Katy Perry has a couple of pretty great songs.

Heard Closer  in a club and thought it was a great new Robyn song or something.

I saw him at All Tomorrow's Parties, and it was pretty wonderful. It was his weekend, he'd chosen all the bands, so maybe that was why he seemed in a better mood than at the show @avclub-e0bcdfb761902d88e9ae5d482cf26739:disqus saw.

I didn't know they were touring, and now London tickets are going for £100-300 on eBay. Add that to The Knife and The Weeknd for bands I was too slow and out of touch to get tickets for.

Totally agree on Let England Shake, that album's been haunting me for two years now.

Yeah, it was great to see stuff like Quarantined live, but it was a pretty slick, bored performance. Whereas their pre-split performances were so visceral.

I thought the first EP was incredible, and I was so excited about the debut album, which I found kind of a letdown when it came out.

Didn't it hit number one in the US album charts?

@avclub-7f0d5ceefd00ad8303401bdcf213eb83:disqus Found the actual quote:

@avclub-7f0d5ceefd00ad8303401bdcf213eb83:disqus Not trying to claim Churchill wasn't pretty racist, or at least colonial in his views towards developing world foreigners. But wasn't the gas he was advocating using CS-type crowd control gas, and wasn't it being presented as an alternative to shooting them?

I'd never heard of that, just looked it up on wikipedia.

Yeah, I took the point of those episodes as "people are terrible most of the time, so even if religion didn't exist, they'd still find some other stupid goddam thing to kill each other over."

A common feature on Thick of It recaps on the Guardian (leftish UK paper with a strong stripe of hard-left old schoolers in its readership) was there were always a few people furious that the show would be as unrealistic as to feature a likeable Tory.

Yes, Minister etc were the inspiration for The Thick of It, according
to Ianucci. Which does make rebooting it today a little odd, since we
have our generation's Yes, Minister, and it involves a lot more
swearing.

"Un burrito grande por favor
Tengo un muy importante poema
Necesito un burrito importante"

Read some New York Times profile of him from around the time he was writing Blood Meridian, and he is apparently hardcore conservative.

I've barely seen the show, but I think you can be an arch-tory cunt and still think the whole landed gentry thing was a bit OTT.

@avclub-66628f1e4867b1a22523af58248350ec:disqus The form reached its apogee when Jeremy Paxman asked a politician if he had lied over and over again for eight minutes:

"Eat the Whigs!", sobbed Kirk Cameron Left Me Behind, to the tune of Aerosmith's similarly-titled song.

Read that as 'wigs', which made it sound pretty dark.