A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

2026-02-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

OKAY, CAMPERS, RISE AND SHINE, AND DON'T FORGET YOUR BOOTIES 'CAUSE IT'S COOOOOOLD OUT THERE TODAY: It's February 2, so it's time to talk about the movie again. Do you buy the whole Buddhist thing, or should we just quote lines for a while and generally discuss its awesomeness?

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2025-02-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2024-06-07T10:58:00.001-04:00

"EVAN O'DEARNY, MY PERSONAL FAVORITE IS UP, HE'S AN ADORABLE PINT-SIZE SPELLING GENIUS AND I KNOW IN MY HEART THAT ONE DAY HE'LL CREATE SOME KIND OF AMAZING BOX-TYPE OBJECT THAT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD SOMEHOW": The by-line to our Bee coverage was "The Writers," -- was this Shonda? -- but we collectively loved Evan O'Dearny. Well, he didn't build a "box-type object" but he's sure done okay for himself. The SF Chronicle follows up with him seventeen years after winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

2024-02-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2023-10-24T15:31:00.002-04:00

TALK ABOUT THE PASSION: In an overload of 1990s nostaglia, earlier this month Frances Bean Cobain married Riley Hawk, son of skateboarding legends Tony Hawk, in a ceremony officiated by Michael Stipe.

2023-02-02T08:00:00.003-05:00

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2022-11-11T10:37:00.001-05:00

PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC, WHITE BOY: One of my favorite discoveries during COVID was funk ensemble Scary Pockets. If you didn't know you needed a funk cover of Radiohead's Creep, Hanson's Mmmm Bop, or Guns n' Roses Sweet Child o' Mine, I am here to disabuse you of that ignorance.

2022-10-26T18:09:00.002-04:00

YOU SHAKE MY NERVES AND YOU RATTLE MY PREMORSE: Okay, there is no way Jerry Lee Lewis was alive yesterday to have died only now.

2022-02-22T16:14:00.003-05:00

ALOTT5MA ALUMNI UPDATE: Yeah, Maddy!

2022-02-02T08:00:00.002-05:00

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2021-11-24T16:27:00.004-05:00

WE WENT FISHING: Does this look like a man who has had all he could eat?

2021-07-24T22:42:00.003-04:00

USUL, WE HAVE PREMORSE THE LIKES OF WHICH EVEN GOD HIMSELF HAS NEVER SEEN: I remain proud of my neologism "Premorse," but never has it been quite so pronounced as with the death of Jackie Mason. It boggles the mind this fellow hasn't been dead since 2004.

2021-02-26T15:44:00.001-05:00

#3 - THE PLANTS WIN: Vulture's Rebecca Alter says there's "only two acceptable ways for any musical to end", providing plenty of footage to support her claims.

2021-02-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2020-03-21T07:05:00.000-04:00

YOU PICKED A FINE TIME TO LEAVE ME: Kenny Rogers has died. Given that I was born in 1970, many musical acts for me are wedded to their associations with the Muppet Show. John Denver, Harry Belafonte, Crystal Gayle. But none, for me, quite so strongly as Kenny Rogers performing The Gambler.

2020-03-19T10:02:00.000-04:00

BINGING TIME:At a time when many of us are looking for entertainment they can readily binge, and feel they've exhausted what's on Netflix, wanted to offer a suggestion--the CW's Katy Keene. All episodes of the season are available on the CW app (with commercials). The show is a spinoff of Riverdale, set 5 years later, and Josie (of "and the Pussycats") has moved to New York to follow her dream, where she shares an apartment with aspiring fashion designer Katy Keene, aspiring Broadway performer Jorge Lopez (who also performs in drag shows at night), and mysterious socialite Pepper Smith (who it turns out is actually a broke con artist).

The show replaces Riverdale's murder and sex with musical numbers, ranging from Christina Aguilera to "My Strongest Suit" from the Elton John/Tim Rice Aida, and uses New York well both as a shooting location and by enabling it to draw from Broadway's talent banks for recurring guest stars (Andre de Shields as a friendly record store owner, Bernadette Peters as Pepper's con artist mentor, Daphne Rubin-Vega as Jorge's mother).

Is it GOOD? Not really. Is it incredibly WATCHABLE? Absolutely, and that's what you probably need right now.

2020-03-18T10:57:00.000-04:00

AWAKENING FROM HIBERNATION:We've been quiet around here for quite a while, though remaining connected to many of y'all via social media. In these times of social distancing and self-isolation, communities like this one are more important than ever. For that reason, we're having our first ever virtual happy hour via Zoom on Thursday night--9 Eastern/8 Central/6 Pacific. If you want more details, find me or one of the other Throwers of Things on social media, and we'll share the info you need to get in. (There's also a Slack many of us have been using.) And we promise we won't spoil Grey's for those of you on the West Coast.

