Oh Nick, you can be honest with your Foster Wallace ripoffs.

How does this work exactly? Are we going to get GWAR doing 'The Final Countdown' or not?

Late here, but I can't pass up the chance to plug my favorite Hendrix documentary: the Over The Edge radio performance 'The Experience Remix'. There once was a download at http://www.negativland.com/ote/?p=48. I suspect it's not there now because of typical sampling/copyright/negativland issues, but I bet if you ask…

I have been in one threesome situation in my life and it was utterly awesome and yet supremely awkward and anxious for that very reason of focus. I only have two hands!

bhang in India — it's like slow-motion LSD.

Elsewhere in these comments I put a bit about reading some Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry recently… also just finished with The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, which was awesome as expected. The man is a genius at quickly sketching place through description and character through dialogue. I think I may now have…

Is Lankhmar a complete collection of Fafhrd/Mouser stuff? Man, one thing I miss from my little library is the six Swords paperbacks. (Knight and Knave of Swords is distinctly weaker). For my money those are the absolute greatest of sword-n-sorcery pulp.

Too bad, I finished Blood Meridian just a few days into the month! I finally started reading CMC with the Border Trilogy last month and then went on to Meridian. I thought it was going to be the book I've been trying to identify for years now that I have only patchy memories of — 19th century cowboys chasing indians…

I read them back to back last year and liked both but overall preferred Anansi Boys for being tighter and more plot-structured.

Skip it — it's not nearly as awesome as the main quartet. An inessential epilogue, as mratfink says.

I appreciate the concept, but… that's not a good mashup.

Oh Heller, where art thou?

Really? The Pentateuch maybe not, but I'm thinking some of the wilder prophets, like Ezekiel.

'Techno' is a perfectly fine catch-all term for the uninitiate, much better than 'Electronica' or 'Electronic Dance Music'. Those who know have no trouble distinguishing the particular from the general application.

Groove is good, along the lines of Human Traffic but in California. I don't know about 'fantastic', but both feel pretty true to me.

Yeah I figured you knew, but I posted it for the sake of general readers who might be browsing the comments with their polka interest piqued.

Does no one remember Polkacide?

The stuff of theirs I've looked at is all twentieth century, and all of that is purely statistical analysis of voting patterns in the House and Senate. There are interesting jumps and bumps around the FDR era but I am inclined to think that the Great Depression and WWII were the main drivers of Congressional arguments…

Are you familiar with the work presented at voteview.com? As an engineer I find that a pretty compelling demonstration that polarization in the US Congress, at least, is currently very high.

Cook's Illustrated is great because you can really read it. Yes the pieces are brief and schematic, but they do give a real story of here's what we did and this-makes-this and that-makes-that and here's why we chose to do things this particular way.