The vinyl single of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" was the first pop music purchase I ever made (or, rather, was first made for me). I was four or five years old, and I could not get enough of that song; I remember playing it over and over again. I'm not quite sure why it had such a powerful appeal to me then; from…

I think Overthinking is has made a bit of a return to form in its last few episodes. For a while there, I thought they were letting the "let's do improv!" impulse take over the show too much. They're great when they're actually "overthinking" things and doing analysis (which is itself usually funny). When they get too…

My only complaint with it really is that the multiple levels of reply really interrupt the flow of reading a thread. I think I much preferred one level of reply where people would reply @ someone from higher up in the thread. I suppose this system allows you to kind of isolate the odd petty argument between two…

Well, to the degree that gossip is fundamentally about taking a voyeuristic interest in other people's private lives, that story was pretty much right on the theme.

Yeah, I suppose I meant more like "emotionally profound" — or, as the Romantics would have it, sublime — than intellectually/philosophically deep.

So, "Stand By Me" seems to me to be about as close to an American secular hymn as we've got. There's something about that song that transcends its historical context. It's hard to imagine that it was ever a new song — it feels like it's a song that is for and of all time. It also manages to be both pop and profound. I…

Concert Films
No one's commented on favorite concert films yet, so here's one: Tom Waits' "Big Time" (never released on DVD — for shame! — but now available on Netflix Streaming).

"….possibly the most underrated show from the 90s."
"It's aged really, really well."

John Crichton — I mean, Michael Crichton
And Erik outs himself as a Farscape fan!

Haven't women always been TV's primary consumers, what with the history of soap operas and daytime TV and all?

One factor to bear in mind is that typical home TV screens from the 60s were quite a bit smaller than we're used to now (heck, many families' living room TV had a smaller screen than most of our computer monitors). And plenty of those were hard to move around cabinet TVs. So you sit down to watch TV, you pull the sofa…

Yeah, I shouldn't have phrased it as "Troughton wins the scene" — I think what I really meant was that I find him more "winning" in that scene. Baker's response is actually very conventional — it's what we would expect from an intergalactic hero — whereas Troughton's is more interesting, even if it's "weaker."

You know, I even looked that up to get it right, and apparently went ahead and typed "Doom" anyway (but I got the link right, at any rate!).

There's also a great scene in the Colin Baker era's "The Two Doctors" (which has the Sixth Doctor encountering the Second Doctor) where the heroes get captured by a villain pointing a gun at them. Colin Baker puts his hands up at about shoulder level and has this "You think you can capture me, you ridiculous…

I find the Second Doctor's "cowardice" oddly attractive. As others have said, I think it's often a mask to make others underestimate him, but sometimes it seems quite genuine. It makes him more vulnerable, and I rather like that compared to the Doctor as cosmic badass.

Cusack
So, I noticed Kyle says "Coo-sack." I've always thought it was "Cyoo-sack."

If you can't make something happen with h's and a j in Scrabble, the problem is not that Scrabble has no strategy, it's that you don't understand the strategy.

One day we will be able to +1 individual comments, and in anticipation of that glorious day, I"m bookmarking this page so that I might come back and +1 your comment, fastandsloppy.

The quote was "definitely not any kind of failure" and the answer was: "No, it was a commercial failure." Seems simple enough.

How is it a myth? I must have missed the scientific studies that prove that zombies don't eat brains, or the dictate from the Academy of Horror that only Romero's zombies count as zombies.