On Sunday, October 30, 2011, for reasons yet unclear, Tom Keith collapsed in his home. Keith's passing robs us of one of the most enjoyable personalities ever to occupy a Minnesota Public Radio studio. Most Americans who knew him probably did as Garrison Keillor's sound effects guy, the one who lent Prairie Home Companion sketches that all-important extra dimension. Others—Minnesotans—knew him as Jim Ed Poole and Doctor Larry Kyle, characters he created for his hosting gig on The Morning Show, which he inherited from Keillor, and which he left in 2008.

I had an opportunity to speak with Keith when he agreed to a "high concept" interview of mine. Sad to say, I dragged my feet and we never completed the project and now we never will. READ MORE

A column that resurrects the highbrow gossip of yore.

Here’s an anecdote from James Wolcott’s crackerjack new memoir of ink-stained ’70s New York, Lucking Out: Wolcott, then in his twenties and cutting his teeth at the Village Voice, tagged along with Pauline Kael for a drink at the townhouse of a top Newsweek editor. Kael was three decades older than Wolcott and miles above him then in the editorial food chain, but he wasn’t about to ask the most famous movie critic in America why she kept inviting him to screenings. (Whatta town.)

The only prominent item on the enormous glass coffee table at the editor’s house was Joan Didion’s then-latest novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Kael asked the host what he thought of it. "The editor reached for the novel, held it up as if it had healing properties, and pronounced: 'It’s full of resonance.'" Wolcott adds: "I didn’t dare exchange glances with Pauline, for whom Didion was full of something, but it sure wasn’t resonance."

Kael, who died in 2001, had a simmering rivalry with Didion that occasionally came to a boil, as Nathan Heller notes in The New Yorker. Like all rivalries, it no doubt owed something to what the two had in common. David Kipen once said, “The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.” Kael and Didion both went to Berkeley (Kael didn’t graduate) and shook off sexism and East Coast bias to gain mountaintop perches in the literary-journalistic landscape. It’s not hard to imagine why they would have spent some time playing compare-and-contrast. READ MORE

Here's the new track from ASAP Rocky, whose debut mixtape, Live, Love ASAP comes out today. The Harlem rapper recently signed a three-million-dollar deal with Sony subsidiary Polo Grounds Music and denounced homophobia in an interview with Pitchfork. That last part shouldn't be as newsworthy as it is. That's the cover of the mixtape there. It's a good cover, I think. What interests me most, though, is the use of the American flag in the image, which places ASAP Rocky in a long tradition in rap. READ MORE

Scary stuff for Halloween! "A three-eyed fish was caught in a reservoir in Argentina, reported Cadena 3, an Argentine news service. The fishing hole where the mutant fish was caught may be more of a fission hole. The reservoir, named 'Chorro de Agua Caliente,' receives water from a nuclear plant in the province of Córdoba." Don't worry, they've got all your "Simpsons" references covered.

It's the spookiest website in the world, made up (stories about) of terror and spookiness!

"This study revealed that Bengalese finches can learn grammar and, furthermore, that their grammatical abilities involve a specific part of the brain region distinct from other brain regions involved in singing. This is similar to what neuroscientists understand about human language processing. If the tweets of birds can be roughly likened to strings of human words, and if birdbrains process songs in a way similar to how human brains process language, future research may tackle whether these animals possess other cognitive abilities once thought to be singularly characteristic of human intelligence."
—Of course, as soon I come all out my face talking about how birds are stupid and whatnot, Science tells me that they are capable of mental feats that I struggle with myself. I suck at Twitter. I swear nothing I ever write on there can be even roughly likened to strings of human language.