John

Reed and Ben also did not have ideal home lives growing up either.

The classic American four person family: Dad, mom, mom's brother, and dad's best friend who is now a rock monster.

Is this...a telegraph machine?

I like the sink/gas stove combo.

Also, the problem with a lot of Dems is not highfalutin principles, it's that "want to win" is entirely directed towards their own personal success rather than the success of the party.

Gavin Newsom clearly wants to win.

Kirby specifically was one, so I withdraw that part of my critique. But Ben legitimately has usually been depicted as a Mets fan.

Proper Midtown and Murray Hill were nice, I think, and the West Village was getting gentrified, and I think everything else kind of sucked. Maybe Gramercy was nice?

Important update: Kirby, who also grew up on LES and of course put a lot of himself into Ben, was a Dodgers fan, so I'll give them that one. But he's still mostly a Mets fan in the comics. Apparently Peter David made him a Yankees fan in an X-Factor comic, but that is obviously not canon.

I think a thing is that today we associate neighborhoody working class vibes with the outer boroughs, but that was not the case when these characters were being created. Large parts of Manhattan were very much not gentrified yet.

I think Steve is canonically from Manhattan, too! He lives in Brooklyn in the 80s.

It's ambiguous, I'd say.

Two pieces of nonsense here:

1) I can't swear there haven't been comics where he's a Yankees fan, but he's very usually a Mets fan.

2) He grew up in the Lower East Side, which is not Brooklyn. He'd have been a Giants fan growing up, I think.

He's usually a Mets fan in the comics, not a Yankees fan. Also he's from LES, which is not in Brooklyn. He'd be a Giants-->Mets guy, I think.

It looked to me like yes, that's true, they'd lose seats in the Rio Grande Valley probably, but unclear in the rest of the state because of how much deep red ground there is in the rurals.

Just looking at the Took family tree, Pippin has three older sisters, lots of fun to be had there. Pearl and Pimpernel can have tedious husbands; Pervinca can get into trouble. Also I feel like Estella Bolger (Fatty's sister, Merry's future wife) is a heartbreaker.

The little known Potho Sackville-Baggins, Lotho's otherwise unmentioned younger brother.

(Btw, giving one of Bilbo's relations a double-barreled surname, and having it literally be "Sackville" is such an amazing gag we don't appreciate enough.)

Merry and Sam make occasional guest appearances. Frequent setting is the Thain's, the club in Michel Delving that Merry, Pippin, Fatty Bolger and Folco Boffin all belong to.

Fan fic where Gandalf is Pippin's valet and they have low stakes adventures extricating Pippin's ridiculous relatives from bad situations. Other main characters: Pippin's four paternal aunts. Set after the end of LOTR (Gandalf is anachronistically still around, but Frodo is gone)

I was going to say that Bertie, who was originally probably conceived as being born around 1890, is probably named for either the Prince of Wales or his late father, except that his actual name is Bertram, not Albert.

Bertie Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Bertie Wooster, what's the difference?

Catherine would have liked to kill her son, too, and did kill her husband. Alexander I killed his father (Catherine's son, who apparently everyone wanted killed)

Romanov nineteenth century familial sentimentality starts with Nicholas I and coincides with the decline of the dynasty.

Grand Duke Nicholas the only vaguely competent member of the Imperial family by then, I think? And he's far far far from the succession.

Their upcoming gerrymander seems pretty efficient to gain them a few seats in 2024 or 2020 conditions without risking too much.

#SevenPlanetsAndTwoOfThemAreTheSunAndMoon

Well, obviously. Astrology is a deeply scientific system based on the cutting edge science of Ptolemy's system of spheres and epicycles. This is why I'll never recognize any astrology that does shit with Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

He more or less literally says that.

There's room in New York and California, but most of the other reliably blue states don't have many Republican seats. New Jersey, Colorado, and Minnesota maybe good targets? Could maybe squeeze a bit more out of Illinois and Maryland?

Las Vegas was the new Elkton, Maryland, and it will go the way of Elkton, Maryland.

That's for dishes that weren't just straight up invented in 1983.