"I'm Bruno Mars, and you're watching… Disney Channel."

Well, I look at it this way- what is current and innovative and new is a move away from dense instrumentation and melody, towards a stark minimalism and freeform, confessional lyrics. Which is intense and interesting, but pretty far from "musical." Mars is going forward by consciously going back to a time when the…

One of my favorite books has a scene where a middle-class man gets on TV, and gradually begins to unravel. By the end, he has nothing left, and he's just screaming the word "N***ERS!" over and over again. He gets incredible ratings and the community declares him a hero.

See also: David Bowie pretending to be a hippie/a gay man/a neo-Nazi; Elvis Costello recording an elaborate Motown and soul homage album then dropping extraordinarily racist statements just to see how people react; Andy Dick continuing to exist.

It's an economic class war wearing a race war costume. "Privileged" is a higher points tier than "white," but guess what color most of the privileged people are.

Today's Pikachu is like "every day is an adventure, let's do great things!" Classic Pikachu is like "let's eat crackers in bed, fuck all it's Saturday."

I quite like both "Red Right Hand" and "Red Right Hand 2.0." It's a sequel to the original song, depicting the community as "infected" by the Red Right Hand and its moral ambivalence- now almost everyone and everything bears the same mark of Cain.

I'm in a production of "Billy Elliot," the musical/working-class drama by Elton John and Lee Hall, right now. It was programmed over a year ago, but the shocking results of the election and the rise of the Thatcher-esque Trump have made the struggles of the unemployed British miners, the militarization of the police…

Is a PoS the opposite of a PoC? I can actually see that turn of phrase getting traction on tumblr…

Chris, Liam and Doo-Dah.

People seem to concentrate on not saying out and out "it was a suicide." Just that Arnold is dead- could it have been a conscious uploading of self into a Host system? The Westworld website/ARG makes it clear that the dead can be made into Hosts at the Delos Corporation's will.

In third grade, I got braces and they hurt like hell. We weren't allowed gum in school, and chewing on something was the only way to stop the pain. I would tear pages out of my notebook and chew them like gum, and teachers were okay with this loophole because reasons.

The best deli style sandwich I ever had was bought pre-wrapped from the grocery at La Guardia Airport: pretzel baguette, black forest ham, applewood bacon, sliced granny smith apple, brie, lots of butter and just a dash of aioli.

As good of a sketch as that was for an X-Files parody, it played just as much like a straight up Buffy episode.

I believe those are called Cheez Roll-Ups.

My grad school would serve Elvis Dinner on Elvis Day, with peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, and all the other soul foods Elvis loved- but they never served a Fool's Gold Loaf.

Sounds like porcupine balls, another traditional "hunky food" from one of those Old Countries that doesn't actually exist anymore due to shifting borders. My grandfather's side of the family came from Carpatho-Russa, which was absorbed at various times into Austra-Hungary, the Ukraine and the USSR. Its only real claim…

Go to your local grocery store or Walmart- they have generic Kraft Dinner packages for about 75 cents most places. Buy two different flavors- I like traditional and three-cheese-shells. Cook them both together, throw in a whole stick of butter and as much milk as you need. It becomes a sort of poor-man's alfredo, but…

Lipton's Ringo Noodle Soup. It used to be Giggle Noodle Soup until about ten years ago- the old advertising campaign included an obviously high hippie giggling about the psychedelic shapes.

I had a strange nightmare once that one of my friends called me and asked me to give her a ride home from the factory where she was working. I showed up and she wasn't permitted to leave- apparently it was an "abortion mill" where poor people were paid to remain perpetually pregnant to crank out fetuses to supply…