A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:

You went away. It should make me feel better.

"So, you the brains of this outfit, or is he?"
"Tell ya the truth, I don't think this is a brains kind of operation."

The Big Brain am winning again! I am the greetest! Muahahaha! Now I am leaving Earth for no raisin!

I like Kristin Stewart well enough, but then I saw this picture on the IMDb home page this morning:

God, I loved Siskel & Ebert. I got misty just seeing the old opening credits ("Trust Roger Ebert") when they played them during Ebert's Oprah appearance a few weeks ago. I also read the 1987 edition of Ebert's Movie Home Companion to pieces when I was a kid—I can still recite some of those reviews almost word for word.

Forgot to mention what might be an even-deeper-than-usual Magnetic Fields cut: the Susan Amway version of "Take Ecstasy With Me," which I believe only appeared on a Merge Records compilation disc. Much better than the Merritt-sung album version, and possibly my favorite thing they've ever done:

"Leave" is awesome—I always wished they'd released it as a single, even if it meant cutting the song in half. (It would have been tough but not impossible.) But my favorite R.E.M. deep cut—and maybe my favorite song of theirs, period—is "Camera."

"I Want To Tell You" was my favorite song for maybe a year in college. Still one of my favorite cuts from "Revolver."

Magnetic Fields
Keith, I feel like the entire Magnetic Fields catalog consists of deep cuts. Merritt writes hundreds of songs, has a ton of obscure side projects, and in concerts, he doesn't feel obliged to play any of the fan favorites. Last Monday I sat through a perfectly decent concert of theirs in Chicago without…

Noel, I second that emotion on "Without You." I've definitely put that song on a few romantically ill-advised mix tapes. (I'm also inexplicably fond of "Shake It.")

locked rooms
I'm getting a little tired of movies and books that advertise themselves as locked-room mysteries, but are really nothing of the sort. In "Dragon Tattoo," a big deal is made about how the island is isolated, the bridge was blocked, etc., when in fact the bridge reopened soon after the girl disappeared,…

I was also underwhelmed by the book. There's a nice little novella hiding in there somewhere, but it's suffocated by way too many indistinguishable suspects and about 200 unnecessary pages devoted to a tedious subplot. Basically, there's one great scene—if you've read the book, you know which one I mean—and it gives…

I remember that reindeer games column, too—and it's been, what, sixteen years? Damn, he was good…

Michael O'Donoghue…
…wrote a great humor column called "Not My Fault" for Spin until he died in 1994. Definitely worth checking out.

@JVS

I've got to go with "Muppets Take Manhattan," if only because I once saw it at a midnight screening on a wonderful first date. Two years later, when we got married, we played the song from Kermit and Piggy's wedding during the cake-cutting. That was a good day.

Now, I'd like two eggs, over hard. I know, don't tell me; it's hard on the arteries, but old habits die hard—just about as hard as I want those eggs. Bacon, super-crispy. Almost burned. Cremate it.

According to Lemmon, on the first day of shooting, Wilder said to him and Curtis: "Boys, be good all the time, 'cause when the broad's good, we're gonna print it."

This feels like a textbook example of the Streisand effect: