POP (ROCK) QUIZ: If your record collection had a Mt. Rushmore, who'd be on it? It's been a lazy day, and I've been trying to winnow mine down to four since 2pm.

BOYS ON FILM: Cory McAbee has a band called The Billy Nayer Show, that I haven't seen yet. I will though. Oh yes, I will, even though they've apparently quit San Francisco for New York City.

He made a movie, called The American Astronaut. It's hard to describe. Many have tried, though they don't all get it.

As the metacritic and rottentomatoes collections linked above indicate, responses to The American Astronaut have been of the love-it-or-hate-it variety. My own reaction fits the pattern: I loved it. In fact, I thought it was fairygodmotherf-ing brilliant. So I'm inclined to think that those who hated it just didn't get it.

If you see it, and you should, here's a tip that may help you find what there is to love about this film:

It is about guys, guys' relationships, and the portrayal of guys and guys' relationships in popular culture. (It is probably also about "authorship" in a broader sense that I'm too dense to describe after only one viewing.)

The American Astronaut is surreal, funny as hell, and if you stare at it long enough I swear you'll see something true.

OUCHIE: Watching this year's snubbed auditionees (is there like, a technical theater term for that?) on American Idol -- the stubborn ones who won't accept judgement -- go out in public to prove Simon wrong provides solid, perhaps sublime testimony to the enduring strength of the human spirit. . . . and the tendency of that spirit to roll right the heck over the fragile framework of human dignity.

Ouchie, ouchie, ouchie!

But it was nothing compared to The Surreal Life, and watching Vanilla Ice throw a crying tantrum about not being able to separate himself from his old image after hounding Gary Coleman out of a Mel's Diner by repeatingly demanding that Gary do the "whatchootalkinboutwillis" line. Vanilla is very, very concerned that the audience get to know him for who he really is and, apparently, he's really a small, cruel, shallow, loud, loutish, unreflective, repellant, petulent bully.

Light side. Dark side.

Mere decadence. Utter depravity.

Realitv is a slippery, slippery slope. I am descending rapidly, but The Surreal Life is still beneath me.

UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB: All season long, the guy four rows behind us at the Linc would yell, when the Eagles had the ball, "Execute the offense!", and I was never sure if that meant that he wanted the offensive players to perform the game plan competently or to be lined up against a wall and shot.

Well, James Thrash (1 catch, 9 yards) and Todd Pinkston (0 catches), this one's for you.

The saddest thing about today's loss is how un-sad I feel. I'm not angry like I was last year, I'm not disappointed. I'm used to it, and it doesn't hurt, and the fact that things like this don't hurt anymore may be the saddest part of it all. It's like I've become a Red Sox fan -- I know that hope is a dangerous thing, hope can drive a man insane, and so I try not to bother any more to apply hope to a Philadelphia sports team, not now when The Curse of William Penn so firmly grips this city.

Last year I wrote about the Five Stages of Eagles Grief, and it's a shame I don't have to revise it too much for this year. Here goes your coping checklist:

DENIAL: I can't believe the season's over already. It would've been different if Donny hadn't broken a rib.

BARGAINING: Houston's a lousy city for a Super Bowl, not that 2005's Jacksonville or 2006's Detroit are much better. If we promise to wait for Miami 2007 ("I've seen the lights go out on Broad Street"), can you send us to the Super Bowl then? I don't even care about winning the damn thing; just give us another trip to the big game.

ANGER: Screw the refs for not calling the flag on the late hit on Donovan McNabb. Screw the WRs for not catching the damn ball. Screw the defense for missing key tackles, and screw the owners for letting Jeremiah Trotter go, because he'd have made those tackles. Bring in Terrell Owens!

DESPAIR: It's Philadelphia. We will never win another championship in any sport. Do you realize that the Eagles last won a title in 1960, and have only been in the Super Bowl once? That the Phillies have won fewer World Series in their 120-year history (1) as the Florida Marlins in thirteen years of existence (2!)? That the time a Philadelphia team won a title -- my beloved 76ers -- it was so long ago that Cheers was in its first season? How long ago? When the Sixers won the title, no one in Philadelphia yet knew that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia were siblings, because that was the week Return of the Jedi debuted in theaters.

You want despair? Since the last time a Philadelphia team won a professional title, New York-area teams have won ten -- heck, even Boston has seen three champions (one Super Bowl, two NBA) emerge since we last won one. And that's Boston, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of sports disappointment. Please. No franchise in professional sports history has lost more games than the Phillies. No one. Hell, if the Phillies won every single game for the rest of this decade, they still would be a sub-.500 team for their history.

Philadelphia: we can't win, we don't win, we won't win. That's our story.

ACCEPTANCE: To everything, there is a season, and the Eagles have won more regular season games than anyone else over the past four years. There's something to be proud of here. Sure, we didn't win, but how could we with our star QB injured? We'll have a lot of room under the salary cap next year, and things will only get better. Right?

On the way out of the Linc, bootleg vendors were offering "Eagles NFC Champions" skicaps -- 2 for $5. Had they won, it'd have been $10 each, I'm sure.

Pitchers and catchers report in 32 days.

CAN YOU FIT IN? Loved, loved, lurved episode two of The Apprentice, in which the men learned that pleasing one's client is, in fact, part of being a good businessman, and the women reminded us all that sometimes a jet engine is just a jet engine, and sometimes it's a huge, gaping Special Lady Place waiting for you to fit in.

