by Brian Pritchett

Do you work for a living? Have you seen the recent presidential polls? Has your life not gone entirely as you had planned? Or, are you holed up in your apartment as a category-twelve murder storm trawls its way toward you? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, I’d like to introduce you to a little drink that will make you feel soothed and mellow and lull you through any anxiety-related sleeping problems. Relaxation and sleep when you need it: this is the gift of Bear Milk.

I discovered Bear Milk in Prague, in 1995. I don’t remember all of the details, but that’s only appropriate, because we aren’t talking about a cocktail so much as a magic potion: an elixir for forgetting, and for deep, deep sleep. You don’t brew a batch of Bear Milk for hanging out and goofing around with your friends. You make Bear Milk when you need to go as soon as possible to the land of Nod, and to stay there for a full span. You make one portion per patient; you drink it while it’s warm, and you go directly to bed, where you can count on a long, deep, and satisfying sleep. Want to just skip Sandy’s wrath entirely, and hibernate until the sun is shining again? Try Bear Milk.

Here’s the origin story. My friend Cristin and I were on a European backpacking tour after college. We had a good time in Holland, and then a lousy time in France, where everything was so expensive. No offense, France: it wasn’t your fault, we were just dumb kids. With our travelers checks and morale running low, we fled to Prague, which, as you may have heard, was a wonderful place to be in 1995, particularly for the young and the broke. Czechoslovakia had split two years earlier, and we were in the new capital of a soon-to-be fashionable Western democracy. The young Czechs couldn’t believe their good fortune; a few years ago they had been looking forward to mandatory army service, and now they were rolling joints on the sidewalk and blowing kisses to indifferent cops. They seemed glad to meet foreigners. There were random thumbs up and hugs, and invitations to hang out from attractive strangers. I was a corny English major with a dog-eared copy of The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting in my backpack. I never wanted to go home.

As soon as Cristin and I got off the train, an old woman approached us and offered a lease on an apartment for a shockingly low price. We accepted right away, and she showed us to a warm and comfortable studio. It was early evening. A light snow was falling. We got dressed and went out to wander the pretty town like Hansel and Gretel. We bought dinner on the street: tasty sausages with mustard and good bread, for pennies. Then we ended up in a candlelit student bar, which is where we found Bear Milk.

As I said, my memory of this evening is hazy, but I don’t think the drink was some sort of Czech specialty, and I haven’t been able to find any evidence of it online. It was most likely the creation of some clever bartender with a gift for naming things while playing on a variation of an old theme: booze and hot milk. We had a portion each, and then we walked home in the snow and slept in a cozy pile. In Bear Milk, we had made a new friend. When I got home I started playing around with recipes, and eventually ended up with the following. It’s definitely open source and it’s hard to screw up, so feel free to improvise and let me know what works best in the comments.

Before we begin, turn off the television and put your phone on vibrate. Is the power still on in your home? If so, dim the lights. If you have any phone calls to make or patio furniture to bring inside then deal with that now, because you’re about to have eight hours of lost time. Put on some pajamas, and whatever music you prefer when you are unconscious. For me, sleep time music begins and ends with “Sleepwalk” by Santo and Johnny. Then maybe the great Astrud Gilberto, Getz/Gilberto specifically, or any of the good quiet techno records from her daughter, Bebel. Try Mezzanine by Massive Attack, or Channel Orange by Frank Ocean, but there’s a danger with any of the above that you might be spurred to attempt some sexy maneuver, one which Bear Milk will soon render you incapable of seeing through to completion. Leonard Cohen, obviously, is perfect for sleepy time, as is much of the Tom Waits oeuvre. Beth Orton is great, as is the most recent PJ Harvey. There are fabulous new sleepy albums from Grizzly Bear, Sharon Van Etten, The xx, and the Ravonettes. Whiskey For The Holy Ghost by Mark Lanegan is great and thematically appropriate, if a bit glum. When you’re ready to go totally comatose, try Brian Eno’s Music For Airports, or David Byrne’s soundtrack for The Last Emperor. Also, I know this sounds weird, but I love side two of Combat Rock by the Clash for this sort of thing. Go your own way, just set the scene for yourself. If it helps, here’s my personal Bear Milk playlist. If you make it all the way to “Death Is a Star” and you’re still up, you have my permission to brew up another dose of Bear Milk.

