At the beginning of the year, I made a list of albums from artists who say they're going to put something out. Although still mostly unfulfilled (Beak actually put a record out this year, so with Beth Gibbon's solo album, that's two-thirds of the way to a Portishead album), I stand by my petulant demands. However, this is a slightly different list. These are albums that can't possibly happen, mostly due to death and the logistical issues that creates. While I’m close to manifesting a fourth Portishead album and consistently badgering The Cure and Dresden Dolls to deliver on those albums I know are near completion, I figured I'd waste my time—and yours—pontificating on albums that no amount of badgering surviving members of these groups is going to do anything. Still, it's fun to imagine. Clearly, we are in the shit timeline that results in a failed reality TV star winning the presidency twice (calling it now) and ends in a nuclear exchange between Russia and America. Who knows what went wrong in the past, and at what point we got knocked onto this horrifying Back to the Future Part II-esque alternate timeline? Who knows what these alternate timelines are, where, at the very least, these albums exist?...

I’ve rather emphatically established that I love the movie Road House, and one of the things I find admirable about Swayze’s OG incarnation of the Dalton character is his degree in philosophy. On its surface, that aspect of the character seems idiosyncratic—one might not initially see much use for philosophy to a rough-and-tumble bar bouncer, but it becomes a little clearer through the words of ancient Greek historian Thucydides: "The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." Well, I can't offer you a degree in philosophy, but I can offer a crash course in it. For starters, I’ve gathered a selection of teachings from the grandpappy of Western philosophy, Socrates...

So, someone close to you has decided to go to the Great Void. They said bon voyage to the hellish landscape that is our world today and quietly whispered, "Peace out, it's cool, it's all cool," while they drifted off somewhere unknown.

Now what? Great, it’s all cool for them, but now what about you? What about their stuff? What about their unnecessary human body that they have no use for any longer? People that need to be contacted? It’s all cool beans and roses for them, but now others are left to ponder what happens next. Well, if you’re lucky, your friend/loved one and you will have others close by who will be able to shoulder some of this process. But if not, or if the others are doing their necessary due process of grieving, you may be left doing the majority of these things on your own. But fear not because those close friends/family members will still be there when the time comes for you to enjoy your piece of the grief cake...

The great American hot dog; staple of barbecues, beach parties, baseball games, and feeding the kids on a budget. They are cheap, delicious, and have an infinite variety of configurations in which one can assemble them.

But where did they come from, and how? They didn't just fall off the hot dog tree one day. Yes, sausage has been around for thousands of years, first being mentioned as far back as Homer's "The Odyssey" in the 9th century BC, but as anyone who has ever had one knows, a hot dog is not a true sausage, outside of its form factor as a tube made of meat. I am going to do some research to see if I can discover the origins of the mysterious meat rods we know and love...