Why can't Captain America just fight regular Nazis?

You know who suck?  Nazis.  You know who are incomprehensibly evil?  Nazis.  You know who plot the destruction of humanity?  Nazis.  You know who probably need to have their asses kicked by anyone with free time and maybe a star-spangled shield?  Nazis.

There doesn't need to be a guy in a weird mask with strange and vaguely supernatural powers, with his own special cell of crazy workers.  The entirely mortal and terrifyingly bureaucratic malevolence of the SS is really bad enough, and I will cheer at least as much when it is defeated.

Maybe it's off-putting to have that kind of not-at-all cartoonish villainy in a comic book or comic book film, but, in a strange way, having HYDRA be the motivating force behind various Nazi plots cheapens their real barbarity.

And actual Nazis can be after the Tesseract; they just have to walk the right side of the Indiana Jones line.    It would still make a good movie.  JJ Feild and his cute red beret can come too.

Why is the NHL season not over yet?

It will be June on Friday.  Nowhere is still frozen.  Grand Slam tennis has started.  People are wearing white shoes.  Two thirds of the Triple Crown have been run.  There is a perpetual smell of cut grass and hot asphalt in the air.

No more ice hockey.

Why do I ever see "Glee Cast Version" when I search for music?

That is never the right option.  That is what they do to you after they pull out your fingernails, when they want you to talk.

I know what you'll say.  "Forget You" sung by a bunch of insipid fake high schoolers has all of Cee Lo Green's original punch.  And, of course, when someone wants to listen to a song, he wants half the instrumentation, and that played as a dirge.  And it's everyone's favorite when you switch up the gender of the lead singer.  Even better when you have to change the words to fit!

Bowdlerized, breathy, and bland.  Sign me up!

Why is Prince Philip so very silent?

After he tells his father that he's going to marry this nice girl he met in the forest, he says nothing.  Literally nothing.  He makes no noise.  He doesn't even grunt when fighting a dragon.  He doesn't thank the fairies for rescuing him.

And he seemed so nice in the beginning!  Sure, he creeped on Aurora a little, but she was dancing with an owl and a couple of rabbits in boots, so maybe he was just trying to be nice.  He did fall in love quite quickly, but that's been known to happen too, and he did so with a refreshing lack of snobbery (if regrettably no sense of duty either).  He picked up on her song, and sang it back to her, with no comment on its extreme cheese.  And he has a very good relationship with his horse.

But then he rides off and gets captured, like a chump, and never speaks again.

A strong, silent type can be nice, but I think I might want some sort of explanation after the smooch.  Right?

Why does Rickie Fowler wear that stupid hat?

Look, kid, you play golf.  Not some weird form of dressage in which you get points for looking like an idiot.

It's fine if you don't want to wear a regular baseball cap or a visor, but you do have to wear some form of headgear recognizable to humans.  Real humans, not humans in a cartoon.  Wear a soft cap if you like.  Hell, wear a deerstalker.  Wear anything but what you wear now.

And get a haircut.  Jeez.

Why don't priests use the pulpits thoughtfully provided for them?

There is a new fashion in church for priests to stand in the arch of the rood screen to preach their sermons.  Perhaps it is not new, but I'm behind on ecclesiastical fashions.  The last good one was the Reformation, and that had its problems.

What is this about?  Do you have no conception of acoustics?  Did you go to seminary for nothing?

If you think standing in a pulpit puffs you up and makes you look as though you are presuming on your spiritual authority, the priesthood is not for you.  That is the point of the priesthood.  You're not one of the sheeplike rabble.  I mean, you're going to give a sermon, right?  It's going to be about how we should all be better people, right?  Because you've thought about the gospel and read some exegesis, right?  Standing in a place where you can't be seen or heard doesn't make you less bossy, it just makes you more pointless.

And the pulpit is already there.  Some architect designed it, so that you could preach from it.  Centuries of ecclesiastical architecture have established a gospel side on which it sits.  There are flowers named after it.  The president of my university has no qualms about bloviating from it, and she holds no holy orders.

So get up those stairs, and read the gospel and preach your sermon, putz.

Why did kale chips ever happen?

Kale chips are what they serve at the Super Bowl parties in Hell, when it's always the Broncos beating the Falcons and the only beer is warm and flat.

They are not delicious.  That is a lie you tell yourself to make it seem as though they have all the virtues of real chips with none of the drawbacks.  In fact, they have neither the virtues nor the drawbacks, because they are not food.  They are a vile, contemptible mendacity.

Why was Cobie Smulders in The Avengers?

This is petty.  And I know it's petty.  But this whole blog is petty, so I'm going to run with it.

