Letters to the Editor
The Brad
Published Letters: 145 Editor's Choice: 16
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Yay Rick
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And yay Jack Cust and yay Shane Spencer.
It's an amazing feat to claw your way back, but King's implications are on the money: a special confluence of circumstances on a floundering Cards team enabled Rick to climb that final rung. Jack Cust's been beating up the minors for a few years now. And he's got the OBP to stay (58 walks n 315 PA). Rick's struck out 6 times in 17 PAs to go with one walk... at least Adam Dunn walks a heck of a lot to counteract his Ks.
None of this taints the current story, but it's a quiet reminder that as difficult as it is to hit major leaguge pitching, it's even more impressive to make some kind of career out of it. Shane Spencer's .901 SLG could never last, and I'm afraid Rick's 1.000 SLG isn't long for this world. But for now and for the rest of your days, Rick: congrats!
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Have you posted the 1994 Cheney video yet?
[Read the article: Young Karl Rove]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let me rephrase: has Glenn Greenwald's head 'sploded yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I
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St. Diana
[Read the article: Quote of the Day: Germaine Greer on Princess Diana]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obviously someone hasn't read Tina Brown's blog. God, Stat Quo didn't sing "Rockin' All Over the World" so some reality-show quitter could slag Our Lady of the Winded Candle, did they? A little respect, please.
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I can't see your tongue from here, Catherine...
[Read the article: If Crocs could kill]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So I can only hope it's pocketed in your cheek when you say Crocs are worn "increasingly" by the "fashionable elite". Apparently you haven't been to an Austin, Texas KFC lately.
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Graduation?
[Read the article: Crazy for Jay-Z]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Burial's for the Wire. Good luck making the dankness translate in these pages.
Anyway... Graduation? Everyone gets their opinion, but electing Kanyeezy in a landshrug is another one of those mainstream moves. How 'bout Killah Priest? Little Brother? Black Milk? Don't drink the Kool-'ye just yet - Graduation was a misstep with a couple dope tracks. Stay away from the hipster vibe - Mr. West is no one's savior yet. Too much good shit coming out. Knock Mr. Carter all you want - 2008 is his referendum year.
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Oh, Hawai'i
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Seriously, Baylor ought to time its 2008 recruiting class' ripeness with a diabetes-inducing cupcake schedule. Make sure they top one flavor-of-the-decade ranked team, and then write the "Hey, we ran the table!" columns. Here's the model: the Rainbow Warriors beat one - one! - ranked team, and they get a BCS crack at Georgia, who beat four. Boise State in '06 didn't beat a single ranked team until the squeaker (a squeaker for the ages, but still) against the Sooners.
Maybe it really is a case of the bigger conferences quaking in their shoes (although that didn't stop Texas and Ohio State, for instance, from playing a two-year tilt). Or maybe it's the Warriors' unfortunate home location. Utah pulled off the undefeated-with-respectibility trick a couple eyars ago.
The system is definitely broken, but the major-conference teams usually do a good job of mixing contests in with the cupcakes. Either the minors get together again and force more favorable scheduling (and with the thousands of combinations of games possible every year, I'm not surprised the odd 12-0 team gets left out - if it can happen to Auburn, it can happen to anyone), or a lot of ADs have got to get on the phone. But we should be past the point of arguing that undefeated necessitates a crack at the title.
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Yeah, that was a real breath of fresh air.
[Read the article: What ever happened to Britpop?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"And if it SOUNDS good, it IS good." That's really deep. I hope you don't mind that every uncurious listener of dreck from Pat Boone to Vengaboys to Bowling For Soup has essenentially copped that justification for being loyal to derivative blandities. It sounds good to my untrained ears, therefore I don't have to seek out a fuller perspective or more exciting options.
I really wanted to dig Reynolds' piece, having devoured his pro-rave screed Generation Ecstasy. I got a couple cheap laughs at cloistered indie kids and clumsy Britkissers, but as others have noted, it's disheartening to see Reynolds join Sasha Frere-Jones' choir of "Needs More Black Music". It's certainly one thing to say AR Kane is a great band, it's entirely another to say Curve isn't a great band because they don't sond like AR Kane. Curve isn't a great band because whatever they did well, they didn't do enough of it.
Leaving that out, the central critique seems to be that Britpop was musically, largely boring. And I have to agree. The really interesting shit was being made up north, by Death in June and Nurse With Wound and Current 93 (all of which were unadhered to any ethnic influences, black, white or otherwise - and forget the unremembered 60s). Disco Inferno released some of the densest pop ever, filled with tape loops, found sound, and no desire to capture a zeitgeist. Happy Mondays I'll always feel loyalty toward, because Shaun Ryder was a lyrical shaman, and his crew did have a loopy affinity for the groove (when they went all-out house, results were mixed, but as a shambolic dance band they were titans).
But really, most American critiques of the scene are skewed. The NME put out a Britpop retrospecticus a few years back, and even its editors couldn't help but crow that they fostered the idea of a "Britpop" scene, and they loved every lager-swilling, "Three Lions"-singing, Damon-baiting minute of it. Britpop was the sound of a young nation waking up and getting dumb. It had its moments, but largely it was a time for foppish experiments and appeals to lad-dom. Like the mods, it was always about the scene, the energy, more than the music. And in that regard, the scene didn't need Bo Diddley riffs or Sun Ra loopiness to enliven it.