I'm with you. I loved it.

That's a fair point. That said, I count myself a fan and followed them since Hell, but I never got wise as to why they fell apart. Maybe I'm projecting.

You're beautiful, Telly.

Hmm. I think he's wildly overestimating how many people know what happened to cause the break up of the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Really? Wild.

Good luck. I had to track my bootleg down, and it was a whole thing. Eventually found it, through the store I was work-squatting in, being sold by a dude in Australia.

Ohhhh yeah. Also, sorry, Discus didn't show your earlier reply. Didn't mean to seem like I was re-explaining your answer.

No, no. The first time they took a crack at it was "Darker Than Amber" with a pitch-perfect Rod Taylor as McGee. It was based on the darkest, least McGee-like novel and featured some brutal, brutal violence. It's a great movie if you can track it down, but because it wasn't the best introduction to Trav it sunk like a…

I dig 'em, and kinda like the variations McDonald throws into the formula, as well as the steady evolution of the McGee character, which is rare for the genre. Between that watching Florida go to seed through Trav's eyes, I found that I came back less for the plots and more for Travis's slow, but steady, evolution.

"Darker than Amber," "The Deep Blue Goodbye," and "The Dreadful Lemon Sky," are pretty good starters, though "Lemon Sky" is a little darker and sits near the end of the series, where things get a little more ruminative. "Deep Blue" is a nice opener, but if you want to start at the beginning, any of the first four will…

It also happened in "Darker Than Amber" where shit got real for Rod Taylor.

But can you teach me how to play craps?

Let's also back up some: He didn't inspire a goddamn thing. He gave a name to trope that already existed. That's it. He coined a phrase.

It was Sanford and Son, not Good Times, putz.

I…agree. And so we reach an accord. What a pleasantly anti-climactic conclusion to our anonymous conversation on the internet.

I…disagree.

I'm just glad that someone, somewhere, is finally affixing the "probable genius" label to this man

Vanessa Bayer is incredibly, brain-bendingly, mind-bogglingly sexy.

There you go.

A developmental delay?