The most recent few selections seem almost random. Why on earth is "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure there? It isn't influential or even particularly remarkable..."Just Like Heaven" by Dinosaur Jr. would have been a better choice, for crying out loud. The inclusion by Dre is hardly groundbreaking or influential; same with that of Spears. And maybe The White Stripes launched a hundred bad garage bands and can be considered "influential" that way...but I think that in time 2000's garage music will be considered as dated as 90's grunge and 80's hair metal (which render the selections by Nirvana and G'N'R pretty useless).

Past "Walk This Way" (more for the effect it had on rap than on rock) this list is close to a blank, save "Bring The Noise."

As an aside: I completely agree with the suggestions of Funkadelic and Carole King. Even us kids know.

...that burning gasoline couldn't possibly be hot enough to melt steel girders and collapse structures supported with them. You know, how every 9/11 conspiracist down the pike claims that the WTC had to be taken down by a controlled explosion because burning jet fuel alone couldn't have melted the steel support systems.

I'd like to see those same conspiracy theorists explain how a gasoline fire, which burns at a low temperature than a jet fuel fire, melted the steel beams here. Or maybe Al-Qaeda's black hand was involved HERE, TOO! "Through the looking glass, people...."

Yes, yes, when my wife and I were married it was at the JP's office, there were only six of us there, our reception was lunch at a local restaurant, the whole thing only cost us $100 including the lunch, yadda yadda yadda.

And, yes, that same year my sister got married and it was a multi-thousand-dollar blowout with a five-course meal and all the trimmings.

Somehow, though, I just don't feel like saying our marriage was superior--whether morally or any other way--to my sister's. Because it just wasn't. My wife and I married the way we did out of necessity, not choice. My parents didn't attend (something that still aggrieves me somewhat). Sure, if we'd had it the way we wanted we still wouldn't have had a big blowout...I don't think either of us were up to that. But I just don't feel like tut-tutting at my sister's "extragavance." In the end, she got married the way she wanted to, and we didn't for the most part. Draw a line under that, and our marriages are really about the same, regardless of how they started.

Spin magazine had it right when they gave album of the year that year to "Bandwagonesque" by Teenage Fanclub; funny how dated Nirvana sounds now (Bandwagonesque still sounds pretty fresh).

There were a lot of music critics in the UK during the Britpop era who thought Teenage Fanclub and Pulp were the real class of the movement, and that Blur and Oasis were paint-by-numbers dull. Looking back, I couldn't agree with them more.

On the Nirvana end, I can't think of another music genre that got dated faster than grunge. It certainly didn't help that after Nirvana and Pearl Jam there was a long trail of even worse bands (Mudhoney, Stone Temple Pilots, Screaming Trees, and a few others come to mind). I don't even think it's offensive now to say that if Kurt Cobain hadn't offed himself nobody would be talking about Nirvana these days. The music just was not that good.

...Sri Lankan or Burmese or Laotian food taken off in the US? I'd vastly prefer those cuisines over Cambodian, and I'm speaking as someone who owns the "one Cambodian cookbook published in the US." Well-cooked Cambodian food is nice, but it's just not so appreciably nicer than other South Asian cuisines to "deserve" a place in the US restaurant scene--good as The Elephant Walk is.

Now Sri Lankan cuisine....there's something that deserves to take off.

That's the real shocker to me. If you've got a pension fund that size you should be getting at least 5%, probably more, in investment income after taxes every year.

In other words, the pension fund isn't even paying out its investment income to retirees. That is incredibly sad, especially considering the need.

I love Sloan and have been to a few of their concerts...but for a lot of reasons they just don't put on a good show in the US. They feed off the crowd and tend to shut down a little if the crowd isn't responding. As another poster said, in Canada the crowd often sings along with them, which they seem to enjoy a lot.

My pick for concert you need to see from the Canadian indie scene: The Joel Plaskett Emergency. Totally unknown outside Canada but Plaskett is an outstanding musician who's not afraid to diverge from the script, with interesting results. At a concert I went to in Toronto, he took a break from the main set to play a mini-acoustic set of "songs my friends wrote". "I wish I'd written that!" he said after one tune. You just don't get that in stadium rock....

...spices, of any kind. Few, if any, "organic" spices are in fact different from the same spices you can buy in a Chinese/Indian/Pakistani grocery store at less than a tenth of the price. Most countries where spices are grown have little to no oversight regarding organic farming and as a result any "organic" label on spices should be regarded with extreme suspicion.

But I would recommend organic, or at least free-range, chicken.

...I'm reminded of the awful mid-90's Canadian rock band by that moniker, and I too recoil in horror. Really, what's worse: purple-prose wannabe erotica, or dirgelike semi-grunge?