High school art class. We were down by the river across from our school looking for stuff to draw and someone had brought along a Walkman to hear the verdict. When the guys with the Walkman started cheering the rest of us knew exactly what had happened.

Congratulations on delving beyond Legend. I think a lot of people hear it and then never bother exploring any other Marley or reggae in general, which is a shame.

Mostly shuffle, plus albums by Charles Mingus (Pithecanthropus Erectus / Oh Yeah / Tonight at Noon) and Beck (One Foot in the Grave).

I would have been very disappointed to see anything else as the first comment.

One bite. Every time we have something at a meal that the kids claim to not like, I make them try one bite. Tastes can change fairly quickly, so they've ended up enjoying some foods they disliked only months before.

Hey Claudia,

Hey Binky,

During the four years I lived in Halifax, I went to see Elevator to Hell, Al Tuck and Thrush Hermit at every opportunity and was never disappointed.

It's okay unless you're a child riding an escalator.

Some CCR in the car yesterday and After Bathing at Baxter's a few days before that.

Glad someone else noticed - it took me right out of the moment.

Just watch seasons 3 to 8 sometime and you'll mostly be up to speed.

My favorite is Elephant. I probably come back to that one and the first three more often than the other two, but there's not a bad album in the bunch.

Wild Honey, nice!

That's the first album I ever became obsessed with when I was just getting into music in a big way. I listened to my cassette copy for months on end, noticing new details all the time in the densely layered production. Still one of my all-time favorite albums.

You're not wrong - many an album was said to have "shipped gold" or "shipped platinum" back in the day; this was based on projected sales to an extent, but was often a contrived attempt to boost an album's chart position in the first week of sales. But the issue here isn't the way streams are converted to album sales,…

Took way too long for someone to post that. It's like I don't even know this place anymore.

O'Neal got to my answer first - soon as I saw the headline, the idealized club scenes at the Haçienda in 24 Hour Party People popped into my mind. I'd also go with closing night - after all, by the end of it Tony got to see God, so they must have been doing things right.

There are two official systems: Hepburn and Kunrei. Kunrei is taught is grade three, though Hepburn is used more often for writing and does a much better job of representing the sounds for anyone outside of Japan - which is kind of the whole point.

I agree that learning kanji is difficult, but getting rid of it and adopting the alphabet would be a disaster. A literate person can glance at a document and get the gist of it in seconds based on recognizing certain characters, but switching to romaji or even hiragana and katakana would slow the process to a crawl.