Yeah, they call him "Big Shot Rob," but he's not as vital to the Spurs' grind-it-out game as Bowen. So Horry throws the hip, he puts a little scare into Nash, and on top of that, he just might get a couple Suns suspended for a game due to ridiculously rigid league policy!

By the way, King, didja catch Raja "Clothesline" Bell talking about Horry's "hockey foul"? Priceless.

It took them long enough, but it is happening. Emusic and iTunes and Napster and Rhapsody and Walmart downloads and Drag City opening its catalog... it's finally statring to happen, to the point where you'd generally have to dig some obscure stuff (in other words, the songs and artists the RIAA doesn't search for in tracking offenders) if you can't find it somewhere for pay.

The big issues will be DRM and pricing (the late great allofmp3 made you pay pennies per megabite rather than a flat 99 cents per song, an alluring business model if there ever was one.

The cat of online muisic sales has been out of the bag for a few years now, but people still download because it's free/more convenient. Prosecuting an infinitesimal number of filesharers may look fruitless, but it's better than nothing. Perhaps a study will indicate whether the threat of lawsuits is any kind of deterrent. My gut says no, but hey, RIAA: smoke 'em if you've got 'em.

I mean "illegal". Big difference, in this case.

Sorry, kids. Making copyrighted files available to share is wrong and can be enforced at any time. You got a problem with it, become a lobbyist or invest in new-platform content distribution. Downloading "Shawty Snappin'" is symbolically meaningless. Now you're working as many jobs as Ian Mackaye!

Ideally, in a democracy with transparent workings, we'd have access to every bit of information we need to make a decently rational decision. Personally, I'm fine with the Sunday-morning chumfight... sensationalism and character assassination date back to Grover Cleveland (and centuries beyond, no doubt). As long as reporters (or bloggers, or video archivers) are transmitting all the data, let the big boys flog their stories about $400 haircuts, fake Southern accents, and mumbled Beach Boys parodies. We live in the age of RSS and aggregators... if you want the real stuff, turn your damn filter on. Why get freaked out by yellow journalism? It's always been here. I don't really consider syndicated columnists and cable TV hosts to have standards to which they must be held, other than disclosure of interests. Let them talk, let them entertain, let them go fuck themselves.

Besides, most of us indulge in armchair psychoanalysis/thinktankery on a regular basis. Keillor and Blumenthal make a lot of hay out of limning the inner workings of W's skull. Greenwald has his aristocratic Beltway media types. Lord knows Salon commenters can take a stray Paglia or Havrilesky quote and map out their complete home life. It's a common human impulse to assign anecdotes to personality traits.

Would that we were all perfect abriters of political candidates' credentials. But as far as presidential candidates go, we don't seem to be hurting for a detailed history (e.g. Giuliani & Romney's stances re: abortion). In the meantime (and I say this with as little defeatism as possible): enjoy the circus! Fault the media for engaging in kingmaking, but not for getting moony over minutiae.

I didn't enter the contest because I'm, like, way cooler than all recorded sound.

Jon Cogburn, you are sadder than "Is This What You Wanted". Unless you were going for a poorly calculated pose of arch dudgeon, your post made my day. 'Twas as seven quickly jotted blue-book entries.

love, luck, and lollipops!

It sure made my day, that's for sure.

And Liz T... why assume Gwen's a liberated female? It's like being an evangelical Christian president... maybe you have some trappings of that identity, but the nature of the system is such that you have to compromise at every turn to scale the heights. Maybe Stefani is the Liberated Female (TM) brand of pop singer, but she's nowhere near the real deal.

Then if it's racism, it's finely tuned. Or it's biased towards dudes who can actually write credible tunes about the ass and the freaking thereof.

I haven't seen the video clip, but I'll assume for the sake of argument that it's egregious. If Verizon "fired Akon for doing the kind of thing it hired him for," then I want to see that contract, if only because I never knew "grinding on high school freshmen" was a corporately-prized skill set. R Kelly's consequences include indictments. Urban's and Wentz's were relatively victimless crimes (unless we insist on being heartbroken for, respectively, Nicole Kidman and legions of underage female mallpunks). Akon humped an young girl in public. He loses a couple sponsors. Two more hooks on Jeezy tracks and he'll be back in black. He and R can hook up for "The Sort of Best of the Same World" tour in 2011.

Aand does Michelle Malkin really have that much clout? I mean, O'Reilly and Luda, fine. But Malkin? I didn't think she could influence a TRL lineup. I hope she's good at reedy, faux-soulful choruses. America's got needs, Shelly.

And Akon's a singer, not a rapper. He's got cadences 'n' stuff, sure, but his calling card is that diluted jar of molasses he calls pipes. In the vast spectrum of hip-hop, he is nowhere near "hardcore".

Fuck me, I'm still cracking up 12 hours later. I don't know which is funnier, the tweaking of corporate-endorsed stereotypes or the dig at Pan's Labyrinth.

Oh, and I dunno about the lot of you, but Mr. Gibb's been treating me right for years. When the books close on the Bee Gees, "To Love Somebody" ought to stand as a far greater tune than "Stayin' Alive".

Or should I say "Heather"? It's Freaky Thursday!