I really didn't intend to sweep everyone under one rug. And fuck me, I am only presuming that the American Gods show is focusing on "people from Latin America" (your term), based on the dialogue I've heard in previews and casting choices. The story is about the "original immigrants" — gods from a host of different cultures, so even even if the main characters are from the Norse pantheon, multiculturalism is a major part of the whole thing. If the shoe is anything like the book and stories, it will include Arabic, Hindu, Crimean, and South African characters, mythologies and cultural histories, among others.

I apologize if what I said was insulting or dismissive in ANY way.

Though just to be clear, when I was in school I took a graduate course in cultural social work, and (because generalist MSW courses are often terrible) we studied racial and cultural designations. For better or worse, "Latino/a" was the recommended term.

Not passing the buck on my poor cultural literacy, but I am definitely deflecting part of the blame to the American academic system.

No Offense season 2
Portlandia season 7

no prob. no offense taken. just sharing info about my little island imperialist colony.

the latest ALways Sunny was funny. I also watched the second waterpark episode again. too funny.

Me and the wife have been watching Cheers on Netflix. Also about 4 eps into new Black Mirror season. creepy as all fuck.

The newest Sherlock season was real hit or miss. I do not think Sherlock did any detective work whatsoevere. fucking tedious. The showrunners wrote all the episodes this last season and they made it much more like a superhero movie like the shit shit shit jude law and robert downey jr sherlock films, where he also does not detective work and is somehow a master MMA fighter in 1880's England....

@ severian - nobody is blaming you man.

just explaining is all.

the first time i came to the us is the first time i had to pick a racial label for myself. seriously. i don't know what my "race" is.

i often refuse these nazi categorizations & checkmark "other" and in the blank space write "human".

if there's money in it i'll take the label though ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa

Well, a litter of mongrel puppies is what "American" means too, though a little over half the population is really into forgetting all about that.

Actually, I think the same is true of a lot of cultures and "races." In that same godawful cultural S.W. class, we did some lineage tracing to prove some point that now escapes me. By all accounts from my family, and even, ultimately, in the class, I'm close to being of 100% Irish. But if going back a bit, I see that I had a great-great-grandmother who married the son of an Italian whose mother was half Greek. In Ireland. But I'm "Irish." And — funnily enough — the Irish people I've met tell me that if I were to say that in Ireland, I'd be lauhed out of the pub.

See.. now I'm remembering that we were essentially using Ancestry.com for accredited graduate coursework, which is of course obscenely stupid. So if you ever hear me bitching again about how I wish I'd stayed in grad school, do me a favor and remind me of this.

EDITED TO ADD:
In all fairness, that class was an elective. I had much better teachers and far fewer mind-numbingly stupid assignments in my program work.

I try to write in Human as well...

"race' is such a holdover concept from the white patriarchy supremacy mindset. it needs to be discarded. we are all one species.

no one is 100% anything. NO ONE. even the most inbred British royal family dipshit has a radical mix of shit in their DNA. Fuck, the "royal" family of assholes that England loves to suck ass on are fucking FRENCH!!!!!!!!!!! FRENCH!!!!!!!!!!

No they're not. If anything they're German, but not French.

Sunny was funny.

Re: Sherlock.
I've heard the same things. It's all Moffat's doing. He's done great things on Doctor Who, against all odds (he was tasked with following David Tennant's franchise-saving 10th Doctor after all, so I think he's done pretty well on the whole.) But honestly, he tries to make Doctor Who a bit too "superhero-y" at times too. And Doctor Who kind of already IS a superhero, so it should take some serious misuses of canonical character attributes to make it seem like "too much," and yet...

Anyway, the RDJ/Jude Law movies were a product of their time. "Gritty," violent origin story reboots were in vogue back then. Unfortunately, I think the wonderful Batman Begins is to blame, however unintentionally.
Batman Begins begat Casino Royale begat "dark" Sherlock the American kickboxer begat JJ Abrams' Star Trek begat JJ Abrams' Star Wars. It was the best and worst of times for gritty reboots. I think the movies are OK for a larf, but as a fan of Doyle's stories, I can't in good conscience stomach their existence.

Sherlock (BBC) seemed a fitting antidote to that for the first 2 seasons. But I've heard tons of people say exactly what you're saying about the new eps, and that's a damn shame. I hear they cast the guy who played Dr. Zola in Captain America as the villain. Oi.

Loved the "Moriarty" character though. Forget the name of the guy who played the part, but he was excellent. ALTHOUGH, to be entirely fair, that character had Heath Ledger Joker syndrome pretty fucking bad. He was great, but the writers were definitely going for THAT kind of vibe. So maybe the show's been harboring superhero aspirations the whole time.

