Wrong Kurosawa movie.

You don't need religion to be speciesist, you just need Darwinism.

There are all sorts of other possible factors not mentioned - as one article on the subject mentioned, believers are less likely to smoke, and smoking is an appetite reducer. Also, Hispanics are more likely to be religious, and they are also more likely to be overweight & obese (see other studies for possible reasons) - so the correlation may have nothing to do with religion itself.

Also, color me not surprised at snarky atheist comments on the internet, at all. I thought plugging everything into one interpretative framework was supposed to be what religious people did?

Man, I am a horrible Star Wars geek, because when I saw the wheelchair costume only my second thought was "Cool."

My first thought was "Darth Vader's TIE Fighter doesn't look like that! The wings bend in."

Interested that they had a binary choice, and no one seems to have gone for "sons add stability to marriage."

Ten seconds of Googling would show that Cheney is not a hypocrite (at least on this matter) because she is not a "vocal gay marriage ban advocate" but quite the opposite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g44yDTwo9oI
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5817720/

Or from her Wikipedia entry: "On an October 10, 2007 episode of The Daily Show, Lynne Cheney stated that she opposed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage."

Amidala - that's right. With "or" you go with the number of the subject closest to the verb - so "child" is singular and takes "does" as a singular verb. IE -

- My mom or my dad does the dishes.

- My sister or my parents do the dishes.

I should really be grading my students' grammar hw instead of doing this.

Halloween costume. You hold it to your head and people think "Hey! He's got a glass saucepan embedded in his brain!"

Gene Wolfe, the magnificent sci-fi/fantasy writer, helped invent the machine that cuts Pringles into their distinctive shape.

A priest down here did that recently for one of his parishioners:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-kidneydonor_11met.ART.State.Edition2.4b76347.html

Nice list! One correction - Iron Maiden's Seventh Son album has nothing to do with Card's novel. The concept of the seventh son being magical predates them both and is only shared ground.

Also, The Battle of Evermore may be Tolkien-inspired (Ringwraiths, the Dark Lord) but the majority of the lyrics are about events never in Tolkien and certainly not at Pelennor.