What's a good plate with nothing on it?

From Anthony Lane's review of Pulp Fiction, in Nobody's Perfect (London: Picador, 2003), pp. 77-81 (p. 77):

"Everybody knows the old E.M. Forster distinction between story and plot: 'The king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot. Fair enough, but what Forster failed to foresee was the emergence of a third category, the Quentin Tarantino plot, which goes something like this: 'The king died while having sex on the hood of a lime-green Corvette, and the queen died of contaminated crack borrowed from the court jester, with whom she was enjoying a conversation about the relative merits of Tab and Diet Pepsi as they sat and surveyed the bleeding remains of the lords and ladies whom she had just blown away with a stolen .45 in a fit of grief.'"

Pretty neat, huh? I was overjoyed to receive my package from amazon today, including Nobody's Perfect, Mark Shechner's Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth, and Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (a sort of abridged version of The Chicago Manual of Style). The Lane book is great--it's a collection of all the pieces he wrote for The New Yorker from 1993-2002, mostly film reviews, but a fair amount of pieces on books and miscellaneous "profiles." He's always been one of my favorite New Yorker writers, and it's fairly awesome to have this brick (it's a 750 page paperback!) to dip into whenever I want. Good writing makes me excited, especially (these days) good journalism, and gets me wanting to be a good writer, which is a positive thing.

I'm sure all of you in the states are being bombarded by a shit-ton of Reagan hogwash (I must admit, one of the first things I thought when I heard that he died was that at least this didn't happen mid-October), praising "The Great Communicator" to the skies. I know it's bad to speak ill of the dead, but maybe reading this piece will offer something of a counterbalance.

Paul: the power pop goodness that I know you love so much (Sloan, Brendan Benson, FoW, etc.) is everywhere you look in the AC Newman album. Consider me a doctor, and consider this a prescription. That said, you don't have the two New Pornographers albums yet, which are just sitting in some record store, waiting to save your life.

How do we get this thing rolling again? I suppose I could send an email to Nish, Willy, Sweet, but I'm lazy.

I've been playing a lot of tetris lately (read: the last 3 months), and I'd like to talk about it a bit, but before that: what do you call the tetris pieces? Do they have names? How would one get into a discussion of tetris strategy--we know those pieces so well, but there doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon nomenclature (except for "box" or "square" and "the long one"). Anyone?