in response to 4: according to her wikipedia page, Taylor Swift is now at the ripe old age of 22. Considering she's already written about a half-dozen songs reflecting on the naievete of her younger years, by the time she's 30 she ought to have produced more wistful ballads reflecting on her own misbegotten adolescence than Bob Dylan has produced in his entire lifetime. in response to the general topic: while the modern state of "Country music" has been drastically mainstreamed in the past decade or so, Taylor Swift's garbage has so thoroughly gone the way of Transplanted Valleygirl Bubblegum Pop (sometimes referred to as Miley Cyrus Territory, or MCT for short) that she no longer commands even an ounce of her originally tiny Country cred. It's sort of like what happened to the Black Eyed Peas and their standing in hip-hop. And by "sort of like" I mean, exactly like that. Normally I wouldn't care about any of this, but I quickly recognized when she first came on the scene just how effective a barometer of the ever-burgeoning stupidity of the average American music consumer Taylor Swift was, and the fact that her increasingly unbounded stupidity has been rewarded ever increasing cash and fame makes me think... yeah, maybe if we're lucky the world *IS* ending in December. If it means I never have to hear another Taylor Swift song, it just might be worth it.

SNESoid is good stuff, works like a champ for me. I also recommend Gensoid and GameBoid for Genesis and GameBoy Advance respectively. They're free here: http://slideme.org/user/yongzh and must be sideloaded because the developer doesn't really speak English and couldn't afford to do the tech support on Android Market/Google Play. Final note: yes, there's an N64oid, no, there are no currently available Android devices that can run N64 games remotely well, it's more like a proof of concept.

A voice in the wilderness, Back when I was working in the ministry, it always fascinated me how often I'd encounter Christians who would say things like "I'd really like to [insert whatever here], but I can't because I'm a Christian". Guess what, fucknozzle: telling someone "I was gonna rip into you but god stopped me." is the actual equivalent of ripping into somebody and just wrapping it in a cloth of laughably conspicuous self-righteousness. If you actually had a modicum of the humility you pretend to have, you wouldn't be spewing that idiocy in the first place and would instead be asking something along the lines of "how can I help you to get re-acquainted with God?". Don't get me wrong, you'd still be an idiot for doing so, but at least you'd be a sincere idiot instead of some pompous ass declaring his righteousness as loudly as he can like a pharisee. You're an embarassment to yourself, your faith, and the human race. If you genuinely view your purpose in life is to drive-by insult random people on the internet based on what you yourself admit is a handful of sentences (not to mention an ex post facto "prediction in your mind", ooh how very prophetic), I'd strongly suggest you cease doing so in the name of your supposedly all-loving God, since apparently you can't even read the God damn manual he allegedly gave you.

No RCPM - No More Beautiful World? Color me surprised.

I like Vegetable. It's Holiday, Russell, Both Telegenic Exes, and Weird Summer that don't do it for me. Actually, all of those but Weird Summer kinda make me wanna jam a fork through my ears.

Odds are looking good for a new Our Lady Peace album in 2012. While Burn, Burn didn't knock my socks off, it was a fairly good album, and according to Raine, the new shit is supposed to be the shit, so now I'm eager for that shit.

