I get a lot of shit for whistling Christmas music all year round. There so much good Christmas music, really some of the best melodies ever written, if you ask me, it's dumb to write it all off in one swoop. And the soul and R&B Christmas recordings from the '60s/'70s? It's hard not to feel jolly listening to those.…

1980s country would be harder it seems to me.

My long-term project of getting my wife to accept Frank Zappa is finally starting to make some headway. Playing her songs where someone besides Frank sings has been a big key.

I recently had a half-hour conversation with an Aussie about the rules and game play of cricket and left only more confused about it afterward.

Yeah, I never got why Trout Mask Replica is always the go-to intro recommendation. Safe as Milk is much more listenable and introduces you to Don's voice. Trout Mask is too dense for the uninitiated, I feel, and Don plays with his voice much more. I started there and it took me a long time to get into it and then…

Hey, I don't know. Dude makes a lot bad decisions I can't justify. I was just illustrating what part of Applebees' problem is with a personal anecdote. I feel like we're having a 'forest for the trees' disconnect here.

Except both of those franchises are expanding, not contracting, and Chik-fil-a doing so pretty rapidly. My point has nothing to do with what you want to eat or even what I want to eat, it's about how Applebees could do better for itself by emulating those two restaurants.

One time is kind of a small sample size, but the point of my post is not that Red Robin is amazing, it's that if Applebees wants to do better, it should simplify and be more like Red Robin or a Chik-fil-a that serves booze.

Thank you for summarizing my post.

When I was in high school an Applebees opened up in the next town over. Everyone in school was pretty interested because it was something we had heard about, but had never been to. I remember going there a few times and liking it well enough, but quickly realized it wasn't worth the precious gas money I was spending…

Yeah, where I live you probably couldn't get a Stoli martini for less than $10, probably not even less than $12, so that's really good.

They did march, albeit for stupid reasons. Their right to march was even successfully defended by the fucking ACLU.

The shootout set to 'Ace of Spades' is pretty great, especially when the clueless store employee laments about having to find another job.

The first two reviews name-check John Carpenter and not long ago I was in a bar and someone played a John Carpenter song on the jukebox. The jukebox! I guess I missed the trend.

Here's a fact for ya: I'm the Wiz!

All I know is there is proof he officiated a mass gay wedding and his sister, whom he credits with helping him become a better person, was a lesbian. Whether or not he did and said those things to quell rumors he was homophobic, I don't know, but in the fact column, he's ahead.

Well, something somebody said he said, somebody not that keen on Fieri himself for business reasons. That colors it a little differently.

I put on John Wesley Harding directly after Big Pink and she seemed to at least tolerate that. To this day I only know one Dylan song she for sure likes, 'Bob Dylan's 115th Dream' so I think she might go for his more humorous stuff.

I got extremely lucky and received some awesome records for free, so I've been listening to those (including Tom Verlaine, Ray Beats, The Records, Devo, Foetus, The Who, Erasure, Cabaret Voltaire, The Kinks, Wanda Jackson). A couple of tracks that I've played a bunch over the past couple of days:

Do you have a favorite Ravonettes? I go between Lust Lust Lust and In & Out of Control, but I also really liked Observator, even if it feels too slight.