Here’s the recipe. My preferred ingredients, for two portions, are as follows:

3 ounces bourbon
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons honey
1 splash vanilla, preferably the good Mexican stuff
1 stick cinnamon
1 pinch nutmeg, plus a little extra
3 whole cloves

Put an ounce and a half of your preferred booze into a mug for each person who wishes to be anesthetized. As a son of Kentucky, I usually fall back on bourbon, but Irish whiskey, brandy, cognac, rum and scotch are all equally right answers. Put all of the other ingredients in a small saucepan, and slowly bring them up to a subtle boil. Start on low heat and keep an eye on it, because milk boils over faster than you would believe, and when it happens your whole scene will get a lot less mellow. All you need to do is melt the honey and flavor the milk a bit. The whole operation should take under ten minutes. If you’ve got an espresso machine or some other means of foaming the milk, that would probably be even better.

Kill the heat when the milk gets to a light boil, and then strain the milk to get the cloves out of there. Top off each mug with the hot milk, stir, and then grate or sprinkle a bit of nutmeg on the top, for aroma. That’s about it. It should taste pretty good, but if you don’t like it try adding a bit more honey. If that doesn’t work and you just hate it put it down the drain, then pour another ounce and a half of whiskey onto an ice cube, and just drink that and go to bed. Pleasant dreams.

Previously in Falling Down: The Chisos Chimney

Brian Pritchett is a writer and web producer in Brooklyn. Top photo by beingmyself.

Part of a series about monsters and other scary things happening here through Halloween.

With its crisp autumn weather and golden piles of leaves and the smell of fireplace smoke on city streets, Halloween is the best time of year. Staggering beneath great stacks of costume boxes, UPS deliverymen maneuver through mazes of foam tombstones and doorways crowded with organic heirloom jack o’ lanterns. Even the seasonal aisles at the corner chain drug store are worth lingering over this time of year, in a way nobody dawdles around the Eastertime merchandise or inflatable lawn pools of summer. Even the shabby costume superstore that appears for six weeks within some unloved vacant storefront has a spirit of fun and community utterly unknown to the previous retail tenant.

The greatest delight of Halloween is reserved for those who put on a ridiculous costume and go out in public, onto the streets and into the bars and to the homes of friends and near-strangers. Everything commonplace is exciting and weird when you’re wandering with a pack of comrades in masquerade. I know this, despite the fact that I hardly ever do it — I’ve put in the necessary effort less than a half-dozen times, and each occasion has been weird and memorable. Making a proper costume is much more than dressing up. The best costumes create entire little worlds that are all the more beautiful for their brief lifespans. When hundreds and thousands of these Temporary Autonomous Zones collide and interact within the mutated American version of the old supernatural festivals of Fall, it’s the closest to magick most of us will ever experience.

The big weekend parties are over and a gigantic storm named after a horror monster is swirling over half the country, but Halloween itself is still waiting. You still have time to put together something memorable with your roommates, partners, co-workers and comrades. And if there’s a blackout affecting 40 million people on All Hallow’s Eve, it will be that much more magical: Everyone will drink whiskey and wine instead of bland refrigerated beer, and the pumpkins will be your hurricane lamps.