*Top Albums* Top album for the year for me was easily Matt Nathanson's Modern Love, my favorite song from that album repeatedly oscillates between "Love Comes Tumbling Down" and "Kiss Quick", so I'll call that a tie. Interestingly enough, Modern Love also bears the unique distinction of being the only album I've ever bought both on iTunes and later on physical CD just so I could always have it in my car (you may or may not be interested to know that of the 6 CDs taking up permanent residence in my CD changer, 4 of them are Matt Nathanson Albums). Roddy Woomble's Impossible Song & Other Songs is a close second and is an undeniably great album, although I hate "Roll Along", so I'm more than a little surprised it's one of your favorites. Mike Doughty's Yes and Also Yes takes my number three spot for reasons we've discussed previously - in my opinion, it's a third good, a third great, and a third crap. It does, however, have the distinction of having perhaps my favorite Mike Doughty song ever: "The Huffer and the Cutter" and despite the fact that there are a lot of tracks on it I don't care for, it's still by any objective measure an excellent album. Peter Gabriel's New Blood deserves an honorable mention for giving his own body of work the fascinating orchestral reinterpretation he gave to a number of artists in 2010 with the insane genius that was Scratch My Back. *Disappointing Albums That Got Less Disappointing Once I Readjusted My Expectations* A tie between Yuki Kaijura's Fiction II (she just didn't pick most of the songs I would've preferred she picked) and "Evanescence"'s self-titled 2011 album (I put Evanescence in quotes because by now everyone in the band who isn't Amy Lee has left and she's not nearly as good a song writer by herself as she apparently thinks she is). *Most Hilarious Song of 2011: Lonely Island's "Japan" from Turtleneck & Chain. Seriously, if you haven't heard it yet, get on that. Immediately. If you have some extra time "Shy Ronnie 2 - Ronnie & Clyde" and "Motherlover" off the same album are great too. *Albums from 2010 That I Totally Missed Until The End of 2011: Keith Urban's Get Closer. Easily my biggest disappointment of 2011, expectations or no. Every album Keith Urban's dropped since Golden Road has been good to great, until this one. Here's hoping it's a fluke. Joshua Radin's The Rock and The Tide is entirely competent and frequently enjoyable, but lacks a lot of the distinctive character 2008's Simple Times received. It's one of those albums that you enjoy as your listening to it and then entirely forget 15 minutes afterward. Honorable mention in this category goes to Carrie Underwood's one-off single for the third Chronicles of Narnia film "There's a Place For Us". It's not her best, but it's an enjoyable song nonetheless. So, uh, with that out of the way, when do we get to do Top Video Games of 2011? I've been dying for an excuse to get a rise out of the trolls by declaring Arkham City my Biggest Disappointment of the Year, explaining why L.A. Noire isn't receiving the respect it should, and trying to make sure everyone in your regular readership is aware of the absolutely disarmingly touching tale that is To The Moon.

At the risk of stirring what is so obviously a rather trolly shitpot, I gots to ask Janet and bluefrog: since when does dating correlate directly to happiness? Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not AGAINST dating, but the dating process is, at best, as frequently frustrating as it is fruitful (which means, for those of you who can follow an extremely simple logic train, that dating is just as likely to equal misery for a given person at a given time as happiness). While Geds probably should (and most likely will, in time) back off the dating asshole-ade, the premise that doing so will bring ultimate fulfillment to his life is the kind of transparent sophistry rarely seen outside of phoned-in Hollywood RomComs at the local multiplex. At the end of the day, all we can be is who we are. Feigning a cheery disposition in a date that you know full well is a waste of both's time doesn't help anyone, and is actually likely to do even more harm. Denying that truth fixes nothing.

Who do the other pair of hands belong to?

I don't know that I see sadness so much as an expression of "Dude... what the fuck?"

On the Paul Simon note... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvAJfXuEdOA It's amazing, to me, how much the song seems to change in this musical context. Goes to show Paul just might be smarter than all of us.

This post cracked me up. A thought regarding the nails: if the body was placed in a box, wooden form, or in/aside just about anything else constructed of wood and nails, the wood will have completely disintegrated while the nails remain. I realize in biblical times the business of casketing really wasn't usually done, but then... do we in fact know this to be the body of Caiaphas and not some guy who may have died several hundred years later when burial in pine boxes was more de rigeur?

There's also the big problem with measuring just how fundamentalist a protestant needs to be to be fundamentalist, and whether that's measured at a church level or an individual level. In a lot of ways, identifying a fundamentalist Christian is akin to Potter Stewart's definition of pornography. It can't be clearly defined, but we all know it when we see it. With such an elastic definition, it's no wonder quantifying fundamentalist Christianity is so difficult.

