Edwin MacPhisto

I'm already tired of people complaining that Passion of the Christ didn't get nominated for best picture. Shitty movie, certainly not top 5, and get over yourselves.

I thought The Cold Vein was 2001, but in any case, yeah, it's really good.

Listened to the Bloc Party album today. Three or four tracks are fantastic, and the rest are seeping in fairly well. We'll see how it ages.

My guess is we're thinking of the same thing; El-P's Fantastic Damage was the best and remains the best album the label has ever released. Kinda like Rjd2 as well, but he really is a poor man's DJ Shadow.

Too much pressure. I might get hives.

Kudos to Bored for being the first to get one of those pictures from the ridiculous-ass Nike ad.

To suggest that being outcoached and the other team being a better team aren't connected kinda misses the point of pro football, I think.

Now, see how much more interesting the villainous family is now? The writers have made them a lot more complex, and I am much more satisfied than I was after the 4-hour premiere. Finally some opportunities to show off a little acting range for actors who are clearly thriving with it.

O M F G Boner-inducing.

He can certainly take advantage of it, though. Which is exactly what my entire post said. It was a clever manipulation of words, images, and associations to portray the situation as something it wasn't. This is becoming clearer by the day now; all you have to do is, like I said, examine all the dialed-down rhetoric in the administration's speeches on the subject these days. But you won't do that, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering. You keep saying this, and NoCalMike has challenged you to produce it. The President saying "there's a connection" doesn't count. I'll use your own words here and say

Def Jux stumbles again. Whoops.

Everyone who's pointed out that the shitty fade to Burress was a not-so-great play call is right, by the way.

Normally I'd say yes, taking the points is a good idea, but when you're down two full scores against a team like the Patriots that hasn't made a big mistake all day--no turnovers especially--go for it. Best case scenario, you score; worst case scenario, they're on the 1, and you have a chance to hopefully get the ball back around midfield with a strong defensive stop. Ripper's right; the field goal doesn't change the way the Pats play at all.

According to Google, I may be the first person in the history of the internet to ever use "Raekwon" and "trochaic" on the same page.

If TO does play, they'll cover him tight and test how able he really is early. If he's healthy, then yeah, the Eagles have a much better chance. If the Patriots find out that he's really not going at full speed--and if he isn't, they will in short order--then he's not going to draw double coverages or be worth much more than one of the Davises.

i'd like a breakdown of this, actually. i'm not terribly familiar with their individual styles and/or strengths. Sure. My humblest opinions. Inspectah Deck's gifts really come through in his delivery moreso than his lyrics--the vocal flourishes he adopts for the "neighborhood Spiderman" and "sayin' goodbye like Tevin Campbell" lines are great. More than other Wu guys, he seems to rely on a lot of pop culture references that are outside of the typical martial arts motif the others use, which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. Raekwon is just fantastic. I guess the "flaws" thing doesn't really apply to him because he's probably the most consistent emcee in the group. You want some fun, take this verse and lay out the scansion for it. Motherfucker uses trochaic substitution and the occasional spondee like an expert, whether he knows it or not. I also like the way he uses turns of phrase like "meltin' pot hot," which plays on obv. the idea of the melting pot and the fact that pots get, well, hot. He does this a lot and it's rarely lame. Method Man is all about 40s and blunts and he really gets his husky thing going on this one. Probably the least lyrically varied Wu-Tang guy, but definitely good at getting a reaction. His first two lines here, as delivered in the song, are a great change of pace. As you can see in the second half of his verse, he's a little more disconnected in his thoughts than the other guys, not really making even thematic connections and kinda going with whatever rhymes. U-God kinda sucks and has a weird-ass gravelly voice. He only gets 4 lines here, but they're the only lines of his I ever remember. So he's doing something right, and his gravelly-ass delivery isn't overexposed. His verse on "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'," the only other one on this album, shows what happens if you let that go on too long. ODB is (was) crazy as hell, but his taunts are pretty coherent for what they are. He uses his common vocal tics here, especially on "niggas be rollin'," and pops another Brooklyn Zoo reference, and something really out there ("bite your motherfuckin' ass"). In moderation this stuff is great; sometimes it can get excessive if there's too much of it. Ghostface's delivery is really intense and sharp, but his verses rarely make sense. Rarely does one couplet here connect to the subsequent couplet, but he keeps the delivery fun and always sounds like he really knows what he's talking about, even if we don't. This is really charming on his Ironman album, but gets a little tiresome and one-trick-ponyish on his later stuff. RZA really can't hold a rhythm, but he always sounds incredibly aggressive. "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthin' To Fuck Wit" is probably the only track on this album where he sounds more pissed off and more likely to eat your throat or something. Still, he usually comes up with one so-cheesy-it's-great line, and I think "Flowin' like Christ when I speaks the Gospel" is one of those. I enjoy him on Wu-Tang albums despite my better judgment, kind of like Flava Flav. And then there's the GZA, who just has an incredibly liquid flow, to the point that you almost don't notice the line breaks or breaths he takes throughout this whole verse. He's also the best at keeping a narrative thru-line through his extended metaphors--note how he moves from the story of stingy companies to record labels with greazy A&R guys to those guys needing a bar of soap to the fact that, well, he's pretty dirty too. He brings it all together. I guess the biggest problem he has is that he rarely taps into the aggression that guys like RZA and Ghostface seem to access pretty effortlessly, which sometimes lends to a pretty downtempo experience in his appearances. Man, I like the Wu-Tang.