Dracula, New Orleans, circa 1979: For months, I had badgered the neighbor kids to help me build a haunted house attraction in my family’s New Orleans backyard. There were heavy oaks and a single-car garage and dark pathways along the fence. I mapped out a basic walk-through attraction with scenes from the old horror movies shown by the local teevee creep, “Dr. Morgus,” and began collecting set materials and writing parts for everyone… and of course nobody helped, so the grand schemes for multi-actor scenes gave way to the usual untended graveyards and ghosts hanging in the Spanish moss. Three kids from across the street were finally bribed into appearing as a monster band, because they liked an AM pop radio group of the day; they lip-synced to novelty Halloween songs, “Monster Mash” and its ilk, and I worked the gate, collecting quarters for admission and then running through the dark behind the garage to perform with the others. Later, after everyone had gone home to watch more television and trick-or-treating was over for another year, I walked through the home-made attraction again and again, the dry ice fog still covering the grass, the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House record still replaying Side One. It was sad and perfect, except for the plaster arm cast sticking out of my vampire/church suit’s right arm.

Slavic Barbarian, Prague, 1992: Another dozen years passed before I put any effort into a costume, probably because I wore a pretty convincing costume every day for work (“police-beat newspaper reporter”) and also thought Halloween was for children and amateurs. But then came the freezing Fall of 1992, when I found myself living with three or four Americans in a dreary panelák housing project in Prague 8. Today there’s a Halloween superstore in the middle of Old Town’s high-rent zone; 20 years ago the celebration was all but unknown. Using nothing but the odd materials we found in the closets and cupboards of our dreary flat, we assembled scraps of 1970s’ shag carpeting, mysterious rolls of parchment probably made to line cabinets, balls of rough twine, and a “Made In Yugoslavia” makeup kit from the 1970s. My roommate Tom — we actually shared a tiny room — decided these were the long-lost garments of an ancient Slavic tribe that once lived upon the grassy hillside where our concrete apartment tower now stood. With barbarian patterns of crumbly earth-tone lipstick and eye shadow on our faces and brown carpet remnants tied to our heads and bodies, we boarded the tram with a bunch of similarly shoddily-costumed comrades. We called ourselves the Kobylisy, after our edge-of-town neighborhood, and spoke in a language of horrible grunts. Everyone who saw us was visibly repulsed. At several pubs, the beer man refused to serve us. So we drank nothing but Becherovka, the dreadful herbal liquor popular with old people who crave death, and waved around our parchments full of runic curses.

William S. Burroughs, San Francisco 1993: A year later I was the co-manager of a derelict apartment building in the TenderNob, that interzone between Nob Hill, Polk Gulch and the Tenderloin. The building had been purchased by a single-season 49er whose wife knew my girlfriend, and that’s how I unwittingly served as an agent of gentrification in exchange for free housing. With its public transportation and comically cheap rents, San Francisco became home to a lot of people I’d first met in Prague. And on this particular Halloween, the old apartment house was turned into a very loose interpretation of the Beat Hotel. There was no Ginsberg or Kerouac, but a terrible Andy Warhol stalked around trying to convince people to try the canned bean dip. Vacant apartments were left open for guests to enjoy sex and drug abuse, actual crazy people walked the halls, a man in a fez operated the elevator, and I held court in my “writing apartment” (a vacant studio), dressed in an undertaker’s thrift store suit and hat, a pile of antique syringes sharing space on a card table with my cigarettes and cocktail and a gruesome old typewriter with spider legs sprouting from the machine’s anus. Does anybody remember David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch? No? Well, it was something like that. And it wasn’t much different the day after the Halloween party, either.

Hagrid the Groundskeeper, Los Angeles, 2001: Maybe it was 9/11, which was very much the continuing crisis in October of 2001, or maybe it was because I’d just gotten married in Mexico and everybody had such a good time that we wanted to keep celebrating, but this was the biggest and happiest Halloween party I ever attempted. My wife and I were renting a long crumbling bungalow at the end of Sunset Drive, just up the street from KCET and the Vista Theater. The backyard was filled with olive trees and palms, which only looked spooky at night through the vapor light haze of the neighboring apartment building. We filled this entire space, inside and outside, with fake graveyards and occult tableaux. Costumes were mandatory and turnout was exceptional. The Harry Potter books were a big thing at the time, and a bunch of us had been to the premiere of the first movie at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. My wife was dressed as Hermione Granger and giving tarot readings using the Crowley deck, various ghouls and dead rock stars were working the Ouija board at a red-clothed card table, the smokers still outnumbered the non-smokers and filled the gloomy back yard, and we ran a full-volume disco until 4 a.m., when the L.A.P.D. arrived. In my full Hagrid getup — motorcycle boots, giant overcoat with a sofa cushion underneath, pink umbrella, massive black beard and hair — I negotiated with the policewomen in full Robbie Coltrane West Country accent. They laughed and gave us another half hour to blast music. I’ve since heard that October 2001 was a time of incredible Halloween parties, especially in New York. #sorryterrorists

