"You will wear your hood up, young man, or you'll get. No. Cake."

It's a catchy song. Cool. I assume you wrote and recorded it before running across my screen name?

Thanks for those links. I'd never read those before. The Kessel essay is especially great.

Thanks for posting the passage, Come On Amarth. I might have to reread the book.

Whoops, sorry about that. I thought you were including Calvino in the books you wouldn't get to. Can we just disregard my comment and pretend it never happened? I did read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, but it was a long, long time ago. I wasn't on its wavelength, and it's never stuck with me the way other of his…

Fair enough assessment of Ender's Game, but Speaker for the Dead is much more adult. Rereading EG last year for the first time since I was a kid (when I read it probably a dozen times), it felt childish and just . . . thin, rushed. The story seemed exactly like what it was: a short story blown up to novel-size. I seem…

Come on Amarth, you should at least read one or two books by Calvino. Invisible Cities would be my choice—it's astonishingly good—but Cosmicomics is a close second.

Well, the reviewer does compliment "its smoldering immediacy and Dolores O’Riordan’s biting vocals." I suppose the song's kind of catchy in a stupid way, but I just always assumed most people found it laughable, not memorable (let alone good). I seem to recall one of the other band members even made fun of it later on.

Wait, "Zombie" is their most memorable song? "Zombie"? "With their tanks and their bombs /  And their bombs and their guns"? By most memorable song, surely you don't mean their best song, do you? Right?

Is it just me, though, or does that picture weirdly make Damon Wayans, Jr. look like a young Denzel Washington?

I don't know, Bill. There's some mighty stiff competition for that stupidest sash.

So never having listened to Sleigh Bells before SNL last weekend, was that performance an accurate representation of them? Which is to say, blech.

"The teenage vampire girls with their absurdly long claws are about as
scary as the ones who show up at my house on Halloween asking for candy."

Nice to know there's some kind of explanation that fills the gaps. I spent most of the serial thinking, "What. In the hell. Is going on?" Of course, this is also the first McCoy serial I've ever watched, so it was pretty clear there was background material with Ace I was missing. But even so.

Surely someone else thought that was a terrible, terrible episode of Castle? I maybe could have bought the overheated 1940s sequences if Fillion had pulled it off, or if he did have tongue in cheek. But the show and Fillion seemed like they were trying to play it straight, even though his performance constantly seemed…

I was going to say the same thing, Amazing. And even more so since Turk, while a thoughtful guy, isn't the most introverted, self-reflective person around. The show takes pains to show that it's just a blip in his development. He might casually step into a moment of racism, but he immediately realizes how foolish a…

Nyssa's new costume (or at least new compared to the last time we watched a Davison serial) was pretty damn fetching.

Yeah, that music was terrible. I don't believe it ever got worse than when Turlough stole the car—I kept thinking, "They're just fucking with us, right?"—but it never got much better.

Ah, that would definitely make sense. And it would have taken exactly one line on Jay's part to explain. But then pushing it into suicide territory is just asinine.

The thing that drove me nuts was that the dog was very clearly swimming already. I kept thinking the joke was going to be Jay was overprotective of a dog that didn't need it. But no, we were supposed to ignore the swimming dog, through quick camera work that was never quick enough to hide the swimming, and pretend he…