"The Amazing Interchangeable Lou Perlman Boys" is in itself a jewel.

Titanic and sister ships were built for the White Star Line, then a competitor of Cunard. The two lines merged in 1934 and operated for a while under combined Cunard-White Star branding; the White Star brand was eventually phased out. Some of White Star's newer ships continued to serve Cunard; the last of the…

In January 1992, when I transferred in, basic full-time tuition for a commuter student (no room/board) at my alma mater (a state school) was $1210/semester, which works out to about $2150 in 2017 dollars. In January 1995, thanks mainly to state budget cuts that got worse each year, it was $1810/semester, which is…

When I was just a baby, my mama told me, "Bub,
"Always be a good boy, stay off the AV Club"
But I clicked on that there movie, just to watch him die
When I see those pictures streaming, I hang my head and cry
*guitar solo*

That and wondering if someone took last year's Christine Chubbuck movies a little too literally.

He's real fine, my surf canine
He's real fine, my surf ca-nine

I cannot argue with that a bit. DiCaprio-as-heartthrob seemed a little too obvious and too good to be true and it didn't quite work. The rest, though, were great.

(Harry Crane starts crying, runs out of the room)

It was around 2000 or so that Tom Lehrer's line about "rock and roll, and other children's records" really started to resonate for me….

Upvoted, among other things, for the Nestor shout-out. My favorite character in the Iliad. (Brief story: my sophomore year of college, we read the Iliad in a literature course and had to write a paper, the premise of which was a casting memo to Steven Spielberg for a film version of the Iliad. We had to choose a…

There are also liquor stores in Augusta that sell autographed bottles of Fuzzy's Vodka (a brand that does well enough to sponsor a decent IndyCar team).

(dabs tear, clicks "upvote")

"Bad Reputation" by Freedy Johnston - which wasn't directly from 1997 (it's a 1994 song, IIRC) but I still heard it a lot then and associate it with those days. The slowed-up Muzak version was beautiful in a strange, slightly sad way. I'd really love to have a copy of it, but short of having an in with the ambient…

Good catch on the typo, and doubly embarrassing since I teach editing at work. That's what I get for trying to comment while eating lunch.

You and I are the same age. When I was 24 I was one year into grad school, had moved from the sticks to one of my state's larger cities, and renting a complete wreck of an apartment in a house that had been split into apartments. The large downstairs apartment was occupied by loud and rowdy frat boys who played their…

"You reckon he means all of 'em, or just the one branch?"

I know firsthand it's a loud record because the frat boys who lived downstairs from the dumpy apartment I had in 1997 liked to play it at top volume.

I'd known the Titanic story much of my life since it's one of those monumental events with a lot of lore around it, read Robert Ballard's book about the discovery of the wreck, wolfed down Walter Lord's classic books about the disaster, and seen the British films from the '50s about it (A Night to Remember still holds…

In 1995 somebody dubbed news reports from the Oklahoma City bombing into "Lightning Crashes" by Live. It remains high on my list of "you know, that was way tackier than y'all realize" things I've had to hear.

It's remarkable how well the Dick Clark and Michael Strahan versions compliment one another. They knew what to keep and what to update, and it works beautifully.