The dog's okay: http://www.nydailynews.com/…

Aggressive Mens!
I really, really don't understand why the TNG writers persist in the belief that extreme, unwarranted aggressiveness is a turn-on.

His non Bas-Lag writing is significantly pared down. The massive vocabulary is there, but he reigns in his baroque tendencies, particularly in UnLunDun and The City & The City. Kraken's prose is more fulsome but still nothing like Perdido Street Station.

Or, alternately, we can list them off again here: My vote is to start with UnLunDun (his young adult book), The City & The City (his most crossovery book) or The Scar (his most accessible fantasy novel). Some would suggest King Rat, but I tend not to recommend starting there as it, while good, doesn't have quite the…

Smersh that
I'm thrilled to have Box of Paperbacks return - it might be my favorite AVC feature.

Magnetic Fields
My husband and I had neither music nor readings at our five minute long, family-only wedding - we dropped our entire budget on one awesome meal. But if someone had held a gun to my head and forced me to choose a first dance, I'd probably want it to be to the Magnetic Fields song 'The Book of Love,'…

Pull my Daisy
My first job was also a shelving books in my local library. I used to borrow things I thought my boyfriend would like (he rarely returned them; god knows how much money I owe the library in overdue fines!). Being a teenager in the mid-90s, my boyfriend liked U2, David Lynch and the Beats. I once…

Another excellent primer
I grew up watching westerns with my dad, who particularly favored Clint Eastwood and John Wayne; I'm shocked and delighted to find that I've seen almost every single movie represented here, even if only once. I could really only wish for a somewhat more thoughtful discussion of sex in…

Yes, but is the song on the new DVD?
Despite the strongly anti-intellectual messages underlying the movie, this is one of my favorite John Waynes. And this is not just because, during the first scene in the cookhouse, the Swedish family is serving up steaks that look like they must be lateral cuts of cow. Of the…

Mieville's gone on record that Iron Council is his favorite of his own books, and I read it with that in mind. Although part 3, Wine Land, maybe some of the best and strongest stuff Mieville's ever written, I was disappointed by the rest of the book which otherwise had no real emotional center to hold together a…

Pancakes, the darts are actually, legitimately, totally awesome. Seriously, the darts competitions are a hell of a lot of fun to watch. The truly awful programming here, which is also unfortunately about 99% of it, is the reality programming. Of course, this is a country which has developed the tradition of…

Elderly characters
I'm with Emily - elderly characters, particularly father figures, dying gets me every damned time. Probably because my own father died when I was young. But I'll cry through Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, even John Wayne's The Cowboys, no matter how many times I've seen them, knowing what's…

Perdido Street Station
China Mieville's epic, extraordinary masterpiece.

That's the thing that lept out at me from Tasha's review too, Dr. M. The basic humanity - the very non-superhero-ness of every character besides Dr. Manhattan (who's own humanity is in turn eroded by his status as a superman) - is such an incredibly important element of the book that to turn the characters into…

Roberta Flack
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." I've heard it a million times and yet it gives me the shivers every time. I'd probably stick "Ain't No Sunshine (when she's gone)" by Bill Withers and Madeleine Peyroux's cover of "Between the Bars" on, too.

Toast, that article doesn't have much to add to the Fairey discussion, really. It accuses him of not being a good artist because a) he may or may not be able to draw (which, frankly, is a pretty tired critique of an artist's work, in the 21st century), and b) being a plagiarist.