"Joy in Repetition" was a preexisting bootleg track. A good one, all right.

I have a tape of a live version of "Girls and Boys" from some European tour circa 1987-88, and it's much better than the studio version. The live "Girls and Boys" had a whole extra layer of melody/rhythm, a 2-measure repeating element, that I wish I could notate here - it started with that repeated element followed by…

Um, don't you mean the "selection" of Dubya?

No, faith is belief in the absence of fact.

In a 1976 interview of Robert Altman in Playboy, he talked about the version of Breakfast that he was planning to direct; search Google for the phrase "peter falk will play dwayne".

Having long owned four albums' worth of bootleg material circa 1985-88 (including The Black Album, which did eventually get an official release), I'm convinced that Prince's official discography will never include his best stuff.

Songs of Love and Hate is the first and only Cohen album I've owned, although with the handicap of having it only as an 8-track tape (and therefore being ignorant of the correct song order) for the first 20 years or so. It really has turned out to be a classic.

I very much enjoyed this as a piece of writing, with a nicely stuck landing (the final sentence). But perhaps weird movies are easier to write well about; this was my own experience more than 20 years ago when my review of Barton Fink (in the university daily) was by far the most successful of my (three) published…

Another good movie about a brother and sister is The Savages, with Linney and Philip S. Hoffman. (Also with Philip Bosco as their aged father. Savage is the family name.)

Not that I'd ever have been an athlete, but my entrance recording, played loud, would be "Earn Enough for Us" by XTC.

What you should have done is start with Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, skip ahead to The Professor of Desire, then one of his two memoirs (Patrimony or The Facts). Maybe joelgord will chime in with suggestions too.

I don't think Everyman and Nemesis (the first and last of the late-career short novels) were half-assed.

I'd settle for a revival of Then Came Bronson.

Listening to the Frakes commentary track version of First Contact right now for the first time (at listentoamovie.com). He doesn't take the movie nearly as seriously as most of you do - which has a lot to do with why it's entertaining. I think he did a really good job with what he was given.

Where's the hate for the most ludicrous of the many ludicrous third-season episodes, "The Mark of Gideon"?

In the original series there was also Surak or, as Spock calls him, "image of Surak" in "The Savage Curtain" - the proto-Vulcan himself, father of Vulcan philosophy of life. And although not shown, there was the all-Vulcan crew of the starship Intrepid, whose mass death, at the hands (pseudopodia?) of the giant space…

Thanks for quickly correcting!

Please correct the title of the sixth Trek movie and the page it links to. Currently it's given as "The Final Frontier," which of course is the subtitle of the fifth movie. Should be Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Also, you've got both "Khan" and "Kahn" (the latter in the "essentials" list) for the second…

As a guess, I think he was trying to be Steve Martin circa 1978. Whether Joe Dante directed him to be that way, I dunno. But it was a very, very strange performance.

Well, I'm not. Although when I do recall it, I always substitute a different female lead from the one who actually appeared in it…