These guys are from England and who gives a shit?

yes yes yes yes yes yes yes oh my dear lord yes. How much money will I pay to see Stevie Wonder perform "Pastime Paradise" and "As" live? Any of it. All of it. Take my goddamn money.

If 128gb isn't enough, you were gonna hit the limit on the 160gb Classic pretty soon anyway. Dunno what to tell you: nurse your Classic along a little longer for 256gb iphones to ship, rip at a lower bitrate, or consider pruning.

What I love about that list: you're looking, right there, at the transformation of Apple from "laughable, near-bankrupt also-ran" to "unstoppable titan." One product, the first iteration of which sold basically nothing and was near-universally panned in the tech press. Yeah, the iphone sealed the deal, but no ipod,…

The number of people who can actually (double-blind) tell the difference between 160kbps AAC+ and 256 can probably be counted on two hands, and one of them is Monty Montgomery. :)

Never say never: I'm sure that if we ever hit some magical inflection point where Apple's engineers believe that they can make wireless audio into something other than a pit of horror and despair, they'd remove the 1/8" jack in a heartbeat. (It's usually the first thing to break on any cell phone I've ever had.) But…

Available for pre-order on ponomusic.com, allegedly shipping in Q1 2015. For a mere $400 plus shipping, it can be yours, if it ever actually exists!

Given that half the comments seem to be about ipods with dying buttons and/or hard drives, I'm not thinking that "too good" was actually the problem here.

The new round of iphones offer a 128gb option, so you can reliably expect that option to show up for the 'ipod touch' in time for next year's christmas rush.

Maybe? I dunno. I slogged my way through C6k out of mostly a sense of duty, and by the time "Blood's a Rover" came out had mostly if not entirely forgotten it. At no point reading BaR did I find myself tempted to go back and re-read C6k in order to remind myself of anyone's backstory: YMMV of course.

"Reading [James] Ellroy can be like deciphering Morse code tapped out by a pair of barely sentient testicles." (Dwight Garner, reviewing L.A. Confidential for Salon.com back in the day.)

Meh, Ellroy likes yanking people's chains in person. The last half of "Blood's a Rover" made it pretty goddamn clear that anyone who takes his cranky conservative uncle persona seriously gets all the grief they deserve.

It's totally worth skipping over the rest of Cold Six Thousand and directly into Blood's A Rover. Whatever weird stylistic fetish he was working out in the former is mostly nowhere to be seen in the latter, thank heavens.

The Cold Six Thousand was, thankfully, a bit of a lacuna for him style-wise. He returned to writing the occasional complete sentence for "Blood's a Rover", and the book was much improved for it.

As a couple of people upthread have mentioned, the fact that gold, prior to the contemporary era, had few non-decorative uses was a plus, not a minus.

Dude, it's Doctor Who. Cheap sets and F/X are part of the charm.

The series has never put any real effort into maintaining any continuity around that particular question. As-broadcast in the 60s, the Doctor is a cranky old alien on the run with a stolen time machine who gradually morphs into more proper hero due to, internally to the narrative, his repeated encounters with alien…

Oh god, I'm gonna be that guy here.

Mmmmmm, 1996 Olivia D'Abo…

Some people just love their Very Special Episodes. Me, I'm with you, but we seem to be in a minority here.