Doctor Strange, Mojave Desert, 2012: The Hagrid/Hermione costumes were recycled in 2011 for the benefit of my kids, now old enough to be Harry Potter fans themselves — they were Harry and Ron, and “Harry” wrote a five-page screenplay that was faithfully committed to iMovie. But this year, there was a break in the boys’ endless dress-up as Hogwarts students, various incarnations of Doctor Who, Kirk and Spock, Luke and Anakin (best pals!), various hobbits and elves, and the kids from A Wrinkle In Time. This break was due to the Marvel superhero blockbuster movies currently dominating our culture, and my kids had claimed the roles of Captain America and Iron Man. My wife got the Black Widow character, which she likes almost too much, and I lost the “bearded 47-year-old” superhero to my kindergarten-aged son. What to do? A quick image search on Google proved that… in some alternate-universe storyline, all the Avengers had beards. Including Scarlett Johansson, probably! But there was also a Buddhist-Mystic superhero from the 1960s, with a lot of Philip K. Dick-style plots about shifting realities. Doctor Strange. Several Amazon orders and a few hours of iron-on yellow cape striping later, and I was the Sorcerer Supreme, occasional magician companion to the more kickass Avengers. It was good enough for our small town and our foray into Palm Springs and to the Living Desert Zoo “howl-o-ween.” I bought some $5.99 LED “rave gloves” to do magic hand swirlies. Halloween was saved.

Previously in series: The Fantastic Outer-Space Tale Of The Flatwoods Monster

Ken Layne is a Thelemic contributor to The Awl, a Reuters Halloween columnist, and the producer of an epic 1,200-part Twitter account. Photo by lscrane.

Drawings In An Extra Hurry Before The Storm

Previously: Return To Cat Town

Amy Jean Porter is an artist who lives in the woods of Connecticut.

★ Preparedness: the flashlight hoard, left over from who knows which previous non-disaster, had proved findable and all powered up. The Rite Aid, the night before, had had a case of bottled water, to say nothing of two-and-a-half-pound bags of Halloween candy. Now light and dark gray rumpled the morning sky. Almost everything was accounted for — save the soggy, snotty cold system working its way slowly up out of the baby, and a sharp tummyache and chills sweeping through the kindergartener, the two systems converging around and inside a third body as an immense, churning swirl of nausea, centered below the sternum. Apparently, out in the world, people were lining up out the doors of the supermarkets. Apparently, out in the world… Indoors, there was dim light from behind the windowshade, and the occasional creak or thump of wind against the glass. It was possible, resting one’s head on a bathmat on the cool tiled floors in late afternoon, to hear the reverberating rumble of low-flying airplanes, as yet ungrounded by the coming storm.

Do you live in a home without books or magazines? Or have you burned them all for heat yet? Then great news! It’s likely a good chunk of the East Coast may lose power and Internet. So here are some things that you could either PRINT OUT (yes, I am serious) or of course also save to your nice, long-lasting-battery’d digital reading device.

