These are in no particular order and are all readily available on iTunes.

• “Birdhouse in Your Soul” off the album Flood
  In Gigantic, the documentary film about They Might Be Giants, Dave Eggers gushes about this song in a way that makes it sound as if it’s a work by Shakespeare or Keats. One of the highlights of the movie is their performance of this song on the Johnny Carson show with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band. The flow of this song from its two-part chorus to the climax of the two parts in counter-point against each other is worth the price of admission alone.

Ok. Am I the only thirty-something on the planet who doesn’t understand the current fad of text messaging? Let’s see… If you have a cell phone, a device capable of carrying your voice over long distances, why would you send me some crappy abbreviated, misspelled, terse message that I might not understand, when you could just as easily call me? Remember: it takes less effort to place an actual voice call than it does to send me a text message.

Each year at this time, the age-old question of what to be for Halloween plagues me as I try to come up with something original for my friend’s annual Halloween Bash. The array of clever ideas other people can come up with never ceases to amaze me when I walk through the door, and for once I want to really concoct something fantastic.

Scientists have recently discovered a “hole” in space approximately one billion light-years wide. Unlike a black hole, this is literally a lack of substance. While the physics of this are mind-boggling enough for a non-astrophysicist such as myself, the grammar of this has been bothering me this week as well. Here’s why:

We have this word—“space.” A lot rides on the context in which we are using it. When we say the word we could be talking about distance, as in a metaphorical distance like Dave Matthews sings about in “The Space Between,” or we could be talking about a physical depiction of distance, such as the “space” between two parked cars. Or we could be talking about Outer Space-the final frontier, all of that stuff “out there,” beyond our earth’s atmosphere-the vacuum which contains the moon and other planets like yer anus and satellites and stars and asteroids. Remember that kid on the commercial who had a report due on space? That kid was screwed beyond an extent where any mere set of encyclopedias could help him.

Johnny blazed down the highway on his 1979 Honda Elsinore. The wind caressed his luscious blond hair and dried his damp karate gi. His muscles rippled as they were still taut from his workout. Johnny had just whipped some wimp in a sparring match at karate practice and he was on top of the world.

Meanwhile, Megatron, (in Cybertronian jet mode), raced overhead. He had just installed some new weapons systems and was itching to try them out. When he spotted the dirt bike cruising down the highway he knew he’d found the perfect practice target.