Thoughts:

Because corpulent middle aged men with exposed mid-riff shirt buttons are truly a terrible sight to behold.

Tragic? Incredibly. A horrifying, eerie, but nevertheless entirely random and meaningless event? Science tells us it must be. But if you're one of the Basanga in that audience, how do you not live the rest of your life thinking either a) you are the chosen people, b) the Benha Tsadhi's are cursed by God, or c)…

Apparently they also had to pry her little dog whining and shrieking from her blood soaked corpse. And the spectators roared their approval!

The book? I'm a huge fan, but I'm not sure it counts as popular entertainment.

You can always depend on /
The kindness of strangers!

If you listen to the podcast its very obvious that most of that stuff is improvised, and a lot of the bits on the show are pretty clearly along the same lines, just heavily edited down. So listen to the podcast and then just imagine a very involved post-production process, is I guess what I'm saying.

The best literary fiction makes you aware of how meaningful life is all the time, even without grand narrative arcs, clear dramatic conflict or tidy resolutions. There's no reason (other than ratings) why TV can't do the same. Your life is never going to 'make sense' the way a cop drama or a half hour sitcom does. …

Point taken. Although ideally your art isn't supposed to make the audience want to hang themselves. Apparently nobody ever told Coleman.

Who knew dysthymia could be such a potent muse?

Totally. No human being should ever see Red Zone Cuba more than once (or at all, really) and yet I've sat through it from start to finish maybe a dozen times thanks to this show.

I can imagine. Personally, I'm such a geek for this show that the Pearl/Bobo/Observer business just plays like well-worn syndicated sitcom episodes for me, but I can definitely see how someone brand new to the show and picking things up at, say, The Undead, where they beam Servo down to the Observer planet and he…

I dunno that I agree with this. Both can make for good MST3K I think. Manos, Monster A Go Go, Party Beach, Pod People, Attack of The The Eye Creatures, Spider Island, Batwoman, The Creeping Terror, the Coleman Francis trilogy, Giant Spider Invasion; these are terrible, TERRIBLE fucking movies, but they're definitely…

Same here. It's interesting to watch just to see how they started out, but I was definitely not entertained.

Nerd warning: it makes me think of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics where he talks about the identification process that happens when you reduce characters to more abstract, universal avatars. Making two out of the three riffers robot puppets definitely has some fairly complex psychological implications and…

"Hey guys, lets write a riff that literally no one outside of the people who work on the show will get!" Except maybe Mike's ex girlfriend I suppose.

I don't get this criticism about the start of the eighth season. Or maybe I do if the problem is too many similar movies in a row combined with anxiety at the time about how the show was adapting to its new home at SciFi. But none of that matters anymore (you can watch in any order you like and we know they setttled…

Doug Martsch's solo on Built to Spill's Carry the Zero is the only guitar solo that can quite literally make me cry. So I'd probably go with that one.

Look, here's the thing: you don't know these people. You know media reports, you know what they're willing to reveal to you in their own statements, you know the official outcomes of legal proceedings, but those things rarely amount to any real understanding of who someone is or was.

Deeply. If you're Catholic I'd say you have some Hail Marys to get started on.