""Hope" sounds like almost nothing else"

Agreed on Diminished, but I think that's about it.  I was thinking Hope because it's basically Suzanne with different lyrics, but then I remembered that it sounds great.  I agree too that Airportman is tricky.  Would have loved to have been in the room when Warner Brothers first put the finished product on…

No.  They had a very good but not perfect record before his departure, so even though the hit-miss ratio dropped, it's not like it ruined a perfect score.  And the hits were still amazing.

Hating I've Been High?

I still like the title track of Around the Sun.  It's a great closer that makes you want to start the album again.

In terms of stumbles… I tend to think of Green as the first one.  Only for Stand and The Wrong Child, though.

Who underrates Fables?  I can't picture anyone who knows it and likes other R.E.M. albums knocking it.  Seems impossible. It ends with Wendell Gee for God's sake!

The lyrics and production on Lotus also undermine anything swagger-y about it big time.

"Am I the only one who prefers Around The Sun to Reveal?"

I was feeling the (obviously necessary) lack of scale a bit this week.  The riot seemed to come from about ten people.  Then there was Theon taking Winterfell with an unknown but apparently very small quantity of guys- could have done with a close-up establishing shot of the boat or something.  On the plus side for…

I think most people would prefer front-to-front. At least until that gets old and you decide to mix things up, y'know?

They could do this actually… the Jon Snow and Daenerys webseries.  I know I'd watch out of a grim sense of duty.  Of course, they couldn't justify the budget, so Dany would be running around in front of expensive-looking curtains while all of Jon's scenes would be be filmed in one snowy day in a producer's garden.

The Wire features black people selling drugs.

I for one agree that it's good but not great.  It's not necessarily the lack of development, but the severe limitations on time spent with each character.  The best episodes seem almost invariably to be the ones which do the least scene-jumping and catching-up.  It's fun watching the plot barreling on, but I don't…

Some day, perhaps, I will understand what these Simpsons recaps are for.  But not this day.

Just looked it up… five writers (I think), each picking their top ten, and very few making the same choices.  Neither Cave nor Waits make the cut.  Shit's weird, yo.

Eh, that shouldn't even matter, because THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES IN ROCK N' ROLL

Oh man, that scene… it starts, and I'm feeling respectfully bad for everyone.  Then the crying gets progressively more hysterical.  And I start thinking 'OK, there might be something cultural going on here I'm not getting.  C'mon, they've lost a daughter, this can't be funny.'  Then it goes on.  And on.  And after a…

At this point that would be the one superhero film I'd be interested in seeing.  Start it out with primary colours and big, consequence-free action, take the film to a ridiculous special-effects peak, and then suddenly rewind and play the story again only grimmer, darker and angstier.  Exactly the same action, except…

Am I imagining things, or did Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus not even appear on the AV Club's albums of the year when it came out?