Question of the Day: Why does the iTunes Genius feature insist on putting "Careless Whisper" by Wham on every single 80s-related playlist I ask it to generate? Starting with Whitesnake -- gives me Journey, Foreigner, Genesis, Def Leppard, Van Halen...and WHAM?

Favorite Thing of the Day: Mattel LED Football for iPhone/iPod Touch! I'm in '80s Hand-Me-Down-Toy heaven! (Actually, I think the one my sister had was baseball, not football, but it's the same sort of interface and makes the same little satisfying bloops and bleeps.)

Holy shit, who put DC FOLLIES on iTunes?? The Sid and Marty Kroft "Land of Confusion" Reagan puppet show? I half thought I dreamed that show. Seriously, until I was about 16, the entirety of my understanding of the Reagan administration was composed of nuggets I'd gleaned from Doonesbury, DC Follies, and my grandmother shouting at the TV screen ( Read more... )

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The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have returned to the airwaves after nine weeks of strike-induced absence. Neither host wanted to go back on the air without their writers, but their contracts left them with little choice. I watched the first episodes back of both shows. As we were watching them, Segev said, "Do you support the writers ( Read more... )

David Cross defends his choice to star in Alvin and the Chipmunks:

I was too young to enjoy the original "Alvin and the Chipmunks" because I wasn't born yet. And I was too old to enjoy the later incarnation in the 80's, so it holds no precious memories for me to defile. If someone decided to re-make "Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang", (a movie I fucking ( Read more... )

I'm reading an article in an old Spin magazine about this kid who shot his parents while playing a Silverchair song. The story is vaguely interesting, but the piece mostly stems from the fact that the guy was a Cobain fan from Aberdeen, and the author really REALLY wanted to use the phrase, "He's the one who likes all the pretty songs, and he ( Read more... )

Aw, Safire's such a cute old man. Does this remind anyone else of that old "grungespeak" article in the Times? (I still think that anyone who can come up with "swingin' on the flippety-flop" off the top of their head is a genius.)

Lord, give me strength. Britney decided that she wanted to be a brunette again, so she'd just dye her existing crappy extensions herself. But couldn't she have let someone else do the back?


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When I was little, my sister made a videotape (a Betamax cassette, to be precise) that contained within it many gems of early '80s Days of Our Lives goodness. This tape, along with the many, many issues of Soap Opera Digest Mimi left behind when she went to college, spurred on my obsessive love of the show. The very first thing on the tape? Was ( Read more... )