I think the first time I brought up this idea, somebody quoted the Kipling line about how when you pay Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane.

...While Spider-Man and the X-Men occupy the Marvel Universe in the comics, it's not clear that they exist in the Avengers movie universe. Probably for contractual reasons, I'd guess.

There was a Japanese Spider-Man TV show in the late 1970s that, I think, was one of the major predecessors of the Super Sentai genre. But the Spider-Man mythos was considerably modified: Spider-Man is a motorcycle racer who gets his powers from an alien spaceship that can transform into a giant robot.

Speaking of the current captcha, for some reason I haven't been able to sign in with it for some time; the sign-in just hangs when I click "Post". I can sign in with my Twitter account, which is why my name is written funny.

NB: the Harvard Book Store isn't the Harvard bookstore, in the usual sense of a university bookstore; that's the Coop, which is now associated with Barnes and Noble. Harvard Book Store is an independent bookstore up the street a bit. It's a great place.

It could of course have the opposite effect. If Obama loses to Romney, esp. by a very small margin, it could drive the Dems back to 'safe' bigotry because 'we lost for being too gay-friendly'. We've been here before; this is already claimed by many pundits to be what sank John Kerry in 2004. Of course, Kerry was anti-gay-marriage, but it didn't matter; the coming of legal gay marriage in Massachusetts, for the first time ever in the United States, provided the mobilization anyway. Personally, I think the effect of that was exaggerated; what sank Kerry was a combination of Swift Boating, his own lack of charisma, and the last dwindling remnants of 9/11 Bush fever. But the belief that gay marriage got him by turning out the "values voters" doesn't seem to have sent the Democratic Party running away from gay rights to any extent that they weren't already.

With someone who would actually pursue expansionary policies?

@Hartmut: That's the standard criticism of "corporate personhood", that these entities are actually required to act in a profit-maximizing manner with no regard for good citizenship. But I think this is a different criticism, that some modern corporations, and even non-profits, are actually set up to enrich high-level managers at the expense of the shareholders and everyone else. If they were actually the sociopathic profit-maximizing entities of the standard progressive critique, it would be an improvement. A while back, Matthew Yglesias argued that you could make sense of some of this behavior in classic class-conflict terms. The Board of Directors of a big corporation consists of people of the same class as the high-level managers, whereas the small-potatoes nonvoting shareholders and the employees are of another class. Incompetent managers get huge compensation at the company's expense because they're all pals at the top. Letting the company fail is no big deal; it happens all the time. Everyone in the Board and everyone in upper management will be fine. Letting the company unionize, say, is a betrayal of the owner class, and is taken far more seriously.

Fred "Slacktivist" Clark has observed that the same thing happened in newspaper publishing: even in the age of newsprint, it was never a high-return business, and the expectation of high returns was one of the things that led to the gutting of newspaper staff and a consequent decline in quality, disappearance of real investigative journalism and tendency to print unaltered press releases.

Here's a rather shaky 2009 first-person video of a ride on the Blackpool Big Dipper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JJoicRavuY Higher quality from 2011, but with Robb Alvey yelling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9QH3WJuXuo (The fear expressed in the caption to the first video, that the coaster would be torn down following a then-recent accident, seems not to have been realized; it was instead refurbished and is still running.)