Yep, definitely on board with that. I didn't like Pearl or Violet at first, but they've both grown on me considerably (Pearl especially has been really bringing it ever since the Personality Smackdown). I still don't hate Ginger as much as some people seem to, though — even if she's not in my own personal Top 3…

Quite apart from the fact that I have no idea what to say to someone who thinks that cuteness as a boy has anything to do with excellence as a drag queen, I have to say that if I were ranking the queens in terms of what they do as boys for my fun bits, I'd have to put Pearl near the bottom of that list. (And I don't…

Agreed. It wasn't an ugly dress so much as it was just an outdated style.

It definitely wasn't good, and I wouldn't have objected to a double elimination, but I was still able to predict (accurately, as it turned out) that Fame was doing objectively worse than Pearl was.

Absolutely right. Out of character, Fame definitely has a "nice guy" sweetness and vulnerability and goofiness about him — but in character she was all look, and lacked the big personality that you have to bring to really excel in the competition. I think the reason she was able to bring more to the video is that…

I know at one point there was a bootleg "box set" of all that stuff available by downloading nine or ten zip files off filesharing sites. Some of it was just remixes or live versions, but some of the new songs did genuinely justify the effort.

Yeah, you're probably right. Maybe Rudy was the point of confusion.

Even funnier is to imagine that Fame still didn't really understand *why* that was the punchline, but just said it because she was fed it.

Or one of the other queens…

The bar where I was watching broke out into a round of applause at that moment.

I'm not getting your connection between "Tutti" and the Cosby kids.

Jason Jones already had another project in development, so I'm not so sure he was counting on or expecting to get this.

Being Canadian, I'm having a bit of déjà vu (which, being Canadian, I will spell in the French way) here. It's Shad 2.0! (Comparatively unknown, but already well known to me, African-born performer takes reins of longrunning cultural institution in need of a new host, to large cultural chorus of "Uh, who?" That's what…

You're right, The Rant is definitely Mercer's standout thing. It's the one part of the show that people actually talk about and share the clips on social media on a regular basis — other than very occasionally the parody commercials, everything else is a little too light, a little too "the politicians are in on the…

Kind of funny now how apprehensive, how "hmmmmm, I dunno…", people were about John Oliver when his original stint guest-hosting TDS was first announced, isn't it?

I've actually never seen him on TDS; what I've seen of his stand-up comedy is what I know him from. So delivering jokes isn't going to be a stretch for him.

Yeah, I think video sharing's definitely a big part of that. Even I, as much as I love Jon Stewart, haven't actually sat down to watch a whole episode of TDS at broadcast time for years now — when he takes on an issue where I'm interested in hearing his perspective, I just watch the online clips.

My odd James story that I feel the need to share is that way back in the Napster days, I was undertaking a project of looking for and downloading the Radiohead B-sides that I had missed along the way, and came across one person who had labelled a song as "Radiohead - I Don't Know What Song This Is". So I downloaded…

Noticed that three. There've been comments on other recaps about that too, but it really jumped out at me this time.

The "mainstream rock" stuff they're most famous for absolutely does suck, no question — but they had already earned a reputation as a great blues band before they went down that road.