Rob’s girlfriend Jenni is here to do some mythbusting on male/female relations, but not before the show plows through a raft of Facebook flamings, DMV woes, movie cries, college tutoring, and a random rummage through the studio’s filing cabinet in search of the wily and elusive Bell Of Insult. Eventually, education and elucidation do ensue, and are all the sweeter for being hard-won. Presumably. Also, Rob gets frisky with the felines, Chris drops anvils on his bulldog, and Thom has no pets, just a hole in his heart where The Rick Emerson Show used to be. Music by The Little Girls, The Wonderstrucks, and Stian Rafto.

Can the show - nay, the Universe itself - survive all three members of Nice Guy Eddie being in the studio together? Find out, as Dave Shalansky joins us for a whirlwind of topical palaver, with affection for Yiddish, antipathy for celebrity baby names, and ambivalence about the return of Van Halen all present on the conversational menu. Plus, the Zen of Vegas, Dueling McCartneys, and this week’s Sodomizing A Legacy gets meta-muddled, in glorious fashion. Music by The Paul Collins Beat and Great Buildings.

Quinton Flynn forgoes his duties as the Spoon’s Suave Shalansky long enough to let his magnificent coif down and delve into the nerdery of anime conventions, at which he appears frequently and with much fanfare. Also, the axiom of never meeting your heroes seems to have at least one exception, which is watching your hero meet THEIR heroes, and just how white can the men of The Spoon sound whilst pitching a TV show about African-American rock musicians? The answer is none. None more white. Music by Cliff Hillis, Martin Briley, and The Sugarplastic.

It’s all about filters this week: whether it be the mist of nostalgia, the blood-rush of tribalism, or the constantly shifting sands of cultural propriety, it cannot be denied that perception colors reality, and reality gets pretty weird as a result. Are the men of The Spoon able to pierce this veil and see things as they truly are? Maybe not, but it’s fun listening to them try. Plus, Rob can finally talk about his new voiceover gig, and 1982 was a pretty damn good year for movies. Music by Trip Shakespeare,The Rainmakers, and Skooshny.

And the men of The Spoon wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. Thus, on the second day of the first month in the year of our lord two thousand and twelve, they turned the full glare of their conversational lens in toward one another, and began upon a campaign of self-promotion and self-destruction, largely centered around what kind of bands they dig. Will this righteously indignant kick-off lead them to madness or perdition? Only time will tell. Music by Nice Guy Eddie,Sons Of Nothing, and Wonderboy.