153 — Me & Mr. Cigar

Sick as two dogs, your pals take on the most bizarrely and possibly wonderfully gratuitous book to make the papers in a very long while, Gibby “Butthole Surfers vocalist” Haynes’ Me & Mr. Cigar. It’s a slow, shaggy, rambling tale of a young man getting weird, and we probably forgot to mention this, but: about […]

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152 — The Price of Time

Tick, tock, tick … doot doot doo-doo … time keeps on ticking ticking ticking … into the future! And, luckily, in the future, nobody has to read any slightly-above-average Crichton-grade semi-thrillers with one science idea and zero character or plot ideas along the lines of Tim Tigner’s The Price of Time. If you’re ready for […]

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149 — Get in the Van

We finally had to do it, so we skipped a couple showers, got real, real mad at our parents (and, probably, yours) and went out on the road to discover (how much we hated) America, and to do all of that, we had to start with one simple step: We had to Get in the […]

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148 — Handbook for Mortals

Because YOU demanded it (several years ago), and because this our annual holiday rule-breaking episode, we finally whip out our wands and make appear an episode about one-time YA teapot tempest Handbook for Mortals! Rock and roll, hair dye, motorcycle rides, dads, moms, tarot, magic, magik, and … typos, cliches, and what may well be […]

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147 — ZARDOZ

A more elegant fiction from a more civilized age is John Boorman and Bill Stair’s novelization of John Boorman’s film script (for) Zardoz. It’s a truly crazypants vision of a post-apocalyptic (and mostly pantsless) future, crafted by a couple men so laser-focused on breasts that you could well call them set adrift on mammary bliss. […]

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145 — Career of Evil

Grisly, gory, gruesome, and far, far too long, it’s Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil, a five-hundred-page career unto itself, even if it’s little more than a footnote to the career of JK Rowling, who we mention for … some reason. (The reason is that Galbraith is a Rowling pseudonym.) It’s the episode that airs Clsn’s […]

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