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Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox: “Big Joe and Phantom 309” is the first song Tom put on an album that he didn’t write. It remains to this day one of a very few covers he’s included on his own records. There’s this, “Somewhere,” the “California, Here I Come” half of the Foreign Affairs medley, “'T Ain't No Sin” off of The Black Rider, and that’s about it.

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox: I’d assumed Tom’s officially-unreleased song “Blue Skies” was a cover. Partly because “Blue Skies” shares its title with a much more famous Irving Berlin song, and partly because it sounds like a standard. That latter bit means A) It’s really good, but also B) There’s nothing particularly Waits-ian about it.

We don’t often get sequels after 20 or more years, and yet here is “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” appearing on Netflix December 15. That’s right in time for winter in parts of the northern hemisphere, which is when parents often need to placate their kids. The movie works as a brief entertainment-escape, vicariously for us and yet literally for the movie’s characters, as the chickens once again have to run away from something elaborately dangerous.

In part one, I thought of a working definition for “choosing memes” as a genre: they have three figures (agent, choice A, choice B); they are (roughly) metaphors with a fixed vehicle and a user-generated tenor; and they are concerned with shouldness — choosing between what is socially acceptable/expected and what is not. But what is genre anyways? Is the idea even useful? Does it do any analytic work other than offering you the pleasure of placing things carefully down and watching them rest placidly in the boxes you have made?

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox: According to SecondHandSongs, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” is Tom’s most-covered song. Now, let me state up front I don’t think that’s correct. A guy named George over at the Tom Waits Fan Forum has been meticulous collecting Waits covers for years, and he has a number of songs with more covers than “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” (which from now on I’m abbreviating as “Christmas Card” because that is too damn long to type).

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox: “Day After Tomorrow” is the first Tom Waits song that Joan Baez covered. I mention that not just to shout out her version (which is quite good), but to point out it’s the rare Tom Waits song that sounds like something Joan Baez would cover.

A Spartan king, asked what the Spartans gain from their ‘spartan’ habits, replied: “Freedom is what we reap from this way of life.” I underlined this anecdote in Ryan Holiday’s book, Discipline is Destiny, which came out last year. I think it’s a microcosm of the book as a whole, which argues, in my view, that self-imposed limits — of body and mind — can free rather than restrict us.

The newspaper headlines read, “Is It a Boy or a Girl?”  BBC Radio 1 asked, “What is that thing?”  Insults slung by the British press in 1982 responded to the world’s first introduction to Culture Club on Top of the Pops. The perfectly plucked eyebrows and smokey-eyed androgyny donned by lead singer Boy George was too much for some viewers — as if they’d forgotten Ziggy Stardust, the space alien in platform heels who’d graced the same show with his presence 10 years earlier.

For my post today, I’ve written reviews of the K-drama “Doctor Cha” and the Korean film “Yaksha: Ruthless Operations.” You may read the entire post, or just skip to the section that interests you by clicking on the specific review: Doctor Cha ☆☆☆ Yaksha: Ruthless Operations ☆☆☆ As always, the ratings are based on a ☆☆☆☆ system and are based on my own personal tastes. So without further ado, here are my thoughts on what I’ve recently watched.