Edwin MacPhisto

She filed the original lawsuit in 1999. Basically, this is just the court saying that they won't dismiss the suit as frivolous - she's allowed to bring it to court if she likes.

Stellar punning. Now, onto mine: Sam Cooke, Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963. Sam Cooke is awesome and you know it even if you don't know the name - "Wonderful World," "Chain Gang," "Having a Party," "For Sentimental Reasons," and a bazillion other great songs. He's in Harlem playing for a crowd that really gets his music, and he's rough, raw, and soulful, giving all his pop hits a lot more depth. The Ramones, It's Alive. "Hey, we're the Ramones, and this one is called 'Rockaway Beach'!" Another Ramones live album came out earlier this year, but that's this same set played 8 days later and not as well. It's 28 songs, 53 minutes, and pretty much all you need. Lightning fast, lots of covers, hyper crowd, and no stops - they take maybe two or three 10-second breathers and that's it. It's the only Ramones album I have and it's good enough to feel like the only one I need. Portishead, PNYC. Portishead with a full orchestral backing, which is even smoother than it sounds. All the music is done live, either by the orchestra or DJ scratching, and Beth Gibbons is tons-of-great at singing. Pretty evenly split between their two albums, and just really, really cool for a band based around samples and synthesized loops to go this big.

Some more cons: If you're going to do conference championships for every league, you're going to need every conference to be 12 teams in two divisions. If you leave the Pac-10 at 10 teams, a team only has to place higher than 4 teams in its division rather than 5 to have a chance to win. So you force some of the still smaller conferences to take in extra teams, and have to deal with a LOT of individual schools griping about re-alignment. You also still leave out 20-some Division I teams no matter what, so any argument about "opens the playoffs up to everybody" doesn't hold water. You're also making the WAC and the MAC a lot bigger than their britches. I know we saw a lot of good teams and good players in the MAC this year, but also take note that the one time Miami of Ohio, MAC champ, played a big-time BCS team, Iowa whomped them 21-3. Unless there are some major revisions in who's in those conferences, especially now that some MAC teams have left for C-USA and some really crappy squads have moved into the MAC, you're giving two of just eight slots to a team that probably doesn't deserve it. They run up conference wins against a lot of shitty teams who, more often than not, spend most of their non-conference season playing homecoming games for major conference teams. Another thing that a lot of people don't take into account about the bowl system is that hosting a bowl is basically a week-long activity for the host city. The teams show up and spend a week there, the fans show up early and pump a lot of money into local economy, there are pep rallies, parades, galas, parties, and all sorts of events that move a lot of income. When those commercials from the keep-the-bowls people air and say all the bowl games combined move $1 billion into local economies, they're not kidding around. Someone will have to figure out a way to make anything more than 4-team playoff more profitable than the bowls before they change the system, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.

OU beat a 9-3 Oklahoma State team, a 10-2 #5 in the country Texas team, and an 8-4 Missouri team. They also played K-State and lost, along with some mid-level BCS teams (UCLA, Texas Tech). LSU beat a 10-3 #11 Georgia team twice, a 9-3 and #17 Ole Miss team, and 8-4 Arkansas team, and lost to a really good Florida team. Beat a decent mid-level team in Auburn. USC beat a 9-3 something like #13 Washington State team...and Auburn (7-5) and Oregon State (7-5). 8-5 mid-major eh team Hawaii, then the rest of the Pac-10 except Cal, plus BYU. If you really want to complain about schedules, bitch about USC. Seriously, no one in college football plays that many opponents that end up looking strong at the end of the season. I believe Notre Dame has the #1 strength of schedule in the nation, and the teams they played with 9 wins or more were FSU, Michigan, Washington State, Purdue and USC. The only reason they CAN play all them plus Pittsburgh and Boston College is because they're an independent. No team in a BCS conference is going to get a chance to play many big teams because they all have to play 6 to 8 conference games.

That wouldn't fly. It's all or nothing with a big playoff - if you have the playoff going the smaller bowls look even more meaningless, will get zero publicity, and will basically just be around for shits and giggles, even moreso than they are now. I think you're also going to run into TV problems. College football doesn't have as big a TV audience as the pros, and to get a network to commit to showing the same college teams playing against each other over several weeks while there's still big-league ball going on won't work. Most of the bowls are on ESPN and ESPN2 and scattered throughout the week because the big networks are still showing pro games. As it stands now, bowl games are still a novelty. Under a playoff, you'd just be getting something that parallels the NFL playoffs going up against the real deal.

Interpol was last year, Curry. Sure is awesome, though.

Actually, I believe the story on the reference - which very well may be Bono covering his ass - is that he put the time as when it was in Ireland when MLK was shot. Which I believe works out to early morning. Yeah, Bono covering his ass. On Rosa and "Rosa": I think the only way she has a case is if she wants to talk about how the language and what-not on the album sullies her image. And I think Tyler's right: she's 90. She hasn't been active in anything for decades. It's her lawyers and family.