The story of the Occupy Wall Street Archive starts with Jeremy Bold, so we might as well too. When Hollywood decides to cash in and make its OWS movie, central casting could do worse than work off a picture of Bold — he has a dark goatee and black plastic-rimmed glasses. He has a “protest name” — Jez. He’s in dark, long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans whenever I see him, hair askew, a well-worn nylon backpack slung over one shoulder and a scarf not infrequently tied around his neck. In other words, he looks like any number of people you might have seen at Zuccotti Park. Jez is 27 and originally from North Dakota. — The Struggle for the Occupy Wall Street Archives

It was early September 2008. Obama, by then widely regarded as the frontrunner in the general election, was campaigning from atop one of the most sophisticated, fully conceived political organizations this country has ever seen. An old college acquaintance of mine who was working for the campaign, Emily Thielmann, sent an email to a few friends saying her regional field director was looking to hire an additional field organizer. A mutual friend forwarded me the email, which I initially ignored, having little interest in quitting my job and moving to the small, mostly rural county in the thumb of Michigan where the office was. A few days later I was laid off and found myself on the phone with Andy Oare, Emily’s immediate superior. At the end of the conversation Andy asked me how fast I could get to Port Huron, Michigan. It was a Wednesday. I said I could be there on Sunday. — A 2008 Obama Field Team Then and Now

In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in their home. Colette’s husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, a 26-year-old doctor and Green Beret at the time of the crime, was convicted of the murders in 1979. MacDonald faces the next of countless court dates on September 17, still seeking exoneration. The MacDonald case has been an object of obsession and controversy for more than four decades and the subject of high-visibility journalistic debate. But respectable opinion has always vastly favored the jury verdict of guilt. Errol Morris is trying to change that. — The Murders and the Journalists

At a performance last August, the deliberate and sharply dressed emcee, who is also well known as an actor, announced his “official transition” to a huge audience gathered in the parking lot of a popular pub and pizzeria in Anchorage, Alaska: “My professional name will be my chosen and my legal name, which is Yasiin Bey. … And I don’t want to have to wait for it to be in Source or Vibe or someplace. I figure, we’re all here. We can see each other.” And then he spelled it out for them: “Y-A-S-I-I-N, first name. Last name: B-E-Y.” — Yasiin Bey Would Like You To Quit Calling Him Mos Def

About two months ago I started reaching out by email to a group of people whose lives I wanted to know about and understand: The Trappist monks of Oka Abbey, in Quebec. Oka Abbey is the oldest Trappist monastery in North America. A century ago, it was a powerhouse; but in recent decades, the community had dwindled to a fraction of what it used to be. After leaving the Abbey to a heritage group, to be preserved as an historical site, the remaining monks relocated to a smaller retreat in the mountains north of Montreal. — How Silence Works: Emailed Conversations With Four Trappist Monks

In the final episode of “Freaks and Geeks,” the Freaks group leader Daniel Desario accepts an invitation to play Dungeons & Dragons with the notoriously geeky A/V club. Surprised by Daniel’s warm receptivity to the game, the Geeks wonders what this means for their future status. As Bill puts it: “Does him wanting to play with us again mean he’s turning into a geek or we’re turning into cool guys?” Sam answers, “I’m going to go for us becoming cool guys.” It’s a nice ambiguous note on which to end the show. — When Exactly Did It Get Cool To Be A Geek?

Ten years ago today Winona Ryder stole several thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from the Beverly Hills Saks Fifth Avenue. I reacted to the news of the incident the way I react to most celebrity scandals — with unmitigated delight — and prepared myself to follow subsequent action with mild interest. — Winona Ryder’s Forever Sweater

When I was in second grade, my teacher sent a note home to my mother. I had recently been skipped ahead from first grade to second grade and the new teacher was worried about me. I was keeping up with the class fine, I was having no problem with that, she said in the note, but she was worried about me because all I would ever write or talk or draw about in class or in my journal or for homework were video games. They seemed to be the only thing that I thought about. She wondered whether maybe there might be something wrong with me for me to be so obsessed with games. — The Tetris Effect

I saw Pauline Kael speak once, “in conversation” with Jean-Luc Godard, many years ago at Berkeley. The place was mobbed and the event was a mess, with the so-called conversation quickly devolving into a shouting match (about Technicolor film stock, as I recall). But it was so great watching Kael yell at Godard, who was such a god around Berkeley at that time. Pleasurably shocking, in much the same way her movie reviews are. “Perversity!” she kept howling. I still yell that sometimes just for fun, in her memory. — What Makes a Great Critic?

