You tell Courtney Love the music section stole Kurt Cobain’s ashes and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two recently released major-label CDs, and two tickets to a Live Nation club show taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here’s this week’s winning whine.

Dear Payback Time: Although I have to commend John Lucas’s versatility—14 strong NBA seasons and a steady gig with the Straight—maybe all the cocaine and alcohol have begun to erode his writing skills. I understand if he was having a tough time picking the Cure’s “finest moment ever”, but give that phrase a rest. I thought moment was a nice word until you wore it out faster than Robert Smith’s makeup kit. Choose either “Fascination Street”, “Just Like Heaven”, or “A Forest” as the Cure’s finest moment, or go back to coaching the Houston Wranglers in World Team Tennis.

> Cale Shapera

John Lucas responds—Dearest Cale: Very funny! We can’t all have made-up monikers like yours, you know. Some of us have to share our handles with two generations of pro basketball players. But seeing how you displayed the brainpower to have a couple of yuks at my expense, I’m flummoxed that you otherwise seem to possess all the wit of a nit. It’s a sad comment on our times that a stoner comedy like Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is considered the height of hilarity, while subtler, more literary attempts at humour—like, say, the repetition and contrast I employed in my concert review last week—just leave folks scratching their heads. Don’t get me wrong, though: I love Harold and Kumar, especially the first movie, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. I can scarcely stifle my snickers every time I recall the scene in which our profoundly baked protagonists encounter a cheetah in the woods of New Jersey. Remember how they decide to ride the cheetah, and how it takes them about 50 miles in two minutes, only it turns out that it was running in the wrong direction? Hilarious, and surely the movie’s funniest moment. I also liked the part where an ecstasy-addled Neil Patrick Harris shows up hitchhiking and then steals Harold’s car. The bit where the car speeds past our hapless heroes with a coked-up NPH hanging out the sunroof with a topless stripper is almost certainly the movie’s funniest moment. And don’t even get me started on the “battleshits” sequence. Call me hopelessly highbrow if you will, but there’s something about the sight of two hot upper-crust chicks taking noisy dumps that really cracks me up. It’s the height of comedy, really, and definitely the movie’s funniest moment.

Cale Shapera continues the chicken-milkingly ignorant tradition of refusing to let us know what discs he wants. You can voice your impotent rage by snail mail or by sending an e-mail to payback@straight.com