SPOUSE: (walks in door, inhales deeply) Mmmmm, now that smells like a fantastic dinner idea!

I'd like to see a film adaptation of Jitney.

The film adaptation of Piano Lesson is great. I still get chills watching Doaker, Whining Boy and Lymon gradually join in on "Berta Berta" and wind it up into the full-on field holler.

I'm with you there. That stuck out like a sore thumb.

Since I'm shamelessly pimping myself, here's another recording by my other band, a bluegrass trio that plays both traditional tunes and a good number of covers. This show has bluegrass covers of Warren Zevon, the Stones, Dylan and J.J. Cale: https://archive.org/details…

We don't, but that recording is free to download as WAVs, MP3s and a couple other formats.

Nearly impossible for it to live up to the source material.

The band is called "Covered in Grass," and the basic concept is we take well-known pop songs and cover them as bluegrass. "Rain" is kind of an exception, since we usually shoot for Top Forty (read: semi-cheesy) tunes like "Take On Me," "Sweet Child O'Mine," "Riders on the Storm," "Lights" by Journey, that type of…

I'm in a bluegrass cover band, and "Rain" is one of our favorites.

Watched "The Killing Joke" cartoon adaptation of the Batman comic on Netflix. Even with Mark Hamill's demented Joker voice (and a creepier cartoon version of the character) it didn't have same creeping horror that the graphic novel engendered. And like so many other comic adaptations, lines that sounds great on the…

No. I don't recall mentioning anything about the AP. I can only speak to my personal experience with print journalism.

The proliferation of news-aggregator sites on the internet has also eroded the public desire to pay for its news. If the Huffington Post can just post a recap and a link (way at the bottom), why would someone want to pay for a newspaper? People don't seem to realize that someone has to get paid to gather that news,…

Technology certainly has its place, and social media has given print journalism an immediacy that it didn't always have (which is good and bad).

I've been a journalist — even worse for me, a print journalist — for the past 12 years, and it's truly disheartening to have borne witness to the steady erosion of trust in media.

Really the only difference between the nod-n-wink/dogwhistle Republican identity politics of the past few decades and Trump is that Trump's attitude was "F*ckit, I'll just say it."

In a competition where only Bud beer is involved…. everyone loses.

Greatest. Screen-name. Portmanteaus. Ever.

We always did the "various meats cooked in sauerkraut" for New Year's Day.

Considering that Christmas is a mishmash of traditions borrowed from other cultures in the first place, I don't see any problem with nontraditional foods. If I had eight hours before my relatives came over Christmas Day, you damn straight I'd be smoking a pork shoulder!

Not for nothing, but Lauryn Hill put out this unplugged album (whether you want to call it a second record is debatable, I suppose), and a search for all permutations of this "New Ark/New-Ark" band, who claimed they were the real musicians behind Miseducation and would put out another record to prove how awesome they…