Just do what I did, and have no one approve of your wedding in the first place. A handful of people might begrudgingly come, out of guilt, but then you wouldn't be obliged to feed or entertain them. It helps if you're a homewrecker, and your fiancee already got an extravagant wedding for her first marriage. Nobody…

Looks like it's suicide for you again this year, littlealex. scotteb's avatar makes me smile too, but in an uncomfortable, spine-chilling way. Sadly, his advice, all kidding aside, is fairly common practice.

[stupid "too many line breaks" bullshit]

Before she met me, my last girlfriend had only been in one other relationship, with another woman — a relationship that had lasted her entire adult life (more than twelve years) until her mate agonizingly succumbed to terminal diabetes. The deceased life-partner's birthday was on Valentine's Day, so my girlfriend…

What's creepier is that this was posted the other day in the "Romance Minus the Schmaltz" comments, complete with the creepiness disclaimer. This girl you've been seeing … Is she, by any chance, a blow-up doll that you dress, bathe, sleep with, talk to, and refer to as "Tasha"?

I thought a few of the first jokes of Martin's comedy special, "Person," were brilliant — the wussy-handshake joke, the ice-cube joke, the rock-paper-scissors joke — and the rest pretty much sucked. Jokes accompanied by his Large Pad are usually okay, but anything he does with a guitar or piano tends to just annoy…

Lord, this *is* depressing. After my ill-fated "first love," I only had eyes for one girl, from about fifth grade onward, but could never work up enough nerve to talk to her. In high school, she started dating some schmuck, and there was an ugly rumor that he had physically abused her. True or not, the shame of it…

My childhood home was at the dead end of a dirt road, no other houses around for miles of fields and forests. Our nearest neighbor was at the opposite dead end of this road, which was intersected in the middle by another, slightly less rugged dirt road. When I started school, I met our "neighbor's" daughter, who was…

I like Danny Elfman's music well enough, even though he seems to have run out of new ideas twenty years ago and has been recycling the same chords and melodies ever since (apart from generic-sounding schmaltz in "Charlotte's Web" and "Big Fish"). I wish I could say his scores for "Batman Returns" and "The Nightmare…

Re-watching the above-mentioned short, it was probably 1992 that I saw it, and Colin Batty is credited as a puppet modeller on "Corpse Bride," which probably additionally explains a lot of the similarities.

Not to change the subject, but, speaking of Tim Burton getting all the glory for "Nightmare": The first stop-motion animation I saw with this particular aesthetic was a short film in a 1991 animation festival, called "The Sandman," made by Paul Berry, who worked as an animator on "Nightmare," "Giant Peach," and…

My whole extended family and I made a big occasion out of seeing "The Nightmare Before Christmas" when it first opened in theaters, but no one else I knew at the time seemed to care about the movie. I remember it falling pretty quickly into second-run theaters, with merchandise sitting on the shelves at stores like…

Ah, the clown from "It." BEEP BEEP, Richie!

I think it's a little silly to make such a distinction between different types of stop-motion animation, when critics regularly act like computer-animated movies are the same as hand-drawn animation. Not to sound like a Luddite, but I will always consider Pixar or DreamWorks Animation films to be "CGI movies" or…

I don't remember the exact timeframe of it all, but I know that Danny Elfman had a rushed schedule for writing the songs for "The Nightmare Before Christmas." That's the thing that's always irritated me the most about that movie: years of painstaking production work, built upon a foundation of hastily written,…

David Edelstein expressed similar criticisms about the added boy character — that, in the end, he distastefully robs Coraline of her triumph. From what I've seen in previews and HBO's little "First Look" featurette, it seems like the male counterpart was created to broaden the movie's appeal, rather than for artistic…

That sounds awesome. Hey, if David Byrne ever performs again with the Young@Heart Chorus, maybe they can do a show on the steps of your retirement home.

"Stop Making Sense" is one of my favorite movies. Last fall, I got tickets to see David Byrne perform current and classic material created in collaboration with Brian Eno. A few days after the concert, the same theater was showing "Stop Making Sense," and I intended to see it on the big screen, to get my fix for…

Pavement tops my list of wishful reunions, but I think the Jicks have begun to jell as a genuine band, judging by Malkmus's last album. It's not the same as Pavement, but they're good, and the Janet Weiss/Joanna Bolme rhythm section is damn appealing.

I, too, never got around to seeing Sleater-Kinney live, and then it was too late. Janet Weiss is still my favorite drummer, and I've been enjoying her work with other musicians I admire, but nothing can beat the chemistry she had with Carrie and Corin. Carrie Brownstein has managed to capture my heart in ways I…