Oh man this AVQ&A is basically a compendium of bands I heard while at friends’ places and parties but never listened to myself in college, with the exception of the Flaming Lips (which I was still introduced to at a party, via Yoshimi, and I’ve just slowly drifted away from rather than making a break; still listening…

The Archandroid is so good that making a worthy follow-up is incredibly difficult, but The Electric Lady never even managed to get lodged in my head (not in an earworm way, but in a this album is forging new mental pathways way) in the same way Archandroid or even stuff from the Metropolis EP did.

I recall reading somewhere that he did a nineteenth-century Charleston accent, but even by the 1930s it sounded so odd and non-southern to everyone that they made him drop it.

Its preferred spawning ground is the Sargasso Sea?

I always got it at a Korean place in Wudaokou (I know I’m being very unspecific, but you could probably get it in any Korean place) when I was living in Beijing. It was just another grilled fish over rice in a delicious sauce. It’s not esoteric at all!

The whole reason eel’s relatively depleted now in New England is because Americans ate caught and ate tons of them! And eel is delicious.

Eel’s one you won’t find so often in part because it’s pretty damn depleted, with a lot of the remaining catch in New England actually going to Japan because they have worse depletion problems there.

I was skeptical but this trailer is just delightful.

“Nice guy” actor is actually a good descriptor for Broderick, given that his performances often have a sort of lurking desperation underneath the exterior (intentionally—my favorite Broderick roles are his pathetic ones).

I actualy just bought Holger Czukay’s Movies, which I’m enjoying a lot. I found out about it in On Some Faraway Beach, a very nice Eno biography I read last month that you might enjoy (that is, if you haven’t already read it)—focuses on his work without while still giving a good overview of Eno’s personality and…

Just as last month’s big themes were the Enlightenment and Brian Eno (On Some Faraway Beach, BTW, is one of the best and most balanced popular musician biographies I’ve ever read), this month the big themes are China and design basics.

There’s still the issue that Paris and New York already existed on either side of the Atlantic—to get a moon base and space Hilton built in the first place one needs to reduce launch costs beyond what scale alone could do.

A fair amount of what’s keeping us from having spaceplanes is material science and propulsion technology, though—getting past that is possible, but getting past that in a way that’s self-sustaining isn’t at this point (witness the challenges of keeping the Concorde going, now multiply them by 10 or more).

I’m honestly surprised they didn’t get into a “united States of America” vs. “United States of America” debate.

I’m thinking more the commercial spaceplanes, space Hiltons, and giant moon base—that required spaceflight to get cheap in the way that commercial spaceflight did, and it’s hard to see how that would have happened even with continued Apollo-levels of funding. Spaceflight’s just harder than aviation.

An instrument panel lit by bioluminescent fungus sounds both incredibly primitive and incredibly futuristic.

Looking at the history of aviation it’s easy to see why people like Arthur C. Clarke (who also lived the first few years of his life without electricity, IIRC) were making prognostications for spaceflight like those it 2001, too.

I just started watching Twin Peaks a couple of weeks ago and throughout the whole pilot I couldn’t get over my “Holy shit, the Mr. and Mrs. Ross!” reaction.

Also a reminder that 2001: A Space Odyssey is in fact rated G.

A treasure map of of Imola, perhaps…