Edwin MacPhisto

I'm going to be extremely satisfied if any one of Logan, Henderson, and Bierko survive this season. One of the things I've always thought was a little hollow about this show was how its villains always get themselves killed. For once, I'd like Gael's wife, the floor outside that parking garage, or the CTU death helicopters to not eliminate our villains--send 'em to court for a change of pace and slightly less neat resolution. Don't know how I feel about the Bluetooth bunch--with Henderson and Logan, I think they're somewhat unnecessary, but I don't think it'll be terrible.

All good choices. Also, summer CDs without the Cars' "Magic" are woefully deficient.

If you dug that, try Pirandello's Henry IV. More of the same, but even more confusing and weird.

Yeah, this is very good. "3000 Flowers"? Listen to them guitars! I'll need to listen to it a lot more to even catch everything he says. Very rewarding just on sound, and very amusing too.

7 minutes in and I already like this better than most New Pornographers songs. Don't know what it is about them. This is good stuff here, though.

It'll be my first Destroyer, short of a few songs here and there. And I'm listening to it right now. I'm looking to play major catch-up with the back catalogues of all these seminal indie artists eventually.

2006 thoughts to date: Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit - My first B&S album, and it's a winner. This is just great all over. Only had it for about a month, and I've still managed to have 5-6 different favorite songs off of it. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale - Just as good as everyone's saying. This is just about everything good from the rest of his albums without any of the bad stuff. Fast becoming my favorite album of his. Band of Horses, Everything All The Time - What Incandenza said, except that I really like the Arcade Fire. This, however, is totally forgettable. Like the Shins if the Shins were boring instead of fun. Islands, Return to the Sea - Already said how much I like this, but worth saying again. Anyone interested in this should d/l "Rough Gem" and the awesome opener, "Swans (Life After Death)." Only the goofy half-rap track in the middle falls flat. Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, Ballad of the Broken Seas - My new nighttime album. So apparently this here lady used to be in B&S, and she sounds wonderful here. Most of her vocals are quashed under the mix, so they just sound like soothing, sweet noise, and then Lanegan breaks it up by sounding like a human dust bowl. I love that guy on most things he does (esp. with The Twilight Singers), and I really like the combination of these two. Hypatia Lake, ...And We Shall Call Him Joseph - More fun noise. This is trippy shoegazing stuff. Like if Ride and Trail of Dead did a split EP or something. Thumbs up. The Knife, Silent Scream - I don't think anything on here is as good or as fun as "Heartbeats," but it's decent. Gotta listen to it more, probably with headphones. On deck for consumption soon: T.I., all of the Lovely Feathers' album (KRAKOW POLAND), Morrissey, and Destroyer. And I downloaded Neko Case, but was then reminded of the fact that I just don't really like her or the New Pornographers that much. We'll see how Destroyer fares in that respect.

I'm buying Logan. I think the writers have made it work. Look back at the way he acted in those end-of-season-4 episodes: exactly this same sort of alternating pompous bravado and whiny incompetence. Right now, things are starting to fall apart; people can expose him. He's got his back against the wall, and he's still incompetent Logan. He's just nastier about it, as I'd expect him to be. Really dug this episode. LOVE the little satellite CTU Heroes team at Buchanan's house. Curtis just needs to show up there in the next hour or two, and they can have a little potluck. Favorite scene had to be the Pres, Heller, and the VP all in the room at once. Ray Wise, William Devane, and Gregory Itzin are all great old hand actors. Just standing there in that staredown triangle was tight as hell.

Crash was decent, not great, often way too cheeseball for its own good. Kind of like a really, really overwrought Altman movie. I agree with Banky that it ended up in a much better place than where it began. Also, pretty much every scene with Terrence Howard was great. He's fantastic.

The Exploding Hearts album is totally wonderful. Good call.

When and where do you draw the line between being sad or often in a bad mood and actually considering yourself depressed? I'm not being snarky here; I actually would like to know.

I don't. Hmm. What can one recommend as a good way to transition out of that music? Weezer? The Clash? Fugazi? The Replacements?

