That was godawful.

Ali Smith's Hotel World is really, really terrific. I'm excited for this, but it sounds like I'll have to temper my expectations.

Weird, I'm almost the exact opposite. I've read almost no non-fiction, save for some autobiographies and stuff like Our Band Could Be Your Life and the Our Noise oral history of Merge records. Otherwise it's literary fiction all the time.

To each their own and everything, but I grew up in an album oriented household, so listening to albums (and music) intently has been just as big a part of my life as literature or film or television. So it's almost difficult to comprehend that their are people who use music as just noise to distract their brains. It's…

Todd: Achewood ain't that much of a time dump to get into. If you have a free afternoon, just start clicking. You'll get hooked.

It's a shame Paul Stanley never wrote an autobiography. It would've made a helluva tetralogy.

Yep. The explanation is "It's a death thing", so I think, within the universe of the show, Oliver actually is a ghost and not a figment of Geoffrey's imagination.

Yeah, Geoffrey just hates musicals in general. Granted, the show stacks the deck a little by presenting the most shallow examples of contemporary musicals (Mamma Mia, the trashy East Hastings musical based on Rent) so I think the show is just more concerned with lionizing the dying art of classic theater.

The therapist from season three is the evil guidance counselor in Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, I believe.

So Jack is based on the time Keanu Reeves played the Stratford festival, but I also seem to remember next season's Henry Breedlove as being based on someone as well. Is that right, or am I misremembering?

I'm sure the Aborigines don't exactly share your perspective, mate. Enjoy your shitty lagers.

I guess you're right. I guess the answer is that the writing staff for Family Guy (and the Cleveland show) is much, much lazier and less creative than the writing staff for American Dad.

The play struck me more as a Tennessee Williams or Clifford Odets type thing, but considering I'm unfamiliar with August: Osage County I can't say for sure how similar it is to that play.

Does MacFarlane even contribute to the writing on AD? One of the things that makes this show stand out is that his style of comedy is, for the most part, completely absent.

Yeah, I figured they left him out of the episode because there would be a lot of difficulty in shoehorning a character like him into a theatrical melodrama. I dunno if he would work.

Well, he's been killed a few times before, right? The Hot Tub episode, one of the Christmas episodes…I think this kind of show can play fast and loose with canon because of how weird it is. Granted, it doesn't completely disregard continuity the way certain Adult Swim shows like ATHF do, but it's definitely not as…

It's weird, I wasn't exactly cracking up the way I do at AD's best episodes, but it was funny in a much more interesting way, and like everyone is saying, the episode absolutely nailed the experience of watching a play, it was basically a perfect recreation of theatrical techniques. Even a show as offbeat as Bob's…

One of the things that always got under my skin as a kid was how this show would quite often end up doing fucked up things to its one-off characters, i.e. leaving the pop star permanently afraid of fire, the CEO constantly fearing the Riddler, or that rich kid in the Terrible Trio basically about to be raped in…

Wow, that was…really bad. And if I were Steve Wozniak I'd be insulted by being portrayed as a mumbly proto-human.

I wonder, based on your posts on these boards…do you actually enjoy anything?