Edwin MacPhisto

If I hadn't had the same Prince lyric under my avatar for almost two years and grown fond of it, I'd immediately be changing it to "my dick too strong to bite off."

I like my internet friends.

I really want to win with Wake as the deciding game. I can be a storybook champ too!

Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball. I devoted way, way too much of my 10-year-old life to this game. It was a ridiculous top-down basketball game, where you could tackle people and run over weapons to send them shooting at your opponents (the elusive flying saw blade and the homing missile come to mind). In season mode, you bought better cyborgs to play on your team as you won games and accumulated money; of course, the best player you could buy was a robot Bill Laimbeer, and the goal was to get five of him so you'd be unstoppable.

You can do a lot with any liberal arts degree if you think a bit outside the box and aren't hugely committed to applying that specific discipline to what you're doing. A B.A. and good research skills can get you a paralegal or legal secretary job, or a research assistant type job at a university, local or state government agency, or think tank. You can also go for any sort of entry-level position at a big company, whether it's a marketing job, a report-writing job, etc. If you get that M.A. in international affairs, you can just head to D.C. and find a really nice job with a government contractor here. And if you really want to teach, just be a community college professor first after you the finish the M.A. Easier to find than full university positions, pays about the same as you'd make immediately after finishing the Ph.D (but lacks tenure-track, obviously), and can give you a couple years to decide if you really want to e spend another 4 years in school to make academic research and publishing your life. And congrats, Al. Are you looking at grad school for the M.A. or for going all the way to Ph.D-land?

Yep, and Vengeance was a generic action movie that was then rewritten to have the protagonist be John McClane and the villain be connected to the Die Hard story. All this chatter reminds me that it's almost Christmas, and about time to watch the original for the 20th or so time.

Detroit trades defensive players for him, then drafts three more wide receivers.

Disintegration is tough to get through all the way, just cause it's very dense and gloomy and long. I love the first half, though, and have no problem getting through that and then switching to something else.

Arizona State/Hawaii will be totally watchable too. The rest will just be those awkward bowl games where the stands are 2/3 empty and you wonder how on earth the administrators got the money to put it on in the first place.

Have you actually watched a Boise game this year? Both Boise and Oklahoma are good, not great teams. Boise's got a great running game, a pretty nasty defense, and will be incredibly fired up for what's easily the biggest game in that program's history. I'll still probably pick Oklahoma, but I think it'll be a really good, competitive game that either team can win.

"Baby's On Fire" splits my head in half and makes we want to take up the guitar moreso than pretty much any other song. Only recently did Eno's pop albums really click for me, taking that hop from "hmm, this is pretty good" to "got-damn I love this." I've been listening to him pretty constantly the past two or three weeks.

The Cure were all chubby and cheerful when I saw them. It was weird, but they played "A Night Like This," so all was fine by me.

Green Lantern's the ultimate possession receiver. And the Flash should be an obvious choice for kick returns.

The album cover reminds me of the scene in Blue Velvet where crazy fuckin' Dennis Hopper drops naked and abused Isabella Rosselini off on the front lawn.

Joel Schumacher, guys. Run.

Eeeww! I can't tell if you're really grossed out by the sappiness, or if you're being facetious. I'll find the original thread. http://forums.thesmartmarks.com/index.php?showtopic=51421 OH, Marney. What a great thread. I thought my favorite part was Milky's post, but then I got to Ripper recommending that he get the girl a vacuum cleaner and I lost it. Fucking great. My face hurts from laughing.

I thought San Diego would get there starting a few weeks back, and the touchdown cyborg that is Tomlinson hasn't done anything to dissuade me from that call. I say they win the AFC, but do it beating a pretty surprising team in the championship game, like the Bengals. The Bears and the Saints are the smart picks in the NFC, but for some reason my gut is telling me that Seattle's gonna start a run as the new early-90s Bills and lose a few Super Bowls in a row.

I love when someone posts about the Beatles, because I then immediately put on a Beatles album and just think, jeez, I'm never not gonna love these guys. The four huge songs on the second half of Magical Mystery Tour (I put "I Am the Walrus" just outside that group, though I do like it) are just facerapingly great.

Does she look hot or weird live? Or...both?

Devin Hester. Absolutely amazing. Nothing more to say about that.

That might be the case eventually, but I think they'll be able to afford both for a few more years. McAllister has the $50 million contract, yes, but it's backloaded just like any big NFL deal. I cribbed the details from rotoworld.com: the salaries are $1.45 million in 2006, $2.6 million in 2007 with a $1 million roster bonus, $3.6 million in 2008 with a $1 million roster bonus, and $5.2 million in 2009. With how well he's playing, they'll have very little reason to dump him before '09.

Actually, he and Woody Harrelson are probably the most enjoyable parts of the movie. The two of them manage to capture the whole folksy/out-of-time thing without going overboard. The pacing of the film is dreadful, though, and all the most interesting parts are merely just glimpsed while everything about Virginia Madsen being the angel of death dominates the film while never really taking off. She is pretty hot, though.

Plus, Bush is proving to be a much bigger threat as a wide receiver than as an RB. When they get him open in space he picks up mid-range first downs easily, and occasionally generates a huge play like last night's 61-yarder. There's more than enough room for both of them on this team.

Quoted just so I can let this concept really sink in all the way.

I think most of the Oprah book club things are just stickers. My mom got the Faulkner box set and was able to peel them off easily. I made a mistake in choosing to read Gravity's Rainbow now; it's a bit large to carry back and forth to work, and not ideal for the short bursts of reading I get on the metro. Good so far, though.