Upvoted for both the story and because I love the Rheostatics, too. Been in Japan for most of the past fifteen years, but whenever I miss Canada I put on a Rheostatics album - usually Melville or Whale Music.

That was fun, though I was kind of expecting this:

"Set me on fire, throw my ashes in a lake, and have a beer." Nicely done. Other than adding "the kids get all my stuff and can do whatever the hell they want with it" and swapping a lake for the ocean, that's basically my Last Will & Testament right there.

What a waste it is to lose one's vagina.

He had a test pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico and covered "I'm Waiting For The Man" a month before the album was released, so I'm gonna go with "true".

I wasn't even following wrestling anymore by the time of The Shockmaster incident, but just thinking about it makes me laugh. Glad it's on the list.

So, after hearing the news of Bowie's passing (my shoulders tensed up as I typed that - it'll take a while to get used to, I imagine), I listened to Blackstar twice in a row. Then I decided that I needed to take a break from Bowie-related things for a while, so I continued watching Fringe. I'm at season 5 episode 7…

SHUT UP AND EAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was also recorded in Switzerland and NYC (actually, "Heroes" was the only album of the "triptych" to be recorded entirely in West Berlin; Low was partly recorded in France).

When I Was Cruel is right up there with anything from his classic period, and as a huge fan of those albums I do not make this statement offhandedly.

I'm sure I'll give it another listen sometime - you're not the first person I've heard from who rates it so highly. I wanted to like it as it does have some very personal songs, but my overwhelming impression was that the production sounded dated - considering it came out in '93, it sounded very eighties to me. But it…

Return To Oz was the only movie to ever give me nightmares as a kid - for about a year after I saw it, I couldn't even look at a picture of Princess Mombi without screaming (boy, did my sister ever have fun terrorizing me with her picture book). I watched it again as a 21-year-old with my roommate and a friend who…

We can be "Heroes", just like Velma Ramirez.

Man, I get that Black Tie White Noise has its champions and it generally got favorable reviews upon its initial release, but did Rolling Stone Magazine really compare it to Bitches Brew!?

That's what I did with TV last year. When I left Canada back in 2000, the only shows I regularly watched (The Simpsons and The X-Files) had both declined in quality to the point where I didn't feel the need to watch them anymore and "reality" TV was just starting to become a thing, so keeping up with TV was at the…

I watched the complete first season of The Sopranos back in 2003 or so when I rented it from my local video store on VHS. I liked it a lot, but then they never ordered in the subsequent seasons and I kind of forgot about it.

I finished season 3 around the same time you did, but I started watching The Wire around that time so it kind of took over for a while. Think I'll go back to Gilmore Girls once I finish watching Fringe (midway through season 4 right now).

YES! YES! YES!

The A.V. Club

(insert semi-appropriate Simpsons quote here)