And I've got a hunch The Mothership will come preinstalled with some bitchen multi-core capable video editing software.

I signed the petition as well. I realize you may have thrown that bit in as a bit of a tangent, but I think it has a lot to do with the core idea of Grace. Grace begins and ends with us, no God can do it for us, and as long as people spend more time on hatred, manipulation, and blame than understanding and comforting, Grace is going to continue to be the concept of prayers unanswered. I've encountered a lot of people who talk about the all-powerful love of Christ and then proceed to make a laundry list of people they view as "traitors", "scum", or "abominations" who should see harm and persecution for any number of contrived reasons, or sometimes no reason at all. Then they find their soapbox of choice and spend the remainder of their time decrying how wrong the world has gone, how times they're too young to remember were obviously so much better, and how the world is growing more and more Graceless by the day. And then they pray. They pray for their God to come down and right the ills of the world. The next morning they wake up, and world is a little more Graceless, and "Today..." they say, "Today I will pray harder." I find it pleasantly odd that I find more Grace in taking a few moments to support a Sheriff desperately looking for it from his state and nation, than from praying to an absent God to do it for us.

They may be taken down now, but Loughner had a YouTube channel filled with rants about how the government was attempting to brainwash us all and how it was imperative to switch to a gold-based currency yesteryear. The guy was delusional, plain and simple. When I saw Loughner's YouTube rantings I immediately thought of Hinkley - there's just no useful way to make sense out of an act committed by someone who's mind was in a different world.

Fuck all y'all haters, I still listen to my copy of "Affirmation" from time to time :P

That's because you continue to stoutly refuse to acknowledge the profound genius that is James Blunt. Plus, he's tangentially relevant to Coldplay, as he was forced to tour with them by their label in an obvious desperate attempt to force extra fame on him and force extra credibility on Coldplay. It was like that time Black Eyed Peas opened for U2... As to other standout albums of the year, I only just now became aware of the Jimmy Eat World and Gin Blossom albums. I will be reviewing them shortly. For the record, Bad Religion did release a new album this year. I didn't pay attention to it for the same reason I suspect you didn't pay attention to it: we own The Empire Strikes First, which is the Cipher album for all future and past Bad Religion, making any further purchasing/listening redundant and unnecessary. I also forgot to include the addition of Passenger's "Fairytales and Firesides" as a top pick for me this year. Then again, Passenger is so consistently good they're one of the few bands I'll give money to simply for the vague promise of an album down the line, so their sophomore album's solidity should come as no surprise. I also have to throw out an honorable mention for The Script's "Science and Faith". And since I'm adding my own crap for the hell of it, I want to put out a massive DIShonorable mention for the Goo Goo Dolls' "Something for the Rest of Us" which is easily the worst album they've ever produced and a massive disappointment given that I had been foolishly tricked into believing the mediocrity of "Gutterflower" was a fluke after "Let Love In" was released.

ARRRGH. I hate TypePad commenting!

So now all the municipal drivers have to worry about is some jack-off tailgating him constantly - because driving a bus in a crowded city isn't stressful enough all on it's own...

It is for this reason that I consider the fact that Blizzard chose the 7th to be their release date for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm to be in poor taste.

I had an inverse experience the first time I set foot at the Devil's Den in Gettysburg. Looking at the terrain, I couldn't imagine how anybody could be so unfathomably foolish and/or suicidal as to try to climb such a steep, rocky grade through a wall of constant gunfire. It totally staggered me.

Oh god, why did you link me to Overton Windex, why!? There goes my next three evenings... and my sanity.

Aaand have I mentioned how much I hate the way TypePad handles user accounts?

At the risk of being a contradictory bastard, maybe her "refusal" to acknowledge you was actually inability. Maybe she felt too awkward, embarrassed, guilty, or what have you. Maybe it had nothing to do with you, and was about her. The fact of the matter is a relationship has to end pretty well for two people formerly in one to be around each other without massive amounts of awkwardness, and for this reason, it's not uncommon for two exes to ignore each other.