To be fair, you never know when your Riddler suit is going to need cleaning at your local Evil Dry Cleaners.

The fun shirt has been a novelty staple of the Brooks line for decades. Perhaps someone with a better sense of fashion history will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall seeing "the fun jacket" as depicted above until quite recently at Brooks.

In 2001, Brooks Brothers was offloaded by Marks and Spencer and acquired by the Italian conglomerate Retail Brand Alliance. As part of the new acquisition, Brooks reissued several items inspired by their halcyon past, such as club-collared shirts, their trademark sack-style suit and other classic togs. At some point in the last three or four years however, some strange form of LSD was slipped into the water there. The Brooks Brothers fun jacket isn't the nadir of the line, this recent item is: "Extra-Slim Fit Camo Print Sport Shirt."

In case anybody from Brooks is reading this thread, as somebody who has bought a pretty fair chuck of his clothes at Brooks over the years, I'll make this as succinct as possible:

I don't buy suits at the Army-Navy Store. I don't want to see camouflage in Brooks Brothers.  Capiche?

CNN anchor John King should host from the left. If only to hear him say "Welcome to Crossfire" every night, after this classic CNN meltdown in January of 2011:

On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.

Perhaps King could convince Sarah Palin to host from the right.

There's a clip I posted on my blog yesterday of Siskel and Ebert from the early 1990s, when they appeared in a segment for budding journalists for PBS, which included this passage:

Scroll to about 3:15, in which Siskel and Ebert observe:

SISKEL: You have to summon up the courage to say what you honestly feel. And it’s not easy. There’s a whole new world called political correctness that’s going on, and that is death to a critic to participate in that.

EBERT: Political correctness is the fascism of the ‘90s. It’s kind of this rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your ways of looking at things within very narrow boundaries, or you’ll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge just that kind of thinking. And certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries; it’s also one of the purposes of art. So that if a young journalist, 18, 19, 20, 21, an undergraduate tries to write politically correctly, what they’re really doing is ventriloquism.

I wish the post 9/11 Ebert had taken his own earlier advice.

Do you have or have you heard the King Crimson Official Bootleg?

No, the only live Crimson I have is the Neal and Jack and Me DVD, which contains a live concert from Japan in 1984, and a brilliant live concert in Frejus, France in 1982. For the latter gig, I believe King Crimson was the opening act for Roxy Music, as their own live DVD, The High Road, was videotaped there on the same night as the KC gig.

What cabana would you choose on the Royal Caribbean Vomitate as it slowly, really slowly, cruised the waters off Quintana Roo ?

And how much would you be selling those always appealing fruit dishes for at that point ?

As a legendary Marxist once said, "Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know."

Back in the Jurassic days when newspapers were still actually printed on paper, wasn't it routine for columnists to use the same mugshot seemingly for decades? (He said, staring at his own photo from 2005...) I wonder what the record is for the columnist who used the same photo the longest.

King Crimson's Discipline and Beat were pretty amazing albums, and I Advanced Masked by KC's Robert Fripp and Andy Summers of the Police from right around that period feature some beautifully intricate and mystical instrumentals. (Or as I like to call the latter album, the Roland Guitar Synthesizer demonstration disk.)

Do Peter Gabriel's third and fourth albums count as progressive rock? In any case, those was some pretty remarkable soundscapes for the early 1980s. The same could be said about Kate Bush's Hounds of Love; which was inspired by Gabriel's earlier efforts. All three of those albums made brilliant use of the then-new Fairlight synthesizer.

Yes, it's true: you'll never get anywhere in politics if you're a Republican who associates a Democrat president with fascism...

I loathe the lyrics on The Final Cut, and its sophomoric anti-Falklands theme, but I love the production; it's a beautifully recorded and arranged album. But the Pink Floyd albums I probably listen to the most are Dark Side of the Moon and A Momentary Lapse in Reason. (I saw the band twice in Philly on the latter tour.) Wish You Were Here sounded great -- the first 10,000 times I heard it in high school; the double album length of The Wall makes it remarkably self-indulgent and loaded with filler. (Which is clearly this band's recurring leitmotif.)

If I had to pick one song though, I'd go with "Us and Them," with its beautiful production and playing.

I'll second The Kid Stays in the Picture and Dogtown and the Z-Boys. I'd also recommend Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a 2002 look at the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band, who toiled in anonymity in the 1960s, despite playing on dozens and dozens of hit records. I interviewed Allan Slutsky, the film's producer for Blogcritics back in 2003. Standing in the Shadows of Motown had a curious gestation -- it's probably the only documentary that began life as a music instruction book (written by Slutsky) before becoming a motion picture.

As for television documentaries, this one's pretty obvious, but the early 1970s Thames Television series The World at War is brilliant, and was made at just the right time. Television techniques (really film documentary techniques, since that was what it was all shot in, before being transferred to video) were sufficiently advanced to the tell story properly; enough of the survivors of WWII were alive (Including Laurence Olivier) to tell the story properly, and political correctness hadn't seeped into liberalism. I imagine that The World at War would have a very different tone if made today, particularly for British TV.

George Bush was a terrific leader yet I did not know much about his heroic ways until after his retirement. where the heck were Time and Newsweek? Why do they not celebrate their great leaders? What is with their pulling down of their leaders?

Time and Newsweek will praise men like Bush, Ford, Dole, and Reagan -- grudgingly -- after they've removed them from the stage and replaced them with the right (read: left) people.

The same is true with our talking heads on television. In 2011, at a graduation address at Dartmouth, Conan O'Brien said of George H.W. Bush:

“Before I begin, I must point out that behind me sits a highly admired President of the United States and decorated war hero while I, a cable television talk show host, have been chosen to stand here and impart wisdom. I pray I never witness a more damning example of what is wrong with America today.”

If Conan had his talk show in the late 1980s, he would have been tearing down Papa Bush nightly with just as much ridicule as Letterman did from 2000 through 2008 and beyond with his son.

I remember a movie in which Stone had Donald Sutherland darkly implicating the Bell Helicopter Corporation in the Kennedy assassination.

Who didn't Stone implicate in the killing of JFK?

Other than Oswald, of course.

I like Costas on sports. On sociology? Whether it's guns or foreign policy, I don't like him so much.

And global warming as well. Though oddly, Bob's halftime advice on that topic -- also during a Cowboys-Eagles Sunday Night Football game -- consisted of demanding the viewer turn off the 75 watt bulb in his kitchen, rather than say, the Philadelphia Eagles extinguishing the 57,000,000 watts of klieg lights used to illuminate Lincoln Financial Field.

"Bob Costas Goes Keith Olbermann -- And Not In A Good Way"

Wait, what's a good way to go Olbermann?