My job requires watching a lot of Scandinavian films, and there are SO MANY of those made-for-TV mystery films it's not even funny. Just off the top of my head: the Liza Marklund series, Maria Wern, Maria Lang, Camilla Lackberg/Fjallbacken, Wallander, Dem Som Draeber, Johan Falk (also featuring Joel Kinnaman!), Varg…

I'm halfway through Divergent, mainly because I want to have a fully formed opinion of it before the movie comes out. There are sections of the book that I enjoy, but only if I allow myself to forget how silly the basic premise is. Can anyone who's finished it let me know (without spoilers, please) if the whole idea…

Well said.

I hear you. There's something to learn in struggling to detail your own world and build your own characters, and in that struggle you become a better writer. I'm an aspiring writer, too, and I know how that shit can be brutal. But writing isn't supposed to be easy, and I think a lot of popular fanfic glosses all over…

I once saw a commenter elsewhere respond to a similar question with, "Do you have any idea how hard it is to build your own world and your own characters?" For the life of me, I don't know whether that commenter was being serious or not.

Am I the only person who recognized Luis from Sesame Street as the guy with the flowers at the restaurant? It's always so weird seeing Sesame Street non-muppets out in the real world.

I'm not even kidding when I say you might have my dream job.

Remember how they changed their name from "Fier" to "Fear" to ward off evil? Such a good move.

Absolutely! I only remember two non-white characters: the African guy from Spellbound (which you mentioned earlier), and the Latina girl whose body Shari inhabits in Remember Me. I love how I can remember details from books I read 17 years ago, but can't remember to pay a bill on time to save my life.

I also loved Christopher Pike in junior high and high school, and read all six of the Last Vampire series in, like, two weeks. For some reason, it pops in my mind all the time, like how she cured some human with AIDS with her vampire blood. And how she was Indian, but had blonde hair and blue eyes. And how teenaged me…

Thriller ended with its title track on Side A, and Beat It was the first song on Side B.

I remember those cheap, shitty walkmans that only had a fast forward button but no rewind, so you'd have to flip the tape and fast forward if you wanted to hear the same song over and over. I also remember being totally fine with that.

I like your take on her murder being a flip side to what we'd see on a standard crime procedural, especially taking into account what George says to Ruth after the funeral. He just saw Dorothy Su everyday when he got his paper and didn't know her that well at all. On a lesser show, he would have witnessed something…

Speaking of the deaths in the opening, Dorothy Su's murder just wrecks me in the worst way. Can anyone recall any other deaths by murder on the show that were as blatant? We had the call center massacre, but that mostly took place off screen, right? And then the boring guy who got hit by the frying pan, I guess. Those…

I haven't seen that episode with the lollipop sculpture in a while, so I'm paraphrasing, but Olivier's response in that scene is perfection: "Live theater."

Do any of you recommend checking out these multi-disc Rhino re-issues of Monkees albums? I'm always tempted, but many of them seem to just be alternate (stereo vs mono) mixes of the same songs, with a demo or two sprinkled throughout. If you already have the Missing Links albums, do the re-issues become redundant?

Things go better with Coke!

This month, for reasons far too nerdy to get into, I finally gave a listen to the tracks I'd never really gotten to know from their Listen to the Band boxset. This consisted of half the tracks from discs 3 and 4, which both cover this Torkless era, and…most of it was not good. Which is odd to me, because I think Head…

My pre-school class all voted for Bush too back in '88, but I know I only voted for him because I could not comfortably pronounce Dukakis.

Hands down, David and Keith are one of my favorite TV couples. I don't mean that in a squeeing schoolgirl kind of way, I mean in terms of how well-realized and multi-dimensional they are, and how believable their moments come across, for better and for worse. Especially in this season, when we see them trying to work…