55 Favorites: #19

The record that won its namesake 2001’s Grammy for Best New Artist, I Am Shelby Lynne wasn’t actually her first album but her sixth.

And Now His Watch Is Vended

TV critic Alan Sepinwall the other day shared that he’s been let go by Rolling Stone.



I’d already been meaning to change the link on his name in my Friends & Favorites
list, at the bottom of the blog’s sidebar, from his author page at the RS website to the landing page for his What’s Alan Watching? newsletter on Ghost. Just a short while ago he announced that his free dispatch, usually out weekly on Fridays and until recently hosted by Substack, would soon be supplemented by a paid tier. Now his plan is for two paid tiers: One will carry the sort of material he’d been writing for HitFix, then Uproxx, and for the past 7+ years Rolling Stone; the other will have the content originally conceived for the premium add-on, with access to a Discord server for ongoing conversations. I’ve followed him since recaps of the show that inspired his logo, and obviously I recommend subscribing or there’d be no point to this post.

You can sign up for any level and still read 150-ish past editions of the free newsletter
at the boldfaced link above.

Neuro Diversions

So there he was, Richard Dawson, in all of his ’70s glory — with a dark blazer and medallion over gray turtleneck — seated behind a large, ornate desk in a room lined with bookshelves. The camera pulled in on him as credits appeared on-screen announcing that I’d found my way to some kind of documentary series or infomercial on talk shows that he was hosting.

I came upon this sight while seeming to browse television channels in a dream.

Waking up, I got the sense that I hadn’t actually been flipping channels but rather watching the results of artificial intelligence tasked with creating such a program. It was still a dream, of course, no matter the rationale behind what was on that monitor in my unconscious; as I rapidly became conscious, though, I found myself intensely musing on similarities between dreams and imagery generated by omnivorous algorithm.

One fascinating thing about dreams to me is that they can draw on the entirety of what we’ve taken in, knowingly or subconsciously, to inform the plots and dress the virtual sets of the movies that play in our head as we sleep.

I dreamt once about my cats, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, adopted when they were just about fully grown at eight months old, delighting in what was basically a false memory of seeing them as tiny kittens. While I never knew them that young in reality, I’d been around cats in their infancy before, so all the data was there for my brain to extrapolate how they would have looked.

Man of the Hours

As they say, IYKYK, but in case you don’t know here’s a ready-to-click DuckDuckGo search for “John Kruk” Phillies clocks time. My first thought amidst the laughter while listening to the broadcast live was that Last Week Tonight’s staff must be cursing their luck at the show being dark for a spell because they’ve featured Krukker’s off-kilter observations during color commentary more than once in their interstitial segments. I’m breaking my hiatus from the former Twitter, now X, to share this with him and lead play-by-play man Tom McCarthy.

Related: 5 by 5 • They’re Magically Suspicious • Jawn of Justice

Arch-Ray Vision

With an infinite multiverse I guess it’d be inevitable that somewhere out there (Earth-F, perhaps?) Quentin Tarantino is Superman.