WELL, NEW JERSEY IS FULL OF TORN-UP TOWNS:  On his current tour leg through New Zealand, Bruce Springsteen performed an acoustic guitar/harmonica cover of "Royals," with some lyrical changes.  It's....interesting.

CLEAR SKIES WITH A CHANCE OF SATELLITE DEBRIS:  So, what are you hoping to see at the Academy Awards this year? Do you have a favorite between 12 Years A Slave, Gravity, and American Hustle for Best Picture?

CAN THEY WORK IN A COLOR ME BADD TRIBUTE? After finishing playing the World's Worst Spanish Teacher on Glee, Matthew Morrison is now attached to the musical version of Finding Neverland, which racked up seven Oscar nominations in 2004 (including Johnny Depp's inexplicable nomination over Paul Giamatti for Sideways).  Seriously, in a show filled with terrible people who we are continually beaten over the head with the message of "like this person!," Will Scheuster is The Worst, right?

HEY! WAIT!  I'VE GOT A NEW COMPLAINT (ABOUT THIS LIST): Rolling Stone attempts to rank all 102 recorded songs by Nirvana from best to worst.  There's not a lot of "contrary to be contrary" rankings (with "Come As You Are" being out of the Top Ten being the biggest surprise), and no one's going to be surprised by what comes in at #1, but you may want to discuss.  (Note that the version on RS's site is a 102 image slide show with embedded videos.  I've linked to a single page version.)

THE DEPARTED:  This year's Oscar Necrology segment faces the same questions as in most year -- what to do about too-recent deaths (Ramis), given that the footage likely has already been edited to fit its time slot?  Who gets tributes beyond having their photos in the montage?

Given this list of those who passed away in the past year, I'd try to make room for oral tributes to Shirley Temple Black (Drew Barrymore?), Harold Ramis (Bill Murray, ideally), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (P.T. Anderson?), in that order of importance. (If you'd rather have a Peter O'Toole tribute than Hoffman, I'm okay with that.) Make sure to include Roger Ebert in the montage—his love of movies brought so many of us such joy, and he deserves to be remembered Sunday night—and don't forget Deanna Durbin.

DON'T SHOOT ME INTO...OUTER...SPACE!  So, apparently Adam Driver's pleas in Inside Llewyn Davis were half-hearted, as he's in negotiations to join the new Star Wars film as a villain.

CORE COMPETENCE:  So maybe this is less-than-healthy foods week on the blog, because Ben and Jerry's is unveiling a new ice cream process where they'll put two ice cream flavors on each side of the pint and a "core" of caramel, Nutella-ish stuff or other flavors in the middle, yielding four new flavors; and McDonald's is finally going to figure out how to serve breakfast later in the day.

Also: a history of the chocolate chip cookie:

Unlike the anonymous inventors of such American staples as the hot dog, the grilled-cheese sandwich, and the milkshake, the creator of the chocolate-chip cookie has always been known to us. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the popular Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, with her husband, Kenneth, from 1930 to 1967, brought the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie into being in the late nineteen-thirties. The recipe, which has been tweaked over the ensuing decades, made its first appearance in print in the 1938 edition of Wakefield’s “Tried and True” cookbook. Created as an accompaniment to ice cream, the chocolate-chip cookie quickly became so celebrated that Marjorie Husted (a.k.a. Betty Crocker) featured it on her radio program. On March 20, 1939, Wakefield gave Nestlé the right to use her cookie recipe and the Toll House name. In a bargain that rivals Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, the price was a dollar—a dollar that Wakefield later said she never received (though she was reportedly given free chocolate for life and was also paid by Nestlé for work as a consultant).