Edwin MacPhisto

I posted the song name a couple days ago, JMA. Kim Richey, "No Place Like Home." Enjoy.

I still want to know what Anglesault does for a job at 27.

It's okay. The next one is all yours. I feel so fucking gay and will never use a smiley again.

I feel like Fred will be back. There's enough of her left in Illyria with the memories she was showing off at the end of last night's ep. It'll happen, unless they did some serious rewrites when discovering the show was going to be cancelled - I don't see Mutant Enemy killing off their one female character if, at the time, they're intending to have another season. They always surprise, though.

Nader's support will drop severely when it's actually election time. I'll be surprised if he pulls in more than 2% of the vote this year, unless Kerry can't reel in the most fervent of Deaniacs. Polling at this point is retarded, but the media is keen to make news where it can. Neither campaign has really started so they'll be a bit hard-pressed.

I haven't heard of anyone not liking this album, and I talked about in the little thread we had going in hardcore. I think it's the best rap album I've heard since The Blueprint and speaks very well of Kanye's future if he's doing this well straight out of the gate. That it's sold about a million copies in three weeks also speaks pretty well. The ideology in those skits is stupid enough - his view of college and the one you're suggesting is way out of touch and focuses on a minority, especially in a society where that very economy is making it almost necessary to have a degree to get any sort of good job. What really gets me is the saturation of skits. That stretch in the middle is really a killer - in 6 minutes, half are skits. Way too much unless we're talking about "The $20 Sack Pyramid." I actually very much like the first School Spirit skit for the delivery of the last line ("But I could up all the change in your purse...very fast"), but the 2 minutes of downtime after "School Spirit" the song is just murderous. "Last Call" is cute once. The version of "Slow Jamz" isn't quite as good as the Twista version - it goes on too long. Overall I frickin' love it, though. Favorite tracks at the moment are probably "Two Words" and "Family Business," which is the best soulful rapper track in some time.

"Hollywood Squares" "Pig Latin" "When Good Dogs Do Bad Things" "Come To Daddy" Yes, the latter is a cover of the Aphex Twin song. It's pretty frickin' incredible. I feel pretty much the same way about Tool as Agent. Seeing them live - seeing them play an intro that looked it would be "Aenema" but ended up being a 12-minute "Opiate" - knocked me off my feet. It's been almost 3 years now since the last album, though, and I need more. Bringing the post full-circle, Mike Patton opened the first time I saw Tool, with his Tomahawk project. It was...very silly.

Well, the idea isn't going totally unconsidered. I think it's the 12th amendment that'd hold it back: I think the intent of the law means that no one under 35 nor foreign-born can be VP, not the "served too many terms" deal, but I don't think the spirit of the law argument would work in this case. Too sketchy. It'd be hilarious, though. Especially if Clinton made his re-debut to the Terminator theme.

I'll defend Bjork even though you won't care, since this is about loathing. Her first three albums are delightful, with Homogenic especially often pushing great. In a time when too many singer-songwriter chicks were doing the boring/dull/most of Sarah McLachlan's catalog thing, she kept her music interesting, experimental, and crazy-as-fuck from track to track. I even like some of the songs off Vespertine, even if it does feel dry by her standards. I don't get your suicidal criticism. I'd call her songs - especially lyrically - far more uplifting than that of her peers. "It's Oh So Quiet" and "Joga" don't scream put-your-head-in-the-oven to me. Understandably, a lot of people do go through a "Jesus Christ I'm going to murder Bjork period" because she's so unique and occasionally abrasive, but I at least tend to come out of those times pretty quickly. Now, if you actually can't understand what she's saying, please buy a Nickelback album. They're very clear. If you just hate her warble, that's another thing. There are a lot of easy targets for my own loathed band, but I'll try to keep it semi-challenging and go with Metallica. Okay, I lied about the challenging part.

Hey, it's cool. I was lying!