Samuel Hengel put a .22-caliber Ruger, a Hi-Point 9mm Luger, two knives and 205 rounds of ammunition in a duffel bag. Then, on Monday morning, he walked out of his Porterfield, Wisconsin home for the last time — another young American boy going to school with guns, ammunition and intention. — Two Hours in Marinette: Lessons From a School Shooting

Blue ripped up most kites and flushed the pieces, but some, especially those received in the exercise yard, he ate. Blue, who is 20 years old, knew that even temporary possession of written notes was against the rules, but he shrugged it off as a necessary risk. One such “kite” was an invitation, which read, “Look we cookin…send some kinda meat for your bowl.” It was scrawled across a scrap of notebook paper, folded seven times and passed from one inmate to another via a third. The paper traveled across cellblock C of the correctional facility, a maximum-security prison in a small town in New York. — What Paper Means in Prison

There’s so much more here.

“In this neck-and-neck, ideologically fraught presidential election season, politically active singles won’t cross party lines. The result is a dating desert populated by reds and blues who refuse to make purple.”
 — Hahahaha, let’s all call it “making purple” from now on.

I already made this apple pie! Using, essentially, this pie crust, and then “throwing apples inside it” and “baking it.” GAZE UPON MY CRUST AND DESPAIR. What have YOU done with your life today? Please don’t go hungry. Bad things happen to people locked in houses who get hungry. Here are some tips, depending on the staples you purchased drunk and at the last moment yesterday.

• Got apples? Tarte Tatin.

• Got arborio rice? Risotto.

• Got pot? It’s pot brownies.

• Got lemons? These lemon squares are A+.

• Got lettuce? Stir-fry for you.

• Cherries? Meet clafoutis.

• Plums? It’s plum cake.

• Got meat and tomatoes

? Start your bolognese now.

• Do you have cheese and macaroni? It’s Macaroni and cheese for you.

• Do you have sugar? SNOW DAY COOKIES. Do you want Christmas to come early? Here’s how to make every Christmas cookie.

• Do you have everything? Here’s beer ice cream.

• Steak? Definitely don’t cook it like this today, you’ll have to open the windows and then there’ll be a hurricane in your house.

“The effect on the movie theaters is tougher to estimate, since most box office experts took into account a reduced turnout on Sunday as people hunkered down for the storm. Hurricane Sandy is expected to hit most of the East Coast on Monday or early Tuesday. Ironically, unseasonably warm weather on the West Coast could offset some of the losses in East Coast movie grosses as people head for the cool theaters.”

“Here are five questions about Sandy’s impact on the election: 1) Will Mitt Romney’s momentum be stopped? 2) Does Obama have a natural advantage because he’s president? 3) How will ad strategies be affected? 4) How will the storm affect early voting? 5) Does this throw a wrench into Obama’s vaunted ground game?”
 — Thank God I’ll be drowned for this. Good luck, survivors.

Shut in? Cooped up? In for the long haul? Well start enjoying the TV while you still have power! Let’s indulge together. UPDATED!

• The entire Brideshead Revisited. It is ELEVEN EPISODES LONG and it is so fantastic. Really, just so enjoyable. There’s two whole episodes that take place on a pitching ocean liner! And the best gay sidekick in history.

• “Alias” season one. Did you somehow not watch “Alias,” as I did not? Well finally, FINALLY, they released the early seasons to the wild. Everyone’s telling me to stop halfway through season 2 but of course I will not. I will abandon the show on MY terms. Spoiler: this show is surprisingly cheesy!

• Did you watch the original Swedish Let the Right One In — the wonderful, lovely, terrifying coming of age/vampire movie? Or did you, as is only appropriate, watch it but three times? Go for number four.