2020-02-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2019-09-02T11:19:00.003-04:00

THE LEGO MOVIE 3 - THE ANTITRUST PARADOX:

If I only had time enough.

2019-02-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

Participate in this thread, or it's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.

2019-01-11T17:05:00.000-05:00

IF YOU WANT TO SEEK A PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION, TURN TO PAGE 25: ChooseCo, a company affiliated with R.A. Montgomery that currently owns the "CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE" marks (and many of the old books), has sued Netflix over its marketing for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

2018-08-13T16:15:00.000-04:00

OUR ANNUAL ENDEAVOR INTO FAKE FOOTBALL: There are two openings for the tenth edition of our ALOTT5MA fantasy football league. Redraft league, non-PPR, $200 auction. If interested, comment here. First come, first served.

2018-08-03T17:16:00.002-04:00

GIVE BACK MY TV; IT DON'T MEAN THAT MUCH TO ME: Hi, me again, another review of an album for the Best Album of 1993 bracket-style tournament. Follow @bestalbum1995 and vote for your favorite albums, unless they are matched up against PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me!

Perhaps, in 1993, you were 23 years old, and your friends invited you to a weird club (which you called the United Nations, because of its semicircle-tiers-of-tables setup) in a weird sleepy neighborhood to see a band on the rise touring their newest album. If so, that band, and that album, would imprint itself on your mid-twenties. It would become the soundtrack to road trips, to drunken camping trips, to the breakup of a couple of your best friends. You’d later form a band with one of the guys who invited you to the concert; your drummer would, coincidentally, have taken drum lessons from that other band’s drummer; and you’d cover one of the songs from the album during messy, noisy practices in dim basements. At the concert, the band wore cowboy hats and ripped through tight versions of their songs, cover songs, and old standards, all sounding suspended somewhere closer to the twangier side of a wire tethering 70s folk-country to early 90s garage rock. They’d pause for long stretches between songs, trading instruments with each other and with a harried roadie. The two singers barely looked at each other. They finished with a cover of Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” and they broke up within months.

That was Uncle Tupelo, and the album was Anodyne. Uncle Tupelo had earlier invented the country-punk (though, really, neither) movement called No Depression with their album entitled, ahem, No Depression, and whatever that was, they perfected it with their perfect March 16-20, 1992, a combination of originals and standards whose hasty assembly manages to convey intimacy and urgency. Anodyne was to be Uncle Tupelo’s breakthrough, like Nevermind was Nirvana’s and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was supposed to be Pavement’s. Every song on Anodyne is great or close to it. There are Jay Farrar mopes ("Anodyne"; "Slate"); genuinely sad Farrar breakup epics (“High Water”; “Steal the Crumbs”); combative romps (Farrar’s “Chickamauga”; Tweedy’s “New Madrid”); and genuinely funny tunes (Tweedy’s “Acuff-Rose” and “We’ve Been Had”). Plus, there’s the so-seventies-country-it-might-be-parody “Give Back the Key to my Heart,” which you just kind of have to hear. This is just a great collection of pop-folk-country-rock, a great band’s swan song and the No Depression version of the Beatles’ Let it Be. I don’t think it’s the greatest album of 1993, but to me, it’s top-5, maybe top-3. Don't let it lose to, like, Counting Crows or James, please.

2018-07-23T16:11:00.000-04:00

GREAT AD, BUT WHAT IS IT FOR? Tour de France sponsors and what I know or guess to be their lines of business:

AG2R: Insurance
La Mondiale: French newsmagazine
Astana: Package delivery
Bahrain: Country with too much money if it spends it on sponsoring a cycling team
Merida: Natural-fiber clothing
BMC: People who like to try out the Tour for a week or so
Bora: Exotic wicker and bamboo gifts
Hansgrohe: HVAC equipment
Dimension Data: Facebook privacy violations
Education First: Violent radicalism
Drapac: Skullduggery
Cannondale: Bikes your dad used to ride
Katusha: Oligarchy
Alpecin: Tinctures and oinments for the scalp
Lotto: Supermarkets
Jumbo: Elephant husbandry
Soudal: Montenegrin bar soap
Movistar: DVD rental kiosks
Michelton: Agritourism
Scott: A guy
Quick Step Floors: Floors, obviously, but also fast-setting concrete
Sky: British DirecTV
Sunweb: Florida Department of Corporations Internet site
Trek: Walkabouts
Segafredo: Direct-sales bakery
UAE: Another country with too much money in a cycling-related arms race with Bahrain
Groupama: Coupons that are bad for both you and the company redeeming them
FDJ: Lockjaw
Cofidis: ED medication
Direct Energie: Undiluted snortable caffeine
Fortuneo: Cryptocurrency
Samcic: Casually racist river cruises
Wanty: Animal-themed manga figurines
Groupe Gobert: Laxative yogurt conglomerate

