It’s got better in the Netherlands over the past 5 years or so, but it’s definitely not Belgium. (Craft brewing/speciaalbier has taken off in a big way in the cities.)

I enjoy trying new and exciting craft beers, both here and when I go home to the States, but nothing has replaced Weihenstephaner as my absolute favorite beer. Centuries of perfection, and it shows.

I like the insane sours more than the insane IPAs, but I think that’s just me. I am really pleased it’s the new trend, though. I was at a beer festival in Amsterdam a few weeks ago and I could spend the whole day drinking sours, which I wouldn’t have been able to do before even with Belgium being so nearby.

Sometimes I wish I could convince myself I was a good person for being insanely selfish like these guys can.

Yeah, this was probably the first movie I absolutely hated as a kid. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was one of my very favorite books at the time, and this movie got it all wrong to a point where I couldn’t appreciate anything about it.

I’d say there’s nothing sexy about Flanders, but Antwerp is actually pretty cool.

I wonder how Madden compares to the other sports-game juggernaut, the FIFA series, in terms of how easy it is to pick up for the neophyte. I’ve heard anecdotes of people getting into the actual sport through FIFA, so I imagine it’s slightly easier to pick up on, but I don’t know for certain.

I don’t like how everything scrolls now. It doesn’t feel like a full website anymore.

Hello? Hey, I get to have the full username here.

Ted Leo does a really cracking cover of Rappaport's Testament, which I have to admit I was surprised to find out was a Chumbawamba song.

Exactly. Make it explicitly what it is - a female-focused coffeehouse singer-songwriter festival, with some Earth Mother/witchy vibes - and it can work. As long as no one expects it to have punk and hip-hop in it as well.

To me, it seems like the way to make Lilith Fair relevant is to lean *hard* into the Lilith Fair part, which - at least from what I can tell - is having its own sort of revival moment. Forget trying to be all kinds of female-focused popular music, and focus on the sort of witch-bohemian aesthetic. Try to get Lana del…

Planning a road-trip playlist for next weekend, split into "going there" and "coming back," so I'm listening to it in order to see how it flows. The first one is peppier, a combination of Dutch hip-hop, songs from RuPaul's Drag Race, Eurovision, and indie of the mid 2000s, with a bit of a German influence because the…

In retrospect, Season 9 has a lot of problems with actually ending its episodes, but it tends to have enough really good jokes to make up for it.

I absolutely lost it when I realized that Paint Your Wagon is a real movie. That whole bit is genius.

To defend a PhD in the Netherlands, you need to come up with a list of propositions about your work, which traditionally end in a quote or joke or something lighthearted like that. My 11th proposition is "In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts."

Consistently and thoroughly.

Excellent point.

From what I understand, having never watched Supernatural, the gay brothers incest fantasy is the entire point of the show.

Then, in the second one starring Ice Cube, there's a scene where they say that no one's into extreme sports anymore, this one's a gangsta. The young people, they like gangstas, right?