Catherine Wheel
A friend of mine told me about a girl whose boyfriend was gone somewhere for a while, during which time she and his best friend went on a road trip following a Catherine Wheel tour along the west coast. Unsurprisingly, they fell in love and got married.

Clannad
I've never been on a pilgrimage, but the one I'd like to go on is to Donegal in Ireland, to find the Brennan family pub where Clannad honed its chops in the 60's and 70's.

a moment from The Simpsons
Homer (watching Circus of the Stars): But Marge, Alan Thicke is throwing knives at Ricardo Montalban.

I live in SLC and I'd never heard it before, but it's well before my time. I'm told Lagoon used to be quite the concert venue back in the day. My uncle saw The Doors there.

The Sixth Sense
I saw this at a time when I was living by myself, and seriously for a month afterward I was almost too afraid to be in my apartment alone. Every time I looked up from what I was doing, or went around a corner, or turned around after having my back to the larger part of the room, I expected to see some…

I totally know how you feel, though. I was about that age when someone, a substitute or student teacher or somebody, read my class a bunch of stories from a collection of urban legends. "The Babysitter", "The Headless Roommate", things like that. Scared me to death.

Maybe Richard Upton Pickman found a sideline illustrating children's books.

Death by fire
I love movies like "Jaws" and "Night of the Living Dead" because they are fun to watch, and they get in my head and give me weird nightmares. But for things that actually scared me, I would have to go with the movies "Threads" and "Come and See". The first is speculative and the second rooted in…

The detail from John Bellairs that freaked me out as a kid and stuck with me over the years: Rose Rita passing out for some reason and waking up covered in a funeral blanket, with coins on her eyes. Fairly simple but incredibly eerie. Those were excellent books.

I knew it
I had a premonition this morning as I poured myself a bowl of Life cereal and fired up my computer to check my daily sites: I will come across something in the course of my reading that will totally gross me out. I made it through snopes and all the local papers just fine, then came to the AV Club and…

From the old-school punk archives
"Susan" by the Subhumans. Kill yourself and the family you couldn't stand when you were alive will forget all about you, once the vacation they take with your insurance money is over.

Maybe this has already come up…
…but "I Wish It Would Rain" by The Temptations (or The Faces, which is the version I prefer), would make a good addition to this playlist. The lyrics are not exactly about offing yourself, but songwriter Roger Penzabene wrote them to express the pain he was feeling over his wife's…

That was the problem I had with "Son of Rambow". It was a fun little movie, but it seemed to say that you can be religious or you can be true to yourself and happy, but not both.

Just caught Freedom Writers on TV last night
How about the cliche of "idealistic (usually) white teacher reaches a classroom of disaffected kids of various ethnicities and teaches them to love (enter school subject here), and in turn learns something about the hardscrabble life of the 'hood, all in the face of the…

My favorite wedding
I went to a wedding once where the music the bride chose for her walk down the aisle was "Beauty and the Beast" from the Disney movie. It was instrumental but still pretty funny to anyone who gave the title a second thought.

When I saw the F, I wondered if it was yet another Nia Vardalos movie.