright getting busted for it.

Newt Gingrich tried to get his payment in the form of a big advance. I assume publishers do this because they know that there will be bulk purchases.

I really hope that's how The Velveteen Rabbit sold so many copies. That people are reading it to children seems improbable.

It's not horrible, like The Giving Tree, but just seems pointless and sad.

Wait, what's a children's book that isn't "pointless"?

That's a rhetorical question, at least given that I'm asking Moby.

The Monster at the End of this Book isn't pointless. You learn that fear itself is the mind killer.

And if you already knew that, you learn that Groover is a piece of shit.

104 & 120 are so great.

Coincidentally, I was just reading this about UMMS for work reasons.

UMMS is private but non-profit -- used to be was public, was privatized in 1984. Like many non-profit hospitals, it's run by assholes who get a tax exemption to be at least as greedy as their for-profit counterparts.

OT: Foucault's Pendulum, American style.

In 104/120 I missed the best part: before saying "not too religious", he specified "nominally Protestant".