Monthly Archives: April 2014
The Era of the Extended Middle
(No spoilers for first five paragraphs) Welcome to well-scrubbed Westeros. Anyone else notice that last night’s season-premiere episode of Game of Thrones looked like the Golden Gate Bridge after a rainstorm, or like your TV the first day you had HD? Everything was so clean and sun-dappled. The sumptuousness is because of the coming bumptiousness. It’s closely related to the endlessly repeated promotional line “All Men Must Die” (or valar morghulis, like you don’t know). Things are about to get bloody. […]
4 Guns to the Head, or How the Early 90s Became the Late 90s during 1994 / Part 1 of 4: The Music
Over here on the populism part of this blog, this April will be about 1994. Have you ever complained about boy bands? What’s the first defense of the boy-band police? Something like: “They’ve been around since the 50s, they’re just a side part of any healthy rock’n’roll scene, and besides I like this one song.” That defense conveniently ignores the fact that overprocessed pop bands were completely, utterly dead – unsellable – between New Kids on the Block and the […]
Why Dar is Awesome
Happy Autism Awareness Day! You are aware…(anyone remember George Costanza being made aware?)…that people have different views on autism. Even people who want to help. The only person diagnosed with autism on the Autism Speaks board…recently quit that board, because the rest of them kept calling it a disease, and he didn’t see it that way. The point is that some people consider autism something like left-handedness, just different and special and one of the colors of the rainbow. Wifey […]