Yeah, I'm a big fan of Radiohead, Videotape, and Warren Lain, but I'm still not seeing what's so impressive about this. Maybe the explanation was just a little muddy, but it seemed like a lot of verbal and visual filler to pad out a simple "the drums accent a different part of the rhythm than usual."

I'm surprised the article didn't mention the third and worst failure, which occurred just seconds before the climax of Let Down. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more widely-beloved passage in their discography.

I'm a fan of Charlie Pierce's various nicknames:

Patrick Stewart as Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan!

MY CHAPPED, BLOODY TESTICLES, MHARTI

I've always pretty much taken that joke in stride while watching reruns, but for some reason reading it written out like that made me crack up hard. So goddamned funny.

It took 28 weeks of quarantine for the infected to die off. But once it got loose again, it spread frighteningly fast. Basically as fast as a panicked person can run, with a few assists from boats and planes.

The episode's deleted scenes (on HBOGO now, YouTube later) had another zinger:

I love how so much angst was wrung out of relatively small differences in policy — the "liberal" Chung with a 22-week cut-off, while POTUS is shockingly pro-life at a mere 20 weeks.

As a fan of short-form science fiction: Ted Chiang. He's only penned 14 stories in the last 24 years (only a dozen long-form ones), but every one boasts dazzling ideas and masterful writing, enough to earn him three Hugo Awards, three Locus Awards, and four Nebula Awards. I suppose the languid pace is key to his…

I trust you've read his latest, last fall's "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling"? If not, you're in for a treat:

I am so excited for this project. Ted Chiang is the best short science fiction author at work today, and Story of Your Life is his masterpiece. Hopefully the "thriller" tag is a goof on Deadline's part, as the original is the opposite — charming, thoughtful, mysterious, heartbreaking. You can read it here:

How's that? It seems like the height of respect to say you admire and value a relative stranger so much that you'd cry over their death.

Please tell me I'm not the only one to catch the classic Onion callback:

I'd love to separate the Cars franchise from Pixar. Or at least tie it to a shell company that will funnel all those billions of sweet merchandising dollars straight back to Emeryville.

Christopher O'Riley's brooding, beautiful piano rendition of Radiohead's "Let Down":

Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities". The language is so beautiful (even in translation), and the stories have a surreal, timeless, psalm-like quality that I imagine would have relevance even to some fallen world of the future (an idea he touches on repeatedly).

I'm pretty sure the hostage country was Uzbekistan (which would make Selina correct about the number of bordering countries).

I saw him in Atlanta back in February. For anybody wondering, the "kicker" was something along the lines of:

The imaginary "neverfood" from Hook. Specifically the apparent mishmash of Play-Doh and Superman ice cream that made 6-year-old-me drool.