@jorge,

Slapstick was my Gateway
Somebody had given it to me, and I was so taken with the darkness that permeated it that I found a cheap anthology that had Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-5 and fell utterly in love with the man's writing.

I'll second Totz in having a soft spot for Dirty Work. Yes, the album cover is awful, but there are some mean, nasty songs in there, plus a pretty cool Jimmy Page guitar solo.

I saw BOC play a small club as "Soft White Underbelly" in the early 80s. They were pretty awesome.

"This is England" is pretty good, though it's really more of a Joe Strummer solo song with big chanty Clash-like chorus than a real true Clash song. The rest of the album is shite: terrible songs with god-awful production.

@37th, there's actually a weird, near-great Neil Young album to be made from the best songs of OLD WAYS & LIFE.

82 WAS better: The Days of Wine & Roses, English Settlement, The Name of this Band is Talking Heads, The Gift, Chronic Town, Under the Big Black Sun, The Blue Mask, Sundown, Heartbeats & Triggers, The Church, Nebraska,

My 1981:

I saw DO THE RIGHT THING that summer in a mostly empty afternoon matinee. There were no riots.

This is Such a Great Film
Way up there on my list of all-time favorites for its utterly kinetic flow, its moral ambiguity, and its deep sense of time and place.

Speaking of Max Headroom
I recently finished rewatching the entire series for the first time since it originally aired, and it now plays as this weird combination of spot-on futurism (real-time data on viewership), cheesy 80s fashions (and effect) and really smart plotlines battling with utter crap.

The Guy Under The Seats was my most favorite of all of the early recurring gags on Letterman. "But until then, I'll be right here, watching you. I seee you, Dave! I seee you!"

And Dave Edmunds, Too
Lowe usually got the lions share of the love because he was a) an actual songwriter and b) wrote such great and clever songs, but Dave Edmunds made a bunch of wonderful records around this time. While none of them quite reached the heights of Lowe's first two solo albums, it says here that…

Wayyy up there, but gotta got with either This Years Model or More Songs About Buildings and Food.

CLERKS definitely caught a lot of what it was like to work at a video store in the late 80s and early 90s, and as such, was one of the first films I ever watched that seemed to get what it was like to be part of the post-Boomer generation.

Hip Answer: Elton John - "Daniel"
Kid Answer: Royal Guardsmen - "Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron"
Embarrassing Answer: Petula Clark - "Downtown"

Spock!
Back when this aired (and when we didn't know that this wasn't the beginning of some awesome Spock-centric plotline ) that was the entire sum of my reaction: Spock!!

I always like Robert Christgau's construction (in his 1979 Consumer Guide review) that song for song, the U.S. version of THE CLASH was the greatest album ever made in the US because of all of the awesome songs they'd released in the interim, but that the UK version of the THE CLASH was the greatest album released…

London Calling could have been improved simply by putting either "Armagideon Time" or "Bankrobber" on side 4 instead of "Lover's Rock"

Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Hour
It just struck me that a great parallel to The Simpsons are the old WB shorts that were collected in the Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner hours that zillions of us grew up loving.