"doing the stay-at-home mom thing," I meant to type. Jenny "doing the stay-at-home mom" would be a very different sequel.

I guess the problem with that one, for purposes of this exercise, is that Malkmus pretty much tells you how their story ends (at least as a couple). But still, one wonders, did Jenny actually go to law school? Does the Ess-Dog still wait tables? That song came out in 2001, so she'd be in her early 30's and he in…

If they have Peter Pan cover Edie Brickell, that could save it.

I'd add And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out to the essential list (and probably drop Popular Songs, which is good, but more for the die-hards). Granted, "Our Way to Fall" was the song my wife and I used for our first dance at our wedding reception, so I'm probably biased. What a great damn band.

The lyric that always floors me, just because I don't quite know what to do with it, is "William Stanaforth Donahue, your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland." It seems on its surface to include at least two details that are completely irrelevant to the story at hand (why does his middle name matter? why…

Sybians. Sybians got me.

It was weird. It seemed like the big alien guy regressed in age about 25 years in one episode for no apparent reason. And I agree—this show is going to be a lot better if they drop the half-baked family dynamic and go for more of a Firefly crew of misfits feel.

I just watched it, and loved it, and my only comment is that you needed to drink a lot more before you watched it. There was a part where I dropped my wedding ring on the floor and couldn't find it while they were being shock therapied and it was a truly profound artistic experience. I was up in it.

Not a huge Richard Thompson fan, but "Shoot Out the Lights" is one of my favorite albums. Tried to get into his folkier stuff, and it's fine, but not really my thing.

"The River" is a fun karaoke choice—really brings down the room.

God they suck.

Saw this tonight, and it is as you describe: admirably acted, but killed by schmaltz. My takeaway on leaving was, first, that it would have been better if they had lost the older brother character. His issues were the least interesting of the four siblings, and there wasn't enough time to develop this entire damn…

I bet it was super-fucking-awkward when Johnny Sac demanded that Ted Mosby call him "dad."

Is it just me or are both of those performances from SNL pretty damn good?

I guess it's radio rather than TV, but I once gave my mother the Dr. Laura board game for Christmas. If memory serves, you tried to predict the advice Dr. Laura would give in various hypothetical situations. It was awful.

Springsteen, "Secret Garden." It's a very pretty-sounding song, but the lyrics all basically seem to be about vaginas ("If you pay the price/ She'll let you deep inside/ There's a secret garden she hides.")

I remember seeing that video when it aired, and I had very much the opposite reaction—I freaking loved it. 120 Minutes interviews were always terrible, but usually they were terrible because the interview subjects were morose or full of themselves. To see Beck and Thurston Moore commit to absolute absurdity was a…

Yeah, it's probably for the best that all the people on here freaking out about him having the audacity to say something bad about "Hey Jude" have never heard "One Down, Three to Go."

I can access Netflix through my new cable box (I just got Google Fiber installed), and while it is hardly the greatest leap forward ever, it is nice being able to go straight from regular TV to Netflix without having to turn on my Blu-Ray player, switch the TV input, go through some menus, etc. I wish they had the…

The writers went with a "Ross and Rachel"—basically the least interesting possible ending to a sitcom. Frankly, what the fans seem to want would have been a more interesting and unique ending relative to the sitcom tradition.