One tiny silver lining from Hyden's departure is that I actually started reading Grantland. They've got some great, great writers. It's a weird feeling to finish a thought-provoking article about whatever and not finding 1,000 comments at the bottom though.

Just looked up that Onion controversy, and it they definitely should have apologised.

I enjoyed season five, and feel like season four would have suffered if they'd tried to tidy everything away by the end of that.

@disqus_sAl1oFdHzz:disqus The more I try to imagine an Avon/String origin story starring Samuel Jackson, the more appalling it sounds.

The Spectator magazine described 4chan's attempts at citizen journalism following the Boston bombings as "racist Where's Waldo".

Yeah, a prequel about turf wars and the minting of Avon and Stringer as the ultimate badasses sounds more like a straight-up gangster movie.

Shortly after seeing this, I paid out like $100 for a ticket to a sold-out show she was playing.

That's great, thanks for sharing. They're one of my favourite bands, but their career for me it a gradual rise from Young Liars (which is amazing), peaking at Return to Cookie Mountain, and then drifting slowly down a little after that.

She really is the best.

It's worth it for the power rankings alone. The actual review is sort of like the preface of a book at this point. And the discussions are great, everyone brings their frustrated humanities graduate a-game to the criticism.

I love the Mad Men comments. I don't get to see the episode until the day after because of timezones, so there's always so much that it's tough to jump into, but it's all so much fun to read.

You're doing god's work, DrRocco.

That was another one of those slightly sad "out of time" type moments, where you see how the rest of the world (or Manhattan at least) is acting and dressing compared to some of the SCDP higher-ups.

James Franco's Obama poem versus Amanda Palmer's Boston bombings poem versus Bono's Elvis Presley poem?

Half of everyone's twitter followers are fake, though. Bots, anyway.

@E.BuzzMiller Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy is awesome and never gets mentioned, I guess because of how many stone classics there are on it.

I used to play Born in the USA a zillion times a day when I was four. My parents thought I might be musical, so they bought me a plastic guitar, which I smashed, Kurt Cobain style. Because being a rocking person starts early.

I associate that album with periods of pure happiness, and pity anyone who doesn't.

Yeah, I like the original track. And god, the will.i.am track is appalling. And that's speaking as someone who likes the will/Britney track, or at least will dance to it in a club.

The Wrong Child works for me just because of Stipe's keening "but it's oKAAAAY" . It's definitely clunky, but in an endearing sort of way. I feel like that about a few tracks on Green, and document as well. A lot of the deep cuts on those albums feel like R.E.M. trying stuff out.