The “War on Christmas” bollocks seems, mercifully, to be on the wane this year, except as an inspiration for Halloween costumes. But it’s still worth taking a gander at Slate‘s examination of the rather long provenance of “Happy Holidays” as a pluralist seasonal greeting, notwithstanding recent attempts to paint it as some kind of 21st […]

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I’ve heretofore resisted getting sucked into the apparently highly-addictive world of MMORPGs (unless you count a few MOOs from the mid-90s, I guess…) but I may have to finally give in when the just-announced Firefly game gives those of us who’ve been mourning the sci-fi western’s demise one more chance to get back out to […]

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Apparently, Joel Schumacher is a Robert Anton Wilson fan: My friend Caleb Brown sends word he’s directing an upcoming Jim Carey vehicle called The Number 23, about a man who becomes obsessed with, well, the number 23—seeing it everywhere, and eventually convinced it’s obscurely controlling his life. On the basis of the trailer, it looks […]

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(Half of Promise Ring) + (bassist from Dismemberment Plan) = good stuff. I managed not to notice these guys until very recently, but was as pleased as I was surprised I found a friend willing to truck out to Northeast at 11 on a frigid Monday night to check ’em out. Give a listen. Addendum: […]

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Quick first thoughts on the Borat movie: I laughed a whole lot, but I’m not sure how funny it actually was. That is to say, while plenty of scenes were just straightforwardly hilarious, I think a fair amount of the laughter was more of the nervous-awkward sort, because so much of the humor involves exploiting […]

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Excepting maybe Kanye West, basically all the hip-hop I like is at least a decade old: Fugees, Digable Planets, old Tribe, RZA’s GZA’s Liquid Swords album, that sort of thing. I’ll tap my foot to the odd 50 Cent song if I’m out at a bar, but I’m probably not going to buy it and […]

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Lawrence Lessig links to a blog post and

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In the midst of a post defending his penchant for 80s music, Andrew Sullivan let’s out a mighty curmudgeonly harumph: There is indeed no pop on the radio any more. Just hip-hop drivel and godawful indie crap or whiny, lesbian complaint-rock. Look at the top ten in any other advanced Western country and pop is […]

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So, at Art Brut last night, I spent the better part of one of their songs torturing myself trying to figure out why a riff they kept playing sounded so maddeningly familiar. I finally realized that it was basically pulled note-for-note from the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”. My gin tonic decided that […]

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I hate to pile on the New York Times op-ed page, but I figure they’re big boys and girls; they can take a little blog-needling. This morning they saw fit to turn over a chunk of their pulpy real estate to Allison Glock, kvetching about the dire cultural peril of… sexy Halloween costumes. Apparently the […]

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