(Fun fact: That guy who played Moriarty was also in SPECTRE, the unnecessary third sequel to the aforementioned "gritty" Batman Begins-influenced 007 reboot. And Benedict is Doctor Strange... AND Khan... so these reboot factories are clearly all dipping into the same pool.

new Sherlock. Just a bunch of trying to be way too clever. Sort of like a Black Mirror spin off. Vapid, I blame Mark Gatiss, he's OK in the role, but the writing is pretty poor. On the Sherlock movies, I disagree, I think that the Guy Ritchies are pretty entertaining, the visuals are fantastic, esp Game of Shadows. The pre ww1 German army with the forest shelling scene!
Eddie Marsan is great in them as Lestrade, and I like Stephen Fry better as Mycroft than Gatiss, and Jared Harris better as Moriarity.

From a social science perspective, "race," though certainly an antiquated concept, can have a positive influenc on self-realization and cultural identity. I think a lot of people, even the most progressive, would shun the idea of abandoning "race" if they were asked to do it themselves. I'm not quite sure we're "there" yet. People have a surprising amount of effect-blindness to the negative results of viewing the world in terms of in- and out-groups... in the sense that they see how racial identity can unite, but inexplicably don't seem to see how it can divide. This is true of most people all over the world.

Right now, we're at an evolutionary impasse with regard to this stuff. Most sane people openly admonish segregation when it's imposed, but their own mental schemas of the world are still built on principles of categorization, classification and segregation. They don't want it to be forced upon them physically, but they want to engage in it cognitively and perceptually.

I don't think "we" have the capacity for understanding necessary to surpass this tendency yet. Until we do, I don't think we'll be ready for a "post-race" society.

More likely, it will be a slow brute force act of evolution that wipes out race-centric thinking. Nature will do it, because it's smarter than we are. When everyone has procreated with everyone else so much that racial divisions become imperceptible, then we'll have a fighting chance. Until then, I fear our own limited minds will prevent us from engaging, and sometimes delighting in, this grotesque practice of human taxonomy.

You mention the royal family. Yeah. As long enter countries bow to families for no reason other than their purity, breeding and lineage, things are going to stay ridiculous.

speaking of waht are you watching on tv, you-know-who is on tv right now and im 100% avoiding it. i just can't fucking look.

yes. YES! They tried to make sherlock be Black Mirrori-ish, where the audience is left disturbed. I dont read sherlock or watch sherlock to be disturbed. I want to see deductive reasoning.

at one point, fucking sherlock says he is going to "warm up" by solving crimes that people send him on twitter or text or something, and they show a montage with barely legible texts asking sherlock to solve something and he solves like 20 of them just from the texts and sitting there with his fucking MAGIC. I hated it. fucking blasphemous.

the guy ritchie movies could have been about any fucking asshole. To just tag on the name of Sherlock was pathetic.

Bennie Cumberbatch is getting way too much work. He's the Breetesh version of Joseph Gordon Levett.

He's been in an obscene number of franchisey adaptations at this point. Star Trek, The Hobbit (first ludicrously unnecessary sequel), The Hobbit (second ludicrously unnecessary sequel), Star Trek, Doctor Strange/MCU, Sherlock...

He's not the British Joseph Gordon Levitt. He's the British fucking Gerard Butler!! Or something. I don't know. Trying to think of some non-British wank who's been in more franchise films. Tom Cruise?

Wait... no... he's the British Harrison Ford!!! The younger, more skilled, less cool, less attractive, deep-voices Harrison motherfuckin' Ford!

Also, I like Joseph Gordon Levitt. And I don't get out to many movies, but I don't think he gets that much work. Does he? Anyway, he's ok by me.

the last tv character JGL did was the old man from 3rd rock from the sun i think. he's not in too many things is he?

whereas frumious bandersnatch has been in all kinds of garbage including one terrible british miniseries about... government espionage or something. awful. he's smaug (good), he's khan (not good), he's sherlock (good), he's alan turing (hmmm....), he's everybody and their mother. getting overexposed. as long as he keeps the money he should be fine though. cash in while you can.

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finished saul season 2. so very satisfying

now started mr. robot season 2, and i'm liking it. please don't be a dick and avoid spoilers of any kind. any kind. any kind. any kind. of any kind. any. any kind. no spoilers.thank you.

I actually quite liked him as Khan. Not as Khan because he is not Ricardo Montalban and he didn't even attempt to re-create that character. But as an alternate universe/timeline version of what Khan might have been? Purty good. I recently rewatched that one, and there's nothing wrong with it. And if anyone should be pissed about a non-Khan it's me (Wrath of Khan = one of the greatest movies ever made by anyone period.)

As Smaug? Meh. All of those movies were pretty meh. Yeah he's got a good voice. Probably one of the better parts of the movie(s).

I thought he was great as Turing. Or really I thought The Imitation Game was great. As Turing he basically just played gay, non-opiate raddled Sherlock. But it was a good movie. I liked it quite a bit.