Hello Kitty World is an excellent game—as the article says, it's basically an NES re-skin of Balloon Kid for the Game Boy, which took the mechanics of the (right-to-left) endless floater mode in the original Balloon Fight. It's a fun, challenging game, and I never thought about or was bothered by the anomaly of it…

A fun thing to do after you introduce someone to Big Star is to play them "The Letter", and then inform them that that's the same guy, but when he was 16. You will shatter their mind.

Of all the people to turn against "Yummy Yummy Yummy". Now I don't believe in nothin'.

Gallagher wasn't the Lester Maddox of comedy already? :(

It's only half-silly; obviously choice and variety are good, but there is such a thing as a glut, when a lot of pretty-good people start doing pretty-similar things, and the effort it takes to make these fine distinctions starts to overwhelm the marginal pleasures.

Makes sense to me, although I think Stern certainly gets his fair share of recognition  from a lot of smart famous people—I mean, lots of them do go on his show, after all. But your point about his show being the template for the Marc Maron-style podcast, in which confessionalism is used as entertainment, connection…

Actually, the joke with Magnitude, to me, is that he obviously _isn't_ an actual one-note character: anyone who entered community college at, what, 14 or 15 (he's 16 when he runs for class president, right?) has clearly got something odd going on underneath the shtick, which is probably just a self-caricaturing…