Yeah, tonight was pretty fantastic. It embodies the reason I've grown to love Angel over the past two years and why, in some ways, I think it's become a much more impressive series than Buffy ever was. Mutant Enemy never takes the easy way out with Angel. Last week's episode was mindblowing, soulcrushing. These week, we expect Surly Dark Wes and a big action blowout. Well, we got all that, but the result wasn't the team getting their asses beat and crawling home to regroup for next week's fight. I don't think any other production group would dare to seemingly kill off a beloved character, and then the next week have the creature responsible for filling her body share a tender moment and connection with the man most effected. Will Illyria try to wipe out the human race? It doesn't feel like it anymore. She's lost. And when you break it down, Fred's death is only very indirectly her fault. Everyone - even the supposed villain - has lost something big. It just stuns me, week after week, the things they can pull off. The fifth season of Angel is probably the most mature and experimental season of anything that this team has created (with the disclaimer that, no, I haven't seen Firefly yet). Also, for anyone interested, the song during the closing credits was performed by Kim Richey and called "A Place Called Home." Nice linkage to the episode of the Season 4 finale, too - "Home" indeed.

Message boards are very serious things, you know.

No, no. Jake was GoldenEye! Which I remembered was funny, because people would spell it Goldeneye and think it was based on the Bond movie, when in fact the guy just had, well, a Golden Eye. Why do I remember this? Because he was often the tag partner of my favorite wrestler in SWF history...SNOW DEMON!!!!!

The only reason to have a grudge against Ludacris is "Splash Waterfalls." Motherfucking awful.

It's a bit tough, because you have a lot of people who were around for a long time in the JL but didn't get going for a certain period. Z's is pretty good though. Makes me feel really old. I pretty much still felt like a new guy till we made it to these boards.

I thought these were the kinds of things people looked at, laughed at, and never bought. I have been disproven.

You didn't use the Ohio Players' "Fire"? Z SUX

So, Anglesault, what do you actually do? Like, for a job?

It's certainly not to say that Whitman is bad. He's vital, and everyone ought to read "Song of Myself" whether they end up liking it or not. For me, though, the imagery and language that his predecessors hit on is more appealing. I'm not sure if they're as evocative in the same sense - the self-reflection and Big Time Ideas, for example - but Wordsworth can definitely match him in terms of Awe of Nature while Coleridge tears up the Fevered Opium Dream like no one else. I'd say that they're neither quite as epic nor comforting as Whitman, but tremendously interesting and impactful, in some ways more immediately so than he of Grass himself.

Till this morning, is this evening? Life is fine. Jesus Christ Superstar, "The Last Supper." This is the version with Ian Gillen from Deep Purple playing the J-Man.

Billy Collins is a tremendously deserving poet laureate. He strikes the perfect balance of pathos and bathos. I'll also second Bukowski for being interesting, though living in a dorm full of hippies has left me a bit overexposed. I really dig the early Romantics - Wordsworth circa "Tintern Abbey," Coleridge circa "Kubla Khan." They were doing wonderfully hallucinatory stuff that remains better than anything Walt Whitman did a few years later. Alexander Pope is tremendous fun if you're into older stuff - I remain convinced that even the most casual literary aficionado can get a kick out of "The Rape of the Lock" and its bizarre toilet humor. I also mark for all things Modernist and will go to bat for the imagery of the rare Joyce poem and Ezra Pound, even if it is dense, imagistic, and overly pretentious. When you're the first guy doing it, though, you get a bit of latitude.

Joy Division - Substance Prince - 1999 The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds Anyone who's never heard Joy Division's "Atmosphere" or the Beach Boys' "I Know There's An Answer" is really missing out on some gorgeous stuff. I also listened to "Cop Killer" three times today.

Nerds, all of you. ::hangs out behind the lunchroom smoking Marlboros::

Cassettes. Someone has street cred!

Nirvana, In Utero. Haven't listened to this in a while. It remains really good.