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The Experts

I hadn’t been on a game show for a while, so when the good people at The Experts, your new favorite YouTube game show, asked if I would come on and demonstrate my expertise in something nonmusical, I was happy to compete on the basis of my decades-long obsession with Alice in Wonderland. Curious how […]

posted 2 April 2013 in Links. no comments yet

Single-Disc White Album Roundup

I traded tweets earlier today with a very cool graphic artist, Craig Robinson, author of the excellent and witty baseball infographic collection Flip Flop Fly Ball. The spur: he recently compiled his own single-disc version of the Beatles’ White Album, which reminded me of the time I did my version. We’re not the only ones, […]

posted 19 February 2013 in Archives, Links, Tasty Bits. 1 comment

The Twitter Project

Rolling Stone has published another of my series of articles where I interview famous people about their Twitter feeds: last year it was Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, but this week it’s the lovely and talented Mindy Kaling, creator and star of the charming new sitcom The Mindy Project. For maximum self-referentiality, tweet about it! Or […]

posted 4 October 2012 in Articles, Links. no comments yet

Five Perspectives on “Fight For Your Right”

The Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” isn’t just the rare song with two parentheses in the title, or the MTV debut of Tabitha Soren. Even after a three-decade Beastie career, it remains the cornerstone of their work. So five perspectives on a #7 single: 1. Public Enemy, “Party for Your […]

posted 9 May 2012 in Links, Tasty Bits. 2 comments

Oscar Aftermath

That was the dullest Academy Awards ever, right? But there were some highlights for me, not least that Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won the Film Editing Oscar for their work on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo–work that they were kind enough to dissect for me (and the readers of The New York Times). […]

posted 27 February 2012 in Articles, Links. no comments yet

Deep in the Heart of Doritos

My history of Doritos was a story a year in the making; it required a trip to Texas to see the flagship Frito-Lay plant and some detective work to track down the snack’s then-96-year-old inventor, Arch West (who has since died, alas). But you can now read it on the Maxim website, with or without […]

posted 14 February 2012 in Articles, Links. no comments yet

Artificial Sweetener

I’m always happy to learn more about the state of the art in artificial languages, such as this article in yesterday’s New York Times. If that whetted your appetite for a historical overview of totally made-up dialects, you might enjoy a 1996 Wired article I wrote that delivers exactly that.

posted 13 December 2011 in Links, Outside. no comments yet

Choose Your Delusion II

This past weekend marked the twentieth anniversary of Guns N’ Roses’ messy yet magnificent magnum opus, Use Your Illusion. Honoring that occasion, the excellent Maura Johnston, music editor at the Village Voice, made herself a single-disc edit of the sprawling two-CD album–something I did for my own entertainment five years ago (although any honoring of […]

posted 19 September 2011 in Links, Tasty Bits. 2 comments

Sweet Melissa

Congratulations to the lovely and talented Melissa McCarthy for her Emmy win last night. McCarthy and I had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch together a few weeks ago, at which we ordered more fried food than we intended to. You can read a short excerpt at the Rolling Stone website, or check out the George Harrison […]

posted 19 September 2011 in Articles, Links. no comments yet

“New York, Springfield, and if we have time, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles.”

I love having mysteries in my daily life, but I’m even happier when they get explained. Exit Through the Gift Shop provided me with a narrative for a lot of the mysterious street art and billboards I had been seeing during my first couple of years living in Los Angeles (although I’m still not certain […]

posted 16 August 2011 in Links. 1 comment