• “The Last Enemy”: hubba hubba, some “early” Cumberbatch, in a little bit of Masterpiece Theater.

• “Any Human Heart” got kinda panned, but so far, its first two episodes of four are delightful. I’m at the part where Matthew Macfadyen plays the title character, which, GREAT.

• Iron Man 2. So great.

• “Daniel Deronda” was pretty amazing, if a LITTLE slowly paced. But it’s a Hugh Dancy-Hugh Bonneville sandwich (that’s LORD GRANTHAM to you), and if you like Jews, you are in luck.

• Velvet Goldmine! Did you ever actually watch Velvet Goldmine, or did you keep putting it off and putting it off until you never actually watched it? Well you were right to do so, but it can scratch a good itch. It’s wild and wooly.

• And it makes a spectacular double-header with hilarious but rather lovely freakfest and David Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell To Earth.

• There are also: “Battlestar Galactica” season one; “Mad Men” season one and then a whole lot of garbage.

• Here’s a good one from Shani: “’Pasta,’ the second-best Korean-language drama on Netflix (after ‘Boys Over Flowers,’ which is like ‘Gossip Girl’ on meth). About a girl who works at an Italian restaurant in S. Korea and falls in love with her sexist boss after he negs her a whole bunch and gives her lots of smoldering glances.” Um, I’M IN.

• And Richard points out that “My So-Called Life” is all up in that piece! (And also Geek Charming, an ABC Family movie.)

• Matt points out that both Ran and Kagemusha are up on the Netflix. You simply must watch Ran for the textiles.

• Joel points out that all of “Dollhouse” is still on there, which I did and enjoyed last year. It’s actually LESS cheesy than “Alias.”

• Lois would like to add Marwencol (yes!), and the English comedy “The IT Crowd,” which I have never seen, and may shortly!

• Adam would like to add Jiro Dreams of Sushi which people LOVED, and also Anvil: The Story of Anvil, because he has terrible taste.

• Oh, of course you know our feelings on “Doctor Who.”

Oh and there’s more!

@joeljohnson @choire @awl Quirky docs: State of Mind (BBC in North Korea) and Make Believe (youth magic world championships)

— Mark Wilson (@ctrlzee) October 29, 2012

@moorehn @choire @awl Ghandi…three hours of how to be calm in the face of danger and oppression 🙂

— jgrprinceton (@jgrprinceton) October 29, 2012

@choire @awl The X-Files is on there, in all its Clinton-era glory.

— Dennis (@tansahsa) October 29, 2012

@choire @awl Freaks and Geeks!

— Jeff Long (@jblong) October 29, 2012

OMG this is true, I loved season one of “Damages”:

@choire Glenn Close’s “Damages” is on Netflix & the first season is amazing

— Sarah Pavis (@spavis) October 29, 2012

@choire @awl The Paper, for the news-junkies, also Kagemusha and anything else by Kurosawa.

— Eric Vilas-Boas (@VilBo) October 29, 2012

@choire @awl Luther series 1 & 2-the spectacular (& hot) Idris Elba plus amazing supporting cast in my favorite new/old London procedural.

— glace (@glace) October 29, 2012

@choire @awl Lee Pace is really hot in The Fall. There’s also Bronson if you’re in the mood for that and Tom Hardy.

— Elisabeth Donnelly (@heydonnelly) October 29, 2012

@choire @awl “Sherman’s March” by Ross McElwee. It’s almost three hours! (And very good.)

— Jessica Weisberg (@jessicaweisberg) October 29, 2012

@choire @awl The Long Good Friday (Helen Mirren/Bob Hoskins in 1980!), One Two Three, Skins, The In-Betweeners, In the Loop, Luther.

— SCAREdithmo (@meredithmo) October 29, 2012

@choire If Terriers was about higher-class people/Britons, it would be huge on Netflix. Really great, smart series.

— Jack Stuef (@stuef) October 29, 2012