I was inclined to say something really low like 10-7, but somebody always seems to break open a few big plays in the Super Bowl. The winning team hasn't scored less than 20 points since 1975, I think.

Great song because, really, every verse kinda personifies what things every guy in the Wu-Tang Clan does or doesn't do well. How about that GZA.

I hate the Eagles, or at least did back when I lived in New Jersey during the early 90s and was a die-hard Giants kid. I suppose that lingers on even though I was more of a Dave Meggett, Phil Simms, and LT vs. Randall Cunningham, Reggie White, and Fred Barnett kinda guy. But I also don't really care for the Patriots. I don't really have a team, so I just go for matchups that interest me. This one doesn't, which at least means I'll get to have more conversations with friends at the Super Bowl party than usual.

The entire point of all this hubbub was to generate public support for war with Iraq by equating Iraq with al Qaeda and, specifically, creating an image of a connection between Iraq and the September 11th attacks. If you believe that connection to be true, you can stop reading here. The language and tone in the majority of all public speeches by the President and the Vice President were measured and designed to create associations that didn't exist. We should know that Iraq was not responsible for the September 11th attacks, but the White House did an excellent job of convincing a large portion of the country that it was without explicitly saying "Saddam Hussein engineered a terrorist attack." The equation with al Qaeda and the attacks also was fodder for the "imminent threat" rhetoric and helped make "weapons of mass destruction" into one of the most commonly used phrases in the country. As all the information about those not actually existing came out, the rhetoric dialed down, and the administration has now backed off most of its original claims, but it doesn't need to support them anymore--it successfully created associations that linger on, and it's reformed its message into a humanitarian one of creating democracy rather than quashing a largely invented--or at least artfully portrayed--threat. To return to the central point of the thread, I suppose, the media just didn't do a good job investigating any of this and gave the White House a generally free pass on its spin for far too long. Which is nothing new, for any administration, but I find it a particularly egregious oversight considering the fact that this was--and continues to be--such a huge undertaking for the country.

Great song.

So I thought "Evil," one of the best tracks off of Interpol's new album, could be the track that made them really hit it big. Seems like I was halfway right: it's their second single, but I caught the video today, and it's one of the shittiest I've ever seen. I can only hope they were morbidly high when they came up with this one, because it's just a puppet, and not a very good puppet at that. See the atrocity here.

I hope so.

Study: Stem Cell Lines Contaminated Wait, so you mean that all the scientists who said this was going to be a problem were absolutely right? I'm shocked!

President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat (Whitehouse.gov) This is just one of dozens of clever statements implying--or outright stating--the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, designed to manipulate public opinion present in this speech alone, which was Bush's big eve-of-war chat on national TV. Dozens more out there; just search for "iraq al qaeda bush speech" to find them. Will that suffice?