What are you talking about? (Since I'm the 4th post, the book had nothing to do with wrestling) Badly phrased; I meant four posts passed, and the 5th post was the offender. It was CM Punk's note about Tietam Brown, by Mick Foley, which he edited to be joking on various pretentious/hipster things. Mishima, Tom Waits, and Neutral Milk Hotel are all great though, jokes aside.

Only four posts till a stupid book by a wrestler came up, but the rest of the thread seems to be in surprisingly good shape. Czech must be happy. I've been terrible about reading lately. Working on a thesis for the past few months has left me with absolutely no desire to read for pleasure during down time. Now that I'm done, though, I'm getting back in to it. While working on the thesis, I did finally read Ian McEwan's Atonement, which is wonderful in most ways and which I feel comfortable recommending to most people. On Tim O'Brien: I read several excerpts from The Things They Carried in the course of fiction workshops and agree with that assessment. I read all of his novel Going After Cacciato, which is just okay but departs from the Vietnam stuff about a third of the way through to become a weird sort of Steppenwolf-esque journey. Not bad if you're looking for more of him. I read Youth in Revolt in 9th grade. It was a big deal at my school, because the administration didn't want people reading it on the school grounds. So, of course, we kept one copy circulating through our class, and then eventually onto the county crew team and into another district school, with everyone who read it signing the inside cover. Everyone went through it very, very quickly. By the end of sophomore year, when the project had mostly run its course, there were about 120 names, well onto the second title page. Oh, 15-year-old rebellion.

I think your racial hyperbole ignores the fact that Kobe (likely rapist that he was) was a professional being paid for his work, and the actual assessment of penalty. These Duke kids are all amateurs, some on scholarship, some not, playing at the discretion of Duke University. Duke's administration made these decisions, not some outside force. You can't really "do" anything to the Lakers in the situation they faced.

I'm really puzzled by this insistence on the relevance of Neil Young as contemporary artist. He's in fine company; Paul McCartney hasn't made good music in forever. Even Bob Dylan's last few albums are merely eh. Mediocre new music doesn't denigrate their past successes, so why force yourself to like it, gritting your teeth all the while?

^ Yeah. God, I hate the way sexual assault cases play out publicly.

I think it might be because, for a lot of U2 fans, that about as heavy as music gets, so it's kind of a novelty? I like some of the swooshy guitar sounds.

That's a huge, huge step up from what you were doing/dealing with. Very nice.

There's a big-difference-I mean, I don't even know if I can express how big it is--between "Ohio" and having a 100-piece choir shout "flip flop" over a sample of the president talking.

Yeah, I've heard that, but what the hell kind of a machine is it that moves completely fluidly through the jungle like that? Or maybe it'll be, like, a very small motorcycle. Kill no, grab yes. Season 1 finale, trying to drag Locke into the ground.

Wonderful new album: Islands, Return to the Sea. I had no idea until yesterday that it was from two members of the now-dismantled Unicorns. It's like that album, except...better, I think. Baroque, tropical, weird. I dig it.

Dude can't work on his own teeth, after all. I agree that this is clearly some sort of weird psych experiment now, though I'm wondering how plane crashes factor into it all. I really just want to find out how goddamn Lostzilla works. Smoke that can grab people? That's still really weird and supernatural.

Very cool ep. Good build, and lots of really basic stuff I wanted to happen happened: Kate told Jack about the medical bunker, someone questioned why everyone was getting so complacent about staying on the island, and Locke got out of the damn hatch, interacted with someone he hadn't in a while, and started to get back some of that old Locke charm. I dug it.

Why would they sue her? So they can split up the combined few thousand dollars she probably has across all 46 of them? Their court costs would exceed anything they could get from her. As for suing the school, I don't really see how that works. There's really no legal cause of action for "we hired a stripper and enabled underage drinking, but she might have been lying so reimburse us for something we didn't lose since all of our lacrosse-related privileges are at the purview of the school anyway."