Shocking news: I went out to watch a movie tonight…and I liked it.

The movie was Spotlight, and I had absolutely no idea what it was about, going into the theater. I only went out because my wife was watching the Republican debate, and when Cruz started whining like a 5 year old that everyone was picking on him, I had to flee before I ripped the television off the wall. So the Morris Theatre Cooperative got my money. If the debate had been on a few hours earlier I would have been watching Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Trip, and I would have liked that better than the Republicans, too.

Spotlight had excellent acting and a strong story, but I have to say that one of the most appealing things about it was the anti-clerical theme. It’s all about the pedophile priest scandals in Boston, and how a team of reporters at the Boston Globe cracked the story. It’s a movie to bring a grim smile to the face of any atheist — grim because there were so many victims of the ratfucking Catholic Church, but a smile through the pain because at least a few high-ranking nasties got exposed. And then got promoted straight up through the Catholic hierarchy.

OK, there really wasn’t much to smile about.

But still, a phenomenally good movie. Go watch it.

Next dilemma, though: who to cheer for at the Academy Awards this year? I was solidly for Mad Max: Fury Road, but now I wouldn’t mind seeing the anti-Catholic movie get the nod.

Annalee Newitz has declared “Mission Accomplished” in the decades-long resistance to the ignorant theocrats who wanted to destroy Dungeons & Dragons. There have long been regressive Conservative Culture Warriors who railed against the game, and I remember a time in the late 70s and 80s when there were lots of silly stories in the media about the corrupting evil of fantasy role playing. Those just don’t happen now.

And yet the half-elf thieves and evil clerics and dorky kids with dice won at least one melee in this particular culture war. That’s abundantly obvious when you consider that the media is dominated by D&D-influenced stories. Meanwhile, the anti-D&D campaigns today have been reduced to items like this shabby little pamphlet, digitized by a gamer who wanted to memorialize a hard time in geek history. It’s a clear example of history being written by the winners.

When D&D types win a war like this, however, they don’t try to erase the perspective of the enemies who once threatened them. They have too much respect for the source material. In the 1980s, angry mobs of parents burned their kids’ D&D books. Those kids, now grown up, digitize and annotate the pamphlets that once condemned them.

Realistically, though, the bad guys never had a chance. It was a lot like the War on Christmas: conservatives grimly tut-tut about dangers of changing mores, while everyone sensible blithely goes on putting up Christmas trees and buying presents and getting together with their family. Similarly, we all went on throwing dice and inventing fantasy scenarios while the geezers clutched their Bibles and moaned.

It was hardly any kind of war at all, which is how we “won”. Just wait a few more years, and people will be finding old footage of Bill O’Reilly, and pointing and laughing.

Those trend-setters in Minneapolis have been freezing pants and posing them outside their homes.

I have not witnessed such phenomena here in our primitive back country outpost, but it seems like a sensible shortcut, preferable to making snowmen, which tends to have painful, dangerous consequences here, in addition to requiring snow with properties that don’t exist in the icy powdery stuff we’ve got.

Or do they? Watch this Mormon video. At first you’ll wonder what dreadful Mormon horror is going to be revealed — do Neil and Craig share the love that dare not speak its name? Is Miss Robinson stalking the boys to exploit their youthful lubricity? — and you expect the cheesy boom-chika-chika-wow music to start up. But you don’t know Mormons.

Oh yes, when I lived in Mormonville in the late 80s I remember well how all the kids regarded coffee and coke as the Devil’s brews. It’s one of the reasons I could never be a member of their religion…in addition to the fact that it’s bugblatting coocoo.

I was busy. Also, I tend to get angry at political events, so I’ve been avoiding them.

But I caught up tonight, and I guess I missed a really good one.

I have a new criterion for who I’ll vote for in the election…who has the best dance moves?

This is a monument to lab rats in Novosibirsk, Russia. I think it’s adorable.

In other news from Russia, our daughter Skatje is deep in Siberia, and has been incommunicado for a while. We got a quick note letting us know that she is approaching Vladivostok, but a more thorough debriefing will have to come after she gets home next week.