Hi. My name's Kris. I'm boring and stultified. And you? Oh, you're Billy and you're mean and prone to gross generalization. Pleased to meet you, Billy.

Way to bury the lede, AV Club.

I feel like a hypocrite because I kind of agree with both of you .

Glad you broached the topic, because I was about to get around to it. I think he also misses the line at the beginning where she says "Go away. Don't go away." which reminds me of the turn in "Revolution" by the Beatles where John Lennon says, "If you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out.…

They still have some good articles, but their hit/miss ratio really collapsed a few years back. I suppose there are only so many times you can talk about obscure Finnish war heroes and misconceptions about Genghis Khan.

The Brave Little Toaster because I don't think toasters are brave.

I don't think Pixar was attempting to make a pro-Objectivist movie, but I do think the messaging is jumbled. If the movie is actually fine with everyone being special, as you say it is, it could have been more explicit about it. At best, I think you could say it brings up a quasi-Objectivist viewpoint with that "if…

Last night I dreamt that somebody funded me. No hope, no harm, just another false alarm.

I don't really hear a huge dropoff in quality between Smiths Morrissey and Solo Morrissey, apart from Kill Uncle. But Vauxhaul and I, Your Arsenal, Viva Hate and the singles from that era are all pretty much top drawer. Sure, I miss Johnny Marr's playing on those records, but that's no excuse to run down Morrissey's…

It's just-a early, early, early…

You can be two things.

I do feel like one of its many virtues is that it puts a big bold "The End" on Blur's Britpop phase. It feels like an album that we'd deeply miss if it didn't exist, but that also shows that if Blur had continued in that mode they'd just be repeating themselves. I don't think that's the same as saying it's a rehash,…

It's really hard for me to rank them. This morning I said The Great Escape might be my favorite, but now that I sit down and think about it, here's how I'd rank them:

Played in a car commercial and everything.

Good call out. I'm aware of both traditions, though I've never heard it called "lined-out" singing before. I thought it was just called "Call and Response". Maybe it's a slightly different tradition?

Usually, I recommend my friends to wade into Britpop by starting with Elastica's first record. It's not the best Britpop album and definitely not the most representative. I do think it's the easiest one to swallow if you're just an American rock fan who missed Britpop, though. From there, get the twin towers of Oasis'…

The only real problem with Plastic Beach - if you can even call it a problem - is that it didn't have the one massive anchor single that the other two records had. Stylo, for all its qualities, wasn't quite up to matching the runaway success of Clint Eastwood and Feel Good, Inc.

It's also unbelievably weird for an album that gets hassled for being too poppy. It might just be my favorite Blur album.

Went to a big clearance sale at Half-Price Books where I purchased some oddball old vinyl - the terribletastic Up With People, an Assembly of God church record called Kansas Christ's Ambassadors Sing where like 200 people sing old church songs while trumpets blast, and a stray old Verve Ella Fitzgerald record without…

I liked his philosophical maturation in Mostly Charmless.