Best Coldplay Album?

Lowbrow Answer: Viva La Vida
Quick, name one song from this album other than "Viva La Vida." Can't do it, right? Of course you can't. Because every other song on this album blows. And admit it - you only know "Viva la Vida" because it has the same name as the album itself. If you look up "generic" in the dictionary, you'll see a photo of this album, right next to a screen shot from "Two and a Half Men" and a quote from Tyler Perry.

And did you notice how the band wore matching old time marching band outfits for this tour? Hmmm, I feel like I've seