Arts, Ants and Sonic the Hedgehog

The line in High Fidelity (the book) goes like this: "I've been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want do it for myself." It comes near the end of the book. For those with only knowledge of the movie, it would be in the bar scene, where Rob asks Laura to marry him.



For those of us who love music - for those of us who love any kind of art form purely and with great fervor - we understand what Rob is talking about in that passage. It's a bit inexplicable how a moment of music, or a scene in a movie, a brush stroke in a painting can change your mind, but it can.

American Apparel Porn Stars, or Why I Defended Kanye West

American Apparel has porn stars in their Internet ads now.



I don't know if you've noticed this, but its true. Notably the above pictured Sasha Grey, who made headlines when Steven Soderbergh, a rather high profile director, pegged her to play the lead in his film The Girlfriend Effect. Either way, poking around the Internet and seeing these American Apparel ads with porn stars is distracting, in a kind of "It's really weird seeing you with clothes on" sort of way.

Forgiveness Through Talent

Note: Midweek Music Review has been suspended until further notice.

I like Daniel Tosh's stand up comedy.

For those who are unsure who exactly Daniel Tosh is, he would probably best be known for running the Comedy Central show Tosh.0, which runs other a rather simple premise: Play dumb clips from the Internet, then make fun of them. VH1 tried it a few years ago with middling results, but Tosh is more successful because he's a more vicious comic and it suits the stupidity of the Internet well. As a white dude from California, he is unafraid to make jokes many would consider in poor taste and, as that tends to suit my own sense of humor, we come back to the first sentence. I like Daniel Tosh's stand up comedy.

Government Scope and Manifest Destiny

The United States is a big country.

In point of fact, it is the third largest country in the world. When compared with the two countries larger than it, Russia and Canada, America has over twice the amount of people as the former, and nearly ten times the amount of the latter, packed into a smaller area.

That's not to say there is a problem with overpopulation in America. It could be argued, of course, but it's not near the issue as it is in, say, China with its 1.3 billion, or India with its 1.1 billion. The problem is with governing a body of land so large, with the number of people so dense.