2018-07-05T16:25:00.000-04:00

DON'T YOU DON'T YOU WISH YOU NEVER NEVER MET HER: I volunteered to write a short essay on PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me for the Best Album of 1993 tournament run by the anachronistic Twitter handle @BestAlbum95, and I thought I’d post it here. In a minute I’ll get to why you—all of you, including the dwindling number of ALOTT5MAers still punching Hurley's numbers into the Dharma box—should follow @BestAlbum95 and vote for Rid of Me. But first, I’ll let David Thomas, author of the worst review ever to defile the pages of a then-major publication, tell you why you shouldn’t vote for Rid of Me:

I was disposed to like Rid of Me, the second from the current darling of British street-cred arbiters. The guitars are hard and up-front without being stoopid[*]. The production is wonderful: abstracted, uncompromised, poetic, and mostly like listening to a cheap stereo with one channel shot away — often stunning. Polly Jean Harvey is an inventive and passionate singer. The ingredients were lined up for something good to happen. Only trouble is, gee whiz, this is one of those angry-woman-spews-sexual-politics records. It has no heart. It speaks not of the hopes and fears of people like you and me, but of doctrine. Like a Led Zeppelin record: sounds great, means nothing. Unless, of course, you want to buy the flavor-of-the-month PC attitude, stick it in your head, and parade it like a banner. D

In other words: I loved every single thing about this album, but I am giving it a D because I would like to punish the practice of women having thoughts that I have not approved. So here’s Reason Number One to vote for Rid of Me: because #FuckDavidThomas.

*Sic, or anyway I need to point out that this person intentionally used the word "stoopid" in a review.

The second, and equally constructive, reason to vote for Rid of Me is that it is the greatest of the four or five masterpieces of 1993. It is titanic, brash, louche, hilarious. It careers recklessly between hiss, boast, howl, and sob. Harvey has said that she wanted the album to be confrontational, “to cause a riot,” and she and her fracturing band, locked up in Steve Albini’s isolated Minnesota studio, delivered.

Take the first track. Rid of Me begins with a muted rhythm on two guitar strings, a taut, controlled seethe, mirrored by a barely-audible tap on a loose snare that sounds like somebody dropping something in the background, plus maybe a bass, I can't tell, and soon joined by Harvey’s half-whispered, half-moaned pleas and threats. It’s mixed so quietly that it invites the listener to keep turning the volume knob just to make it audible, a clever trick (used probably once too often on this album, but beautiful here) that pays off when the band suddenly shifts into a crashing wall of sound under Harvey’s commanding shout, carrying the Pixies’ and Nirvana’s quiet-loud template to its logical extreme, before dissolving into Harvey’s third voice of the song, an unsettling hoarse falsetto bearing an equally unsettling instruction. It was enough to befuddle Jay Leno and Michael Richards.

And if you like it, that's the Polly Harvey who showed up for most of this album, with the twin anthems of gender-twisting braggadocio, Man-Size and 50ft Queenie, the crisp menace of Rub 'Til it Bleeds, the sardonic Dry. Also, track down the band’s unhinged cover of Wang Dang Doodle, which inexplicably didn’t make the album but showed up as the B-Side to Man-Size. Those are the songs that built the character Harvey would play on this album and her next, To Bring You My Love: larger-than-life, elegant, with a penchant for sudden, intimate violence. But the album also buries other treasures among those songs. Its second track, Missed, is a lush, aching (and cleanly produced, for you Albini haters) ballad of a woman sick with grief; the alternate version of Man-Size dials the anger back to "conversational" but undergirds it with dissonant strings; Ecstasy prefigures the loosely translated blues of To Bring You My Love.

It's a great album. Not loving it would be a character flaw.

Bonus terrible review, from Andy Gill in The Independent, via Spin’s oral history of the album:

Rid of Me is one long clumsy galumph, an extended tantrum of foot-stomping and frowns.

I mean, I guess that's one (point-missingly reductive) way to look at it. But seriously, #FuckDavidThomas.