It’s with some bemusement that I viewed an anti-abortion ad apparently being run by an organization called CatholicVote. Partly I was amused to see that after months of mocking Obama as “the One,” we have a conservative group making a clear variant on the bizarre and confused old Beethoven argument, but plugging in Obama for […]

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I just want to get this out now so I can say “I told you so.” Since it involves spoilers, only continue below the fold if you’ve seen the season premiere of Battlestar (or don’t care about having it spoiled).

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A thought stemming from a throwaway line in a post about something else over at Ars: Are we at the point yet of having developed multimedia dead metaphors? We’ve got tons of prose dead metaphors—expressions that started as evocative figures of speech but eventually lost any link to the original image they were supposed to […]

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Why, Peter Suderman wonders, are music reviews so often positive, while film reviews seem to be equally split between hosannas and hatchet jobs? Peter suggests it has to do with the different cultures that have grown up around movie and music reviewing—which in one sense almost has to be true as a proximate explanation, but […]

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Feel free to add your own suggestions in comments: Black Swan  —  Thom Yorke Succexy —   Metric I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free  —  Nina Simone Sick Of You  —  Lou Reed Lip Service —   Elvis Costello Nothing Much to Lose  —  My Bloody Valentine Cake Parade  —  Georgie James […]

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For no good reason at all, I just saw the opening credits to the now-defunct TV show Charmed. Why in the name of all that’s good and pure would anyone do that to “How Soon is Now?”—and having done it, why would anyone use it for anything? Nothing that happens in the course of the […]

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Yglesias finds this from an interview with Rachel Maddow: Biggest misconception about pundits: That we all hang out together. I don’t know any of these people. Maybe all the pundits are hanging out and not inviting me. […] By her bed: Comic books. I read comics sometimes and graphic novels. I appreciate that genre. So, […]

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Market value of an unopened copy of the Rauschenberg limited edition LP of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues: ~$200 Price I found it for on eBay: $75 Sliding off the cellophane and blasting “Burning Down the House”: Priceless

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About a year back, I floated the idea of things that are “exactly good enough to suck.” Things that fall into this category—writing, music, art, whatever—are just barely of sufficient quality to get judged by the appropriate “serious” standard (professional journalism, a “real” band), by which standard they fail miserably. If they were only slightly […]

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