Edwin MacPhisto

They're okay, but not great. The album is specifically the reason I didn't try to get tickets for this tour; if it's going to be half new album/ATYCLB, I'm not terribly interested.

I tend to like most "classic" albums, I think. The best one I can come up with is the Stones' Beggars Banquet, which I find okay but largely uninteresting as compared to the rest of their catalog.

The new U2 album can be quite easily knocked down to a double A-side: 1. City of Blinding Lights 2. Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own

Loveless is top-5 stuff for me, and it's precisely the sea of sound that gets me, and digging the melodies out of said sea. Rarely do 3 weeks go by that I don't listen to it, actually. Love that album, particularly on headphones. Nowhere is also really good, especially the edition with the bonus tracks. I don't like Dark Side of the Moon that much, but I get the feeling that's up there with Led Zeppelin IV in terms of "classics" commonly disliked.

What looked like a rout in the making has turned into quite a game, but Wisconsin's starting to get outmanned in this second half, I think. They're still keeping it close, but getting very little penetration. Sean May picked a fine day to have one of his best games of the season. Wisconsin's Kammron Taylor has one of the most hardcore first names I've seen in a while.

Ok once again. Has anyone figured out what the fuck they were doing at the end of that game? What I thought they were going for was echoed in the Associated Press recap:

wtf. You've lost it, man. What is your insane frame of reference for that? I just spent about 15 minutes looking over Middle East Studies course offerings, descriptions, and student evaluation at UVA, Columbia, Yale, and a handful of other places to find common links among them. As I suspected, such dastardly, politicized topics such as "Intermediate Arabic," "Iranian Film," "History of Mesopotamia," "Judaism and God," and the dread "Independent Study" are set to annihilate our nation with their obviously subversive notions!

Incidentally, Hot Hot Heat has another album coming out soon. It will also not be the album of the year.

bandages on my legs and my arms from u

You're totally lame except for like no songs.

I also forgot about Bloc Party's Silent Alarm which, upon continued listening, is also really good. Still not something I'd call album of the year, but that and M.I.A. are my definite favorites thus far.

Born bad, 32 years ago. Keep on truckin, cap'n!

I was mean and entered to Nine Inch Nails! Rrrrrrrrrrrr! It actually could have been really great if I had stuck with it. The whole theme was Edwin selling out his roots to get handpicked by fed prez Jayson Grant when he got passed over in a massive 10-man bump from the JL and ML. Of course, I really just wanted to get back to the Carnival, so after about 4 weeks I was firmly into tweener territory, and with two more I was full-on face again.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the one at my school, at least. Focusing on the recent and ancient development of the Middle East along with language training has become a really popular approach of late. I'm not really sure what the problem is with any of the compartmentalized history/culture fields like Middle Eastern, African-American, or Asian studies. They tend to be interdisciplinary programs that allow a student to incorporate history, politics, anthropology, linguistics, and sometimes literature courses into their chosen field of study. Sure, you can make your path through an easy one, but you can cruise through college in easy classes for pretty much any degree but the hardest of hard sciences if that's how you want to be. These majors, while certainly not vital, are no different than a concentration in American politics or European history.

It's definitely not that either. The two songs I've heard off the other new album were pretty catchy, though. Conor Oberst seems to have toned down the whine a bit.

M.I.A.'s Arular is pretty wonderful, but I haven't heard anything that's really levelled me in these first three months. Certainly not the Mars Volta album, I'll say that much.

Saw Interpol at the 9:30 Club last night. These guys get better every time I see them. Quite a pleasure to hear so much of Antics live; anyone going ought to watch for "Take You On A Cruise" and "Not Even Jail" as highlights. Blonde Redhead opened and were awful. Sorry, Special K.

Oh, Richard Milhouse. Opened China, was constantly paranoid, and was the original "I have a plan!" candidate. Except for him, it worked.

I tried to make an Edwin once, and he came out looking more like a cross between Carrot Top and a Mortal Kombat character. Yipes.

Nah, not really. I'm familiar with all the things Mike is harping about except for the Kuznick guy, and maybe two of them compare. I don't agree with the views these people espouse, but in context I wouldn't say they're significantly harmful at all. If those people and those examples are the ones that he sees as representative examples of academic evil (and even if you think they're morons, they're not close to representative), then I'm not too concerned with this so-called apocalypse.

They ARE incapable. They are, flat-out, incapable of doing so. Academia has become the haven for the burnt-out hippies of the 60's who have yet to have to actually mature and maintain the same idiotic beliefs they always had. -=Mike ...Ward Churchill isn't exactly way out of the mainstream of college profs... Great flip-out moment there, Mike. You hate college professors; we get it. As for Churchill, find me ten other professors in the entire country who've said the same things as him. You've turned a corner lately from staunch conservative to looney conspiracy-theory madman and it's making these threads impossible.

They're not renewing his contract. That's considerably different from being fired. If you're not a tenure track professor, you're always expendable--one of the flaws of the tenure system, perhaps, but not an outrageous firing or anything resembling one. I'm also well-aware of the liberal identification predominance among professors. You and those looking to create an enemy in the academic world have this tremendous belief that these people are incapable of keeping this from affecting their classrooms in a significant way.

That's all I really need to see to know that I'm not gonna bother replying to the rest of this tinfoil hat nonsense. You seriously need to come hang out at UVA for a while and bounce around in our history and politics departments.

But you shouldn't fucking have to. You can always deal with police brutality by filing lawsuits. Does that mean we should not care about police brutality? That's not really analogous. The most common extent of a professor misusing his position of authority isn't physically beating someone. I don't know how they roll at USC, but here at UVA, if anything it's talking down to a kid in lecture who, if he really has a problem, can go to office hours or to the administration, or drop the class without penalty. If they're not dealing with your problem, it's probably because it's insignificant. You have somebody who can RUIN YOUR LIFE if he/she disagrees with your views. Yeah, a student should have some serious protections. And if you say "Professor Tucker said something crazy in class!" I should hope that they'll say "Sorry you disagreed" and make a small note on his record. Academic hirings and maintenance of said hirings are some of the most difficult hires to manage. Professors are not paid to agree with their students; they're paid to do research, to publish, to bring their university a higher reputation, and to instruct students in various academic and practical fields. I highly doubt that your isolated examples are symptomatic, or that you'd be dumb enough to stay in a class with someone who suggests that the US bombed Pearl Harbor every single day and makes "DID THE US BOMB PEARL HARBOR" a final exam question worth your entire grade. When a professor's not filling classrooms, the university will take notice, but they're certainly not going to make snap judgments based on a grievance, nor would I expect them to. He shouldn't have plagiarized? Again, your approach doesn't logically follow. If a professor accuses him of plagiarism, any accredited university in America is going to give him a hearing and evaluation. At the point accusations are levied it ceases to be the professor's sphere of power. Maybe there's a big conspiracy throughout the entire system of review that's working against your friend, or maybe he just fucked up. If he genuinely didn't, I wish him luck in winning his lawsuit.

PROFESSORS ARA ALL EVIL Get a life. Any stupid shit that professors do to lord power over students can be handled easily by standing your ground and going through administrative channels. If you're expecting someone to get fired every time you bring a complaint, you're expecting a retarded amount of value being placed on your own experience. This bill is brutally stupid. My state is just hitting them out of the park lately.