I hate Robin Scherbatsky.  I hate her so very, very much.  Because she is that unbelievably irritating kind of woman who has no feelings until you hurt them and then she has all kinds of feelings, which is inexplicable, crazy, and stupid.  I have hated every single Robin storyline since she and Ted broke up (the first time), and I hated a solid half of them even before that.  Her only redeeming feature is her Canadian pop career, and that was way too long ago to help.

And I have never seen Cobie Smulders in anything that is not How I Met Your Mother, which is sort of amazing because I watch most things, even the sort of dubious things in which she has appeared.  She now merely represents a show whose long yet precipitous decline I have watched religiously, in the vain and constantly-thwarted hope that it will stop being quite so soul-sucking.  This is perhaps unfair, but it remains that she managed to be incredibly distracting to me as she pointlessly and woodenly appeared for about four minutes this past Sunday in an otherwise mostly enjoyable flick.

It was a completely throwaway part.  All she did was accuse Nick Fury of being a manipulator, which, to someone in her position, should not have come as a surprise.  You can pick a throwaway actress.  Just make it someone that I don't hate.  (So, no, Mr. Whedon, Eliza Dushku is not an option.)  And don't put her in those stupid boots with the wedge.  They're not practical, and she's not a superhero or on Star Trek, so she doesn't get dispensation for reasons of silliness and convention.

(Fine, Scarlett Johansson was kind of annoying too, but she was inherited and the Black Widow's probably supposed to make you feel a little bit ooky, so I'll accept it.)

Why do some people put out Union Jack bunting and then pull the ol' switcheroo and only serve vodka?

I see a Britain theme, I think gin.  Warm beer.  Shandy, maybe.  Over-boiled vegetables and penitential puddings, also boiled.

Not vodka.

That is just false advertising, and cruel to those of us who like our booze to taste like booze.  Or trees.  More gin!  I demand more gin.

(And yes, I know that British people happily drink vodka, as they happily drink pretty much everything.)

Why are there apartments with a southeast exposure?

All some of us want to do is nurse our hangovers and whimper, but the sun streams insistently through the window, telling us that it is a beautiful day and that sleeping is no longer allowed.

Why are those Miller 64 ads so irritating?

If you are that concerned about the calories you're ingesting, you have two options that allow you to retain your self-respect:

1.  Drink water.

2.  Run another half-mile and drink real beer.

The following things must never happen:

1.  Singing songs about light beer.

2.  Pretending that light beer is part of a balanced lifestyle, or anything other than watered-down horse piss.

3.  Drinking light beer.

Why did my dinner reservations interfere with watching all of that awesome Red Sox-Orioles game on Sunday?

Here I am, alternately freezing and roasting as Helios makes his fitful way across Fenway Park.  I'm getting a sunburn.  I've seen a grand slam, but, you know, that's no big thing.  Nothing has happened in many an inning, and I need to change and get to the restaurant.

So I leave in the fifteenth inning or so.

And then the DHs have to pitch!  I would have seen an AL game become a thing of humanity and civilization again!  Amazing!  17 innings and wacky hijinks!

Instead there was foie gras.  Life is hard.

Why does everyone think it's cute to hate the word "moist"?

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS.

It is just a word, and every single wannabe-quirky girl you know just hates it, and that is fake and it needs to stop.

Why is Raza Jaffrey being completely wasted on Smash?

Yeah, so, Smash started out sort of interesting and has entered a downward spiral.  There are a million problems with it, but I will address only the one dearest to my heart.

Raza Jaffrey, who is British, is purported to have a job in City Hall in New York, in the press office.  And it is only well into the season when the people of New York realize that people with poncy accents are not really ideal for representing that city.  So his career is not going so well.

Aside from that ludicrous stupidity, he's saddled with a shrill and otherwise pretty useless girlfriend, and his only song so far has been a tour de force of cultural insensitivity.  And, despite having had considerable experience, apparently, from Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams (yikes), he's not a great dancer.  Well, I don't know.  Maybe he can waltz like a champion.

Oh, and now his stupid, cardboard girlfriend has turned down his proposal of marriage.  They're an awful couple, so there's that, but she really can't do better, so there's that, too.

Basically, it's thankless, and I prefer Mr. Jaffrey infected with some ghastly biological agent and on fire.

Why are treadmills the worst?

Invariably, on the treadmill, I run a mile, and it's fine, and I could keep going, except that right about then I die of boredom.

Perhaps it's the lack of landscape.  Or the odd bounce of the belt.  Or the steady, rather insulting red numbers.  Or your tendency to get your arm caught in your headphones and toss your iPod across the gym.

Or the knowledge that, for all that effort, you have gone literally nowhere.  You are a hamster.  Your life is an exercise in futility.