Under the Sea:

I’ve always liked mermaids, ever since my first Sea-Bee bathtub toy with long blue hair. I have a cool out-of-print mermaid coffee table book, and an old Italian radio poster with a singing mermaid hanging over my fireplace, but other than that, the mermaid factor around here is pretty low. However, wading through the Disney and the dreck and the vaguely-dirty on eBay makes me want to rethink my affection.

This sort of thing happened when I was 19, with Tori Amos: after seeing her in concert and being turned off by her fan base, I never bought another album. I liked Little Earthquakes, but I could never shake the image of those sobbing 15-year old wannabe-faerie girls, bedecked in glitter, wailing, “Tori! Tori!”