I thought the Joker sounded like David Lynch sucking on a lozenge.

You're late to the Rappin' 'Bout Rabin party, dude. Many have been surprised and/or disappointed that it's not "Rabeen." I don't know how many harassing anonymous answering-machine messages I've left for him with the incorrect pronunciation of his name, but now I feel like a fool.

There have been a few times that I've had a disc from Netflix for a couple of months, and I'll reflect on the fact that if I can truly "keep each DVD as long as [I] want," isn't it the same as owning that disc?

Convenient quantity vs. quality
Concerning any new form of entertainment media, it seems to me that convenience comes first, and quality comes second. I've got thousands of .mp3s that I listen to on my computer and iPod, but I've also got a $400 pair of Bose acoustic noise-canceling headphones that I've never had an…

I prefer Facebook, which I reluctantly just began using, but most of my friends don't have any online social-networking profile, or else they're on MySpace. I don't know if there's a way to stop it, but I can't stand it when an uploaded song starts playing as soon as you open a MySpace page. Sorry, Kevin — maybe I'd…

Sold!
"A slightly implausible story of the young playwright with a contemporary college-campus escapade. … Neither protagonist of 'My Name Is Will' seems strong enough to carry a book of his own. William is a wuss … and Willie's pursuit of women and drugs would quickly become repetitive if it weren't interrupted by…

"See No Evil, Hear No Evil" was rated R, but my conservative-Christian babysitter took me to see it in the theater when I was ten (I think she was also the first woman I saw naked — many puzzling memories there). To this day, the only thing I remember about the movie is Joan Severance's shower scene.

Uh oh. Nathan, maybe your Silly Show-Biz Book Club has gone to your head, and we'll have to read about your throbbing cock and your many trysts with Mamie Van Doren.

There's an automated filter for that word, as discussed ad nauseam in an "Ask the AV Club" a few weeks ago.

Right. Which you can hear on albums like "That Motherfucker's Crazy," "Supermotherfucker," or "Bicentennial Motherfucker."

Cool. I can't wait until the subsequent winter/spring, when I'll buy it as a five-dollar publisher's remainder.

Pryor was a rare bird, that's for sure. He's one of my heroes, but ordinarily I would find nothing heroic in an otherwise admirable man who "became someone else" under the influence of drugs/alcohol. I'm somebody who thinks that being high or drunk usually reveals a person's true colors. The thing is, Richard Pryor…

After he went to Africa and had his anti-N-word epiphany, "motherfucker" became his go-to replacement word. Honestly, I think it's much more frequent than every third sentence, even.

Yeah, but the song after that bursts through "like Kool-Aid Man in a funeral home"!

I avoided Pavement, for the most part, in the '90s, because it would have been all too typical for someone like me (a very Malkmussy sort of guy) to listen to them, so I dismissively resented their music without really listening to it.

Churnin' urn of burnin' funk
I like James Taylor well enough — at least well enough to indulge my wife and see him in concert last month.

Yeah, you can't really go wrong with "Tim" or "Pleased To Meet Me," although they've got that distant, diffuse '80s production. The recent Replacements best-of compilation is pretty good, with a couple of odd inclusions and absences.

I remember the sex scene from "The Name of the Rose" being pretty hot, although I hate Christian Slater (wasn't he underage in that movie?). I do like sexy, dirty feral girls, though.

Never had a Talk 'N Play. You have to be careful with those electronic things — if you pile anything on top of them in the toy box, something could rest on one of the buttons and drain the batteries, which your mom just changed for the millionth time. I'll stick with manually operated media devices, like looking at…

I like Maria Bello, but I'm perfectly happy not seeing Rachel Weisz play a mother with the baggage of a "dashing playboy son." That would just be creepy, like Jennifer Connelly playing Casey Affleck's mom or something.