That's the beautiful part: when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

"The Commander Thinks Aloud," about Columbia and mentioned in the inventory, makes me cry pretty consistently. It's such a beautifully impressionistic song about something so incredibly sad.

The best, the best, the best, the best…

I bought the Downward is Heavenward CD in a bargain bin over a decade ago knowing nothing about it. Maybe my greatest random music purchase ever.

Your dad died at 13? That's tragic.

That Chicago Reader story is brutal, especially as someone who saw him a bunch of times on those tours where apparently his drinking was already getting out of hand but didn't notice.

"Tigress" was my first I think. Honestly all of his albums have really great moments on them. Didn't It Rain and MECo are probably the "best" records, but I listened to those too much in really heavy times in my life, and I think now my favorites might be Pyramid Electric Co. and Ghost Tropic, which are among his…

Making several really good rock albums might suggest that he knows a thing or two about it, though.

I disagree!

"So Real" doesn't get enough credit. I think it might be my favorite track on the whole thing. The chord progression is so great — nobody EVER uses those voicings in rock. And that outro, holy shit.

"the copy editor" lol

Big Fish makes me cry every. single. time. And I've seen it at least 3 or 4 times at this point.

I mean, point taken about box office, I guess, but you could make even an 8-figure rather than 9-figure Batman movie without too much difficulty I feel like and still fill seats, and that would have a way lower box office bar to clear. The studios won't, but they could.

This is funny, but in all seriousness, let's be honest, CTA (aka 1) is the only Chicago album most people ever need.

I've been rewatching TAS and oh my god why can we not just get that Batman on screen. And yes I know Mask of the Phantasm blah blah blah. But seriously. That series understood Batman.

I'd be curious to see where you read this. The part about surveys isn't as true as one might expect, in my experience. If you give people a fairly wide range of choices (I think 5-7 is usually considered to be optimal?) you tend to get pretty good dispersion.

I don't really disagree with most of this (I used to work in the "real world" and primarily do applied social science), but I find it a puzzling response to my comment. It is possible to teach critical thinking skills. Most upper-level social science and humanities courses attempt to do this. I would argue that the…

As an academic, I want to point out that virtually no one in academia except the administrators actually thinks this is a good thing. Trying in vain to teach critical thinking skills to a growing proportion of intellectually incurious students who are basically just there to obtain a piece of paper certifying skills…

Seriously. I watched it on Netflix once on a whim and found myself asking, "why doesn't anybody ever seem to talk about this?"

Is the newspaper story as heavyhanded and terrible as I remember it being, or should I rewatch Season 5? I hated the newspaper stuff and the fake serial killer stuff so much when it aired that it's the only season I've never rewatched.