So far in this series dedicated to forgotten vanity projects past, we've addressed a pretty-good album by Ian McShane and an awful one by Corey Feldman. Now it's time for our first unabashed success. Milla Jovovich's The Divine Comedy, an acoustic art-rock timepiece heavily influenced by the Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush, is a vanity project, but it's one that entirely deserves a place in your collection.

But to put the album in its proper context, we'll have to explore a period in our history we might otherwise prefer to forget: mainstream pop culture of the mid-90s. The Divine Comedy came out in 1994, and so [...]

Nostalgia for the cultural touchstones of the 1990s, according to the Times, is a real-life, actual thing. Of course, they’re thinking in terms of Nickelodeon programs like "Doug" and "All That." I would hasten to add that any good reminiscence of the pre-Lewinsky Clinton years requires a recognition that Columbia House Music Club was both a blessing and a curse for many a nascent music fan. It was for me. My membership fell somewhere between 1993 and 1996, pre-high school, pre-love of record stores. It was through Columbia House’s mail-order catalogs that I received all the Nirvana, Soundgarden and Belly albums I could get my hands on.

Huh. Here's a blast from the past. Eighteen years after they sang together on the Lemonheads' lovely It's a Shame About Ray album, head Lemonhead Evan Dando (he for whom the term "alternahunk" was coined) and the Blake Babies' Juliana Hatfield have formed an official duo. Both from Boston, longtime friends-and-maybe-more, the two are playing NYC's Mercury Lounge next Wednesday. They've been recording together, and they've remastered their old song "My Drug Buddy." Sounds as nice as ever.

"Fish on PCP also showed more erratic swimming behavior. Collins also looked at social behavior in the shoaling test. Zebrafish are social, and like to shoal together, but will show differences in social behavior in response to different drugs. When Collins gave the fish mescaline, the fish appeared to be more social, showing decreases in inter-fish distance. Psilocybin and PCP also produced increases in the stress hormone cortisol." —Scientists are testing hallucinogenic drugs on fish now.

"Are 18- to 34-year-olds too young to be nostalgic? Evidently not. Starting next Monday, TeenNick, part of the Nickelodeon family of cable channels for children, will start rebroadcasting old series from the 1990s that are considered classics by young adults. That’s right: classics from the 1990s."

I am surprised that the New York Times finds this surprising. My sophomore year of college, 1991, this guy I knew threw an '80s Party. Where people dressed up in '80s fashions and danced to '80s music. The early '80s held sway, apparently: pastel leg-warmers and off-the-shoulder Flashdance sweatshirts, Flock of Seagulls and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I didn't go to [...]

The amazing thing about the 1992 survey of librarians' attitudes toward sex that got its author, Will Manley, fired from his job at Wilson Library Bulletin is how absolutely chaste it is by 2010's sullied standards! A few sample answers:

In the new video from Cleveland-based rock band Cloud Nothings, Bill Clinton is dragged by his feet out of a house, through a parking lot and a forest and a field and up a tree—above which he then hangs upside down like the inverted cross symbol of the occult. It's not actually Bill Clinton, but it is actually pretty terrifying. It feels a little like we're watching someone die of a heart attack. The song it accompanies is the first one on a new album, Attack on Memory, which has been getting rave reviews and comes out today. I like it a lot. It reminds me [...]

One man's quest to identify the "Most 90s Film of All Time" continues with this frightening installment on Airborne. Directed by the exec producer of "Castle," who is also the director of Elektra and Reign of Fire—no lie, not the best movies ever made, God bless!—Airborne is about a California high school surf-dude who is forced to move to Cincinnati, where is he is mocked and then proves his awesomeness in a rollerblading race. It includes Jack Black in his second film role, and it sounds terrible and delightful. It's a real standout in the genre.

I guess I knew about Wendy Williams in the same way that our culture makes little girls know they should wear princess dresses or little boys know they should play with trucks. The kind of knowing that results from those culturally hegemonic signals that fall somewhere between English teacher favorites "nature" and "nurture." You know: how orphan Pip, bouncing from here to there all those years, was ever socialized. For example, I had heard Will Smith or Jay-Z or Lil' Wayne rap about a Wendy. And I remember how an old colleague of mine tuned into some Wendy for "you know, the gossip."