Knock him out, Joooohhhhhnnnn!

Agreed on all points, though I probably do prefer the alternate Idiot Wind outside of the context of the album. It's amazing how the same song is a completely different song. Bittersweet rather than bitter-bilious.

I loved this album for years before even knowing about the original versions of those songs. I think the points made by others on this thread—that the sameness wrought by the open-D tuning would have made the songs too similar for album purposes—is correct. Damn, Up to Me is the most heartbreaking song ever! I can see…

I am the wheelbarrow. I am always the wheelbarrow. You be the thimble if you think the thimble is so great. I am the wheelbarrow.

Weird. I have all those records too, just not in that order.

I like it, too. The CD has been on rotation in my wife's car for about nine years, mostly out of laziness, so my kids have grown up with it. We always turn it up when that particular song comes back around.

I don't think you can go wrong anywhere you pick up. I haven't read all of her stuff, maybe a quarter or a third of it. She is mind-blowing. I didn't read her until about five years ago, after years of assuming she was a little old lady writer, and was blown away.

It's a lovely movie. The Mark Knopfler theme is gorgeous too.

George Jones, George Jones, George Jones.

Yeah, I can't fathom anybody having any other answer besides "Brady" to this whole question. I mean come on, shit, the answer is "Brady."

I've been watching old TZ episodes with my kids also (8 and 10 years old). Time Enough at Last was the one I remembered best (it is apparently the most widely remembered of all episodes, according to something I read on the internet.) My fave so far has been Walking Distance. All episodes except Season 4 (which was…

Oral histories bore me the same as those talking head documentaries bore me, the ones where it's somebody looking at somebody I can't see answering a question I didn't  hear, over and over again. I was very much looking forward to "For the Sake of the Song," a documentary about Anderson Fair in Houston, and it turned…

Stevie Ray Vaughan, a/k/a "Puss in Boots" in Austin. It's horrific.

Yeah, this was huge in my childhood also. I still know just about every song on it.

Paul Giamatti and I were born on the same day, 6/6/67, exactly one year after the birth of Damien from The Omen.

Noah nailed it: I read Stuart Little when I was seven years old and never recovered. It's wry and melancholy and beautiful. It's about the only book I loved as a kid that I've revisited many times over the nearly 40 (40? Damn) years since and have never found diminished. The ending is heart-breaking. Talking to that…

I think the album was kind of a clearing-out of various songs he'd had around for years but that had never found a place on prior albums. I saw him at the Cactus Cafe in Austin about 1988 or 89, just him and his cellist John Hagan—still one of the best shows I've ever seen, with a version of "You Can't Resist It" that…

Yeah, this was a cool album, came out about the time of the Julia Roberts marriage, I think. "Hello Grandma" and "The Fat Girl" are highlights I remember.

This one's a no-brainer for me: Willie Nelson's "The Red Headed Stranger." It mesmerized and haunted me as a kid listening to it on 8-track, and it still mesmerizes me 35 years later, for the same and additional reasons. It's about a half hour long, comprises a few original Willie songs and a patchwork of old songs…

I'm not getting the Saunders media-saturated love-in. I've read a few of his stories in magazines over the years and didn't really see anything terribly revolutionary about his style. It's several steps back from Barthelme as far as "out-thereness" goes. I bought Tenth of December, based on all the hype, and still…