Simon's statement is misguided. Everybody agrees that the war on drugs is mis-managed, but acquitting drug dealers is not the solution - all that does is put a drug dealer back onto the street. Drugs impose an enormous social cost - in addition to all of the Wire-style violence over street corners, an enormous…

Anybody having video problems?
Is anybody else having trouble playing the video? No matter how many times I have refreshed it, I can't get it to go past the initial scan over the tins of candies.

A Noel Murray Sighting!
Its great to have a face to go with all of the great criticism he's written for this site over the years.

I saw Grindhouse in a theater in Madison, Wisconsin about a week after it came out. The college kids, graduate students, and writer/freelancer-type audience was really into it. I don't think that anybody, except perhaps for Roger Ebert, gets all of the references in any Tarantino film, but that crowd definitely got…

Last Christmas my girlfriend bought me a poster-sized painting of the cover of Middle Cyclone. Just about the perfect Christmas gift, because I love it and would never in a million years have thought to look for, let alone buy, something like that for myself.

I particularly enjoyed Kyle's knowing reaction shot at 2:23-2:24.

I picked The Magicians up for $1 at my neighbor's moving-away stoop sale. Sometimes it pays to live in a neighborhood full of bookworms like myself.

The audio cds of Gould, or Patrick O'Brian?

All over the map here . . .
1) Buy fewer books, read more of the books I already own. Among the must-read books that I already own are Glen David Gould's Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, Dan Simmons' The Terror, numerous books by Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson, Nixonland, and Colonel Roosevelt.

The Pynchonian caricatures are what put me off of Infinite Jest the first two times I tried to read it. The best parts are absolutely brilliant, but there were too many weird/eccentric/clever/grotesque- for-the-sake-of-being-weird/eccentric/clever/grotesque characters and scenes for me to love it, at first. In…

Good approach
I like the disclaimer at the top of this page - I tried to read more new books this year than I have in past years, but I only read ten or twelve books that were published this year, and most were written by authors I already knew from their previous books. It is difficult to hear of and read a new book…

"Clap Your Hands!" from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
I know that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! has kind of fallen off the face of the earth, but I think that their first album is really great, except for the opening, vaguely carvinal barker-esque "Clap Your Hands!," which sounds like something that would have ended up on Tom…

Reminds me of something Al Franken once said . . .
When I was in college, Al Franken came to campus to give a guest lecture and have a Q &A with the students, and somebody asked him to talk about his favorite memories of Saturday Night Live. He said that he loved when Paul McCartney hosted in the 90's, when Chris…

More songs!
I think that, when Saturday Night Live has a musical guest like Arcade Fire or Radiohead or Kanye West, somebody really great, they should let them perform an extra song or two, and cut a couple of the weaker sketches. If nothing else, they can save those sketches for a future episode when they might be…

The National
The National is the best live band I've ever seen. They rock harder than they do on their records, and their slow songs more moving. Every uninitiated person I've taken to one of their concerts has walked out a fan.

I suspect that Bainbridge was being clever, and meant "apology" both ways - the Latin inscription and the archaic "apology" sense of the word. But if I was told that she only meant it to have one meaning, and had to guess which one, I would go with the latter.

Todd - For what its worth, I would totally read that column.

Hannah and Her Sisters
I know that Woody Allen gets criticized because his soundtracks all draw from the same era and genre of music, but they're all good, and the soundtrack to Hannah and Her Sisters is legitimately great. Its a great introduction to 1930's and 40's jazz. In the era before iTunes, copies of this…

O Brother has a fantastic soundtrack. For some reason I don't enjoy it independent of the film quite as much as some of the other great soundtracks, but there are so many great songs on there.

One more to add
Great primer.