What I most appreciated about the episode was the notion that flying the women to Boston for dinner was an inculcation into The Trump Lifestyle, and that's because they flew all the way to Boston via private jet to eat at Todd English's Olives when there's an Olives in New York as well. Trump Lifestyle, indeed. And you wonder how he went broke.

(P.S. Jen and I love the Olives at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Sit on the terrace, watch the water show, and for heaven's sake don't leave without ordering the flatbread with fig jam and proscuitto.)

(P.P.S. For what it's worth, given how much abuse I've given the show, this week's ER was tremendously good, moving and dramatic, all the things we've missed about the show. Why did it work? Because rather than be a soap opera about the doctors, it was a drama about their patients through which the doctors' characters were revealed. Excellent stuff. Bring on the ER:NICU spinoff!)

GIRL IT'S SO GROOVY, I WANT YOU TO KNOW: Das Fork is now reporting green lights and grand plans surrounding a Pixies Reunion tour.

That bio/fan link back there (thanks Leo, whoever you are!) explains The Pixies' story and significance well enough, if anyone's unfamiliar. It also descibes their "taut . . . and demented songs", and there's a shade or a flavor of what is precious to me about The Pixies in that desciption -- the reassuringly certain arrangement of the songs, even when the "sound" was at its most innovative or *gulp* revolutionary, is a grounding counterpoint to lyrics that evade expectation and often leave sense itself torn asunder.

I live cement
I hate this street
it does to me
I must lament
this human form
where I was born
I now repent
Caribou!
Caribou!!!
Caribou!!!!!!!

And then, just when you're thinking "how pleasantly odd this tune is, in a jaggedly melodic way. . ." Frank starts shrieking Reh-pehnt! -- Reh-pehent! -- Reh-pehnt! with such an intensity and raw disregard for the longevity of his vocal chords that it seems possible he might mean it: This guy might actually wish he was a caribou.

Right there, blammo! The 80's are over, and it's only 1987. (As a matter of pop-culture physics, this is a fairly complicated effect. Succinct rigorous representation of the detailed temporo-aesthetic cascade is not possible in this limited space. But if you're satisfied with approximations and hand-waving, you might say that the force of Caribou balances and cancells a network of trends and tendencies that can be traced generally but reliably to the 1982 release of Duran Duran's Hungry Like The Wolf.) Not a minute too soon, if you ask me.

With 1987's Come On Pilgrim, The Pixies reformed punk and redeemed pop and launched "alternative" all at once, providing a palette of innovatively structured sounds hitched to enough chaotic energy to jumble all the parts around and make them more interesting, arbitrary, emphatic and free. Lyrics like a cat on a leash: tethered, spastic and justifiably out-of-sorts. Exactly how I felt at the time. The Pixies' whole package summed up to me in a sound the instinctive late-adolescent objection to conventional structures and established forms of doing and being (which seem arbitrary and oppressive before we learn to inhabit and own them ourselves). Their music was anchored, principled, heartfelt schizophrenia; more immediately credible and compelling than any "supposed to" that might be pressing down from other quarters.

And yet, The Pixies' music wasn't an objection. It didn't reject or deride, just did something else. Something better. Louder. Weirder. It celebrated itself, seduced us, and we roared on.

So, how will that sound as a reunion? Will it have the spark of spontaneous, unfettered creativity that made The Pixies such a liberating experience the first time around? If the songs sound like recitations, if they have themselves become rote forms of doing and being now that they have stood for years as established objects on our cultural landscape, then I suppose I will frown and shrug and settle for the expected nostalgia trip.

That would be a shame though, since it was The Pixies, at least in part, who taught me that I don't have to settle for the expected.

INSIDE SCHILLING'S NOGGIN: You may never have a better opportunity to find out how a major league athlete's mind works than this ongoing thread on SoSH in which frequent poster Curt "Gehrig38" Schilling is taking questions from Red Sox fans on how he approaches the game.

For example, check out this answer on how he plans to work with Sox catcher Jason Varitek:

There are 5 people that I speak with on the day I pitch, My trainer, manager, pitching coach, defensive coach and my catcher. On my day, IMO, it's my world, conversing with anyone else is wasting breathe and time on things that will have no positive impact on me getting anyone out that night.
I ask, no I think the word demand fits, alot of my catchers. It's the reason I prefer to work with one guy, every game. It's never been a thing where I liked one guy more than the next, I want my catchers to be able to throw sure, but more than anything I want to know he's as locked into getting every hitter out and making every single pitch, for 9 innings, regardless of his AB's. That's not as easy as it sounds to find. I have always asked my catchers during games, if they have a feel for something, or see something, to shake me off. For that to happen, I shake a catcher off, he taps his chest and puts the same sign down, telling me that it's his call, and he wants the pitch he put down. In that situation he's telling me he has seen something and the pitch he wants is the pitch to throw. Hasn't happened for me in about 5 years. Catchers are afraid to do this because with that decision comes responsibility, I am hoping Tek is ok with this and I think from what I hear he will be. I want my catchers to be psyched when we throw a shutout, that matters to me. I want them to WANT to know before the games what we are going to do for that 9 innings.

Show me one professional athlete in any other sport who's this open with the fans. I wish more were.