Callin' Doctor Unk

I was surprised when I first learned that Guinness World Records actually did begin as an (at least tangential) offshoot of the Guinness brewery.

I'm with Spencer when it comes to the dramatic ripping off of necklaces / pendants / amulets, and for dozens of examples of this well-established trope, look no further than tvtropes.org itself.

Maybe I misunderstood, but weren't we promised the new Summah Single at the end of the episode? Also, Laibach are Slovenian, not German. I hope I cleared that up for the zero people who care!

I'm a big fan of Russell Howard, but I wasn't sure how well he'd mesh with the NNF crew. As it turned out, this was one of those episodes where I was just grinning nonstop the whole way through. Great stuff!

I know the Venn diagram of comedy fans and Lucero fans might not have much overlap, but as somebody right smack in the middle of it, this is the most excited I've been about a musical guest since Michael Dean Damron (Huh, turns out I just enjoy singers who sound like they gargle broken glass daily. Go figure). Awesome, awesome stuff!

Brandon Wardell seems less like an actual person than he does a "Nathan Barley" character come to life.

Uhhh... what?

I'd be curious to hear how Jimmy and Matt would feel about Gillian Welch's original version of "Elvis Presley Blues." I feel like it's a song a lot better suited to their 'morphine hillbilly' sound than to whatever that was that Tom Jones was going for.

Yeah, I agree. That was definitely a cultural turning point between "generations." Strauss and Howe codified their definition of "Millennial" before 9/11, so that event didn't figure into their theory. I'd think that the deliniation would be between people who came of age after 9/11, though, and not when they were born. So maybe bumping the vague generational cutoff age of birth forward from the "Millennial" threshold of 1982 to something more like 1985 would be a better yardstick of a seperate 'generation.' In general, though, the whole Strauss–Howe generational theory and their grouping of "Millennials" seems over-generalized to me. On the other hand, I'm totally on board with the term "Trans-Millennial."

Way to send some traffic over to Consumption Juction, guys.

Just in point of fact, Strauss and Howe, who coined the term "Millennial," specifically defined it as people born between 1982 and 2004. Obviously there's no rigid definition of a 'generation,' but considering that the oldest Millennials are at this point 33 years old, they would hardly be in the same broad generation as a person born today.

Edit: Ah, California Emmett beat me to it.

Hold on, maybe I heard that wrong, but Greg thinks Sleater-Kinney is "precious"? That's, uh... an opinion you can have, I suppose.

I wouldn't say that there was a "name battle"; they're all different terms with different meanings. 'Butter' and 'margarine' aren't involved in a name battle, either. But regardless, any categorization of a "generation" into a specific timeframe of birth dates, strictly or leniently, is silly. I think that was what Howard was joking about in the first place.

Well, according to Strauss and Howe, who introduced the term as it's currently used, 1982 is pretty specific; hence the word "milennial" itself. Other writers and analysts have applied a more nebulous definition of the generation, but usually apply a different terminology as well ("Generation Y," "Echo Boomers," etc). But "milennial" itself is a specific term with a specific meaning.

Sorry to be a pedant, but "Milennial" has a very specific definition: someone who came of age, or turned 18, after the turn of the milennium; thus, anybody born in or since 1982. As far as "trans-milennial," well, I suppose that term might be a little more loosely defined.

Isn't "Earwolf" a play on the classic Jan Michael Vincent TV program "Airwolf"? I always assumed it was, but the discussion in this episode now makes me wonder if that's the case.

I guess I'm just old, but every time Scott says "Netflix for magazines," I envision browsing titles online, adding issues to a queue, receiving an issue or two at a time, then sending them back in pre-paid red envelopes and waiting for new issues. Great episode, by the way!