Skummy

Surely Zack would have to be Skinner for that to work?

It was the first episode I watched, and convinced me to watch the first few series, so I'll always have a soft spot. There's a few post-peak Simpsons episodes that are still great. I was talking to my brother recently about how several of my favourite Simpsons gags are in New Kids On The Blecch - "the Statue of Liberty, where are we?", "Lieutenant LT Smash", "superliminal advertising", and "YVAN EHT NIOJ". Not so much "actually like", but I'm doing a Twin Peaks rewatch, and just got to the Diane Keaton-directed episode in Series 2, that's pretty universally seen as a low point. It suffers from being focused on a James Hurley storyline that nobody cares about, and the awful Ben Horne Civil War stuff, but some of the directing choices are more authentically Lynchian than anything not touched by Lynch in the rest of the series (there's a scene where a cop is questioning someone, and when they walk away they're followed by two smaller, silent cops walking extremely close together, and it's pointless and weird and silly in all the ways Lynch is), and Miguel Ferrer is an absolute delight in it. It's not good by any stretch, but it's not measurably worse than any of the other episodes in a pretty dismal slog.

Junior Taskmaster had its moments, and I love Wozniak in general and as the Taskmaster's Assistant, but I found a lot of it really difficult to watch. Just unimaginable levels of nerdy theatre kid energy that was giving me massive second-hand embarrassment. As for yesterday's episode, Andy said "One" during the chair-counting task and they never pulled him up on it!

I finally saw They Might Be Giants last night, rescheduled from last year. They had advertised that they would play the entirety of Flood, songs from their new album, and scattered other bits, and were playing two sets, so I assumed we'd get one set that was Flood and one set that was everything else, but apparently every night on the tour has been different, and they spread the songs from Flood out through both of them, which I think worked a lot better. Just a very, very fun gig, really joyous and celebratory. As far as songs not on Flood go, the two I really wanted them to play were Dr. Worm and Hotel Detective, and while they didn't play the latter (which would have been a long shot anyway), the second encore was Dr. Worm, so I could go home very happy and with that stuck in my head (as it has been fairly regularly for months anyway)

Roxy Music's self-titled debut is up there; full of mad takes on pop music that increasingly feel like an alternate future for directions pop could have taken. Nothing else sounds like it. Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) deserves a mention too. Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine and Black Sabbath's debut aren't necessarily my favourite albums, but as far as statements of intent for who this band is, you can't find much better.

I just had genuinely my favourite finish on one of these games in a long time. Playing as William Regal in a Triple Threat with CM Punk and Seth Rollins. All three are down to red health in at least one body part, everyone has hit their finisher, but someone is always there to break up a pin. I knock Punk down with a running knee, then hit Rollins with the Power Of The Punch. Before I can make the cover, though, Punk is back on his feet and just throws a chair directly at my head. That takes me out, and he pins Rollins rather than me, stealing the win. All happened in the space of a few seconds and flowed so perfectly that I'm not even angry that I lost.

I have often said that "again" can be the funniest word in the English language.

Oh for sure, the entire idea is unworkable. But I'm starting from the other guy's starting point of "in five years, it will be better", and assuming that many of those problems are ironed out, and it would still be shit.

I was talking to a mate in the pub a couple of weeks ago about AI, and someone at the table next to us butted it with the usual, "yeah, but you're talking about AI now, not what AI will be capable of in five years time", and about how by then all the limitations will be ironed out, and you'll be able to just tell it to make whatever movie you wanted. The example I pointed to then, and will probably continue to make whenever that argument comes up, is that an AI would never have made Jaws. Because everything that made that movie is great is born of having to adapt to the problems of making it, and of how it evolved through that process. That's true of every film, and pretty much any creative act, that it's shaped through the work and through the accidents and coincidences and everything else that takes place during that work, but never really as glaringly so as in Jaws.

I love Alarmo.

I love Dylan's singing voice from around the '90s onwards, once it has some more bass behind it, and it's less nasally. Something like "Love Sick" really leans into that voice, and I prefer it to any cover version. I also have a soft spot for the couple of covers albums he did in the 2010s, to get this back on topic, doing "great American songbook" and Tin Pan Alley stuff, and a lot of that is on the strength of how his voice has matured.

I completely get Stephen King's objections to The Shining - that it was a deeply personal book for him, that it was about how addiction can destroy families, and about how circumstance can drive an ordinary man to madness, while, as King himself pointed out, Jack Nicholson's performance in the movie is clearly stark-raving mad from the beginning. I'm not a huge King guy, but I quite like the book, and adore the film, so I'm thoroughly team Kubrick on that one.

Tetris