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Hello again.

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That’s me.

The Los Angeles Times’ Robert Lloyd has up a first-rate oral history of Adventure Time, featuring Pen Ward, Adam Muto, Jeremy Shada, John DiMaggio, Olivia Olson, Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey, Pat McHale, Julia Pott, Fred Seibert, Nick Jennings, and Rob Sorcher. Salut!

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impossibomb custom pop vinyl!

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

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I wrote about Bob Elliott, the Bob of Bob and Ray, who died yesterday.

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In which I talk “Clarissa” old and new with creator Mitchell Kriegman: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-clarissa-explains-it-all-mitchell-kriegman-novel-20151209-column.html

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A Charlie Brown Christmas

I wrote this a few years back (for the L.A. Times), and it’s all still true.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" makes its yearly visit this week, in all its gorgeous melancholy. One of the first and still relatively few holiday perennials created by television, it remains, after nearly 50 years, as fresh as snowfall.

What makes it so? For one thing, it isn't about any cooked-up crisis in the life of a mythological creature; there are no elves, no reindeer, no Santa Claus. It's just about us. In the year he watched his humble comic strip become a national obsession, Charles Schulz wrote a little fable about the commercializing of a pure, deep, simple thing, and the only Christmas magic it allows is the kind we muster ourselves, when we pay attention to something other than ourselves.

As animated by Bill Melendez, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" remains true to both the spirit of Christmas and to the spirit of "Peanuts" — it makes its pitch for hope and love, but it doesn't sell short the anxiety and alienation the season creates. "I know nobody likes me," sighs Charlie Brown. "Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?"

The sad little Christmas tree he buys for the school play stands for all the world's underfed, unseen, unloved, yet it is not beyond rescue. Subtle, slow and quiet — absolutely silent at times — the special is satisfyingly wintry, spoken in the voices of real children and garlanded with Vince Guaraldi's famous pensive-ecstatic jazz piano score. And here and there it flies into passages of unmitigated joy, as comic characters freed from the page exult in the power to dance.

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NASA just released a brand new equirectangular projection of Jupiter, so I thought it would be fun to revisit the surface of some planetary bodies … IN CONTINUOUSLY LOOPING GIF FORM.

So here’s

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Earth’s moon

Mars

Jupiter

Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s moons)

Pluto

Credit: NASA/JPL, USGS

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Something I made when you were like 13 years younger.

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Coachella 2009

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Los Angeles 2015

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In which I speak with Martin Clunes.

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Alligator Lounge 1990s. With Doug Freeman, guitar; Rick Arbuckle, saxophone; Steve Wagner, bass; Kevin Jarvis, drums; self Robert Lloyd, accordion.

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Los Angeles 2005

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Cervelli, cervelli! Devono mangiare cervelli! You know where I picked up that handy Italian zombie phrase?

Middleman without context