One big problem I see rarely mentioned concerning a Division I playoff is attendance. Seriously. There's a biiiig difference between going to your team's bowl game, and going to FOUR post-season games. It works for the lower divisions because they don't expect much attendance in the first place. If you have the same sixteen teams playing, especially a mid-major team like So. Miss, you're simply not going to sell out every game. A lot of even BCS conference teams are lucky to move 20,000 fans to a single bowl game. You're sure as hell not going to get that many going to every single one of those games. Travel is just too hard and the prospect is just two expensive for all but the most die-hard fans. And when you get down to a quarter-final match-up between Iowa and Southern Miss, you're only going to be getting die-hard team fans, not casual folks in the area. Also, you're still eliminating a ton of revenue, because you're eliminating I believe 10 bowls. It might not seem like a lot since they're the lower ones, but it still pumps a LOT of money into a school and its athletic program, even if it is the Liberty Bowl. You're going to alienate income from the other 36 schools who want to see their teams play a bowl in addition to the tired-out fans of the 16 playoff teams. I think the best you can do is basically something like what Marvin suggested - turn the BCS bowls into a pair of semi-finals and a final, if you want to. I think that's the furthest point you can go without undermining the rest of the bowls. This year, it'd mean that Oklahoma/LSU would play USC/Michigan for the undisputed national title, and I think people could get into that. Travel is still hard for that, though - even if you put two weeks between the semis and the final, that's not much time for fans to put their jobs or school on hold, make travel arrangements, and get out there. Fiscally and in terms of not alienating the fanbase, the bowls sans playoff absolutely remain the best system.

DJ Shadow, Endtroducing. "Stem/Long Stem" right now, a piece of music worth obsessing over.

Yeah, the Darkness album is one of my favorites of the year. It's just really solid - they're enthusiastic in the same way Andrew WK is. I think they're to 70's rock of the AC/DC & Queen variety as AWK is to 80's party rock. The songs are fun and hang on a nice balance between clever and cock-rocktacular. Inexpensive too - you can pick it up for 8 or 10 bucks pretty easily. I really need to hear more of this year's releases in-depth (particularly the Wrens album, the new Basement Jaxx, and the Aphex album like saturnmark said, all of which I've really liked on my sampling thus far) before pulling together a year-end list, but some of the more stuff I've loved this year: Dizzee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner Andrew WK, The Wolf OutKast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below Jay-Z, The Black Album The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow Oh, and the new Radiohead is pretty spiff, if only their, mmm, 4th best album. Kinda feel that about a lot of stuff, the Outkast and Jay-Z especially. Really good, but not transcendent - I feel a bit spoiled after last year offered some really, really standout stuff - foremost Wilco, Trail of Dead, Interpol, and Sleater-Kinney - but hey, I'll take what I can get.

T2 has been on USA or Sci-Fi something like 5 times since Thanksgiving weekend, and I think I've had it on every time. I can never decide if that or Aliens is Cameron's best. Guess I'll just have to keep watching them over and over again until I come up with an answer.

Well, in this case, Michigan is overwhelmingly number 4, in both polls and in the BCS. So if anyone's going to get a 4th slot, it'd be them, presuming a playoff model stuck to some of the BCS formula.

20 and at college, so home for the winter break and summer as of now. We've saved a lot and my dad's business has done well the past few years, so my parents are still pretty comfortable sending me to undergrad. Hopefully grad school will be the transition time: I intend to do whatever I need to get stipends and pay tuition and rent for an apartment on my own, probably then spending summers just working. As long as you've got a job (and I don't mean 15 hours a week at Burger King), I see no problem with living at home into the early to mid-20's. I suppose my mind is cued to the college-and-beyond mindset, though - depending on what sort of grad education I go for, I don't expect to be out in the school-free working world until I'm between 23 and 25. And shit, if that works out, I just might go post-doc and try to land a professor's job somewhere. I'm down with knowledge.

Why didn't you tell the lesbians to go work on her for a few minutes? Problem solved.

Jackman'll come back. The most high-profile thing he's done since was a stage revival of Oklahoma. I doubt they'll have trouble getting anyone but Berry back, and as was mentioned earlier, who cares? She's bored me in both of them.

I can't read any of the college football threads anymore. Please stop. My eyes hurt. Ouch. Let's talk about...the Houston Bowl! Woo!

Sugar: OU/LSU Rose: Michigan/USC Orange: Miami/FSU Fiesta: OSU/KSU If somebody had predicted that two weeks ago, they'd have been laughed out of the building. Hilarious.

GROSS. And FSU/Miami is opening the season in August. That's going to be THREE TIMES in eleven months! Shit, I'm bored already.

Bobby Bowden's going to the Orange Bowl?? Color me surprised. ::waits 3 minutes to see what's up::

Amazing. Pete Carroll is a real class act while at the same time displaying balls of steel. The Rose Bowl execs have got to be busting champagne bottles all over the place: it's not their year for the title game, but they've got Big Ten/Pac-10 and the number one ranked team in the nation. Dag, yo.

Get Your Learn On ain't half bad. I also support "Academic Enema" and "Cheat On Your Term Papers."

I would join you, except I've only got one final, and it's a take-home. So, really, it's not as exciting. Did I mention I only had one final? SUCK IT, TOM.

I can't believe you made me choose between The King And I and Purple Rain. Bastard! Jailhouse Rock The Sound Of Music Beauty And The Beast (1991) Pink Floyd: The Wall West Side Story Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs Brigadoon A Star Is Born (1954) Rocky Horror Picture Show My Fair Lady A Hard Day's Night The Wizard Of Oz State Fair (1945) Guys And Dolls Jesus Christ Superstar Road To Rio Anchors Aweigh Chicago Singin' In The Rain Purple Rain An American In Paris South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut Little Shop Of Horrors Paint Your Wagon The Music Man Tommy Godspell Holiday Inn Cabaret Mary Poppins Grease Moulin Rouge!

Holy shit, the Oregon State QB has a frickin' CANNON of an arm. 7-0 Oregon State after a pretty frickin' stunning 90-yard pass play. I don't expect that lead to hold up, but with Syracuse winning USC is gonna have to play better than that today...

So...where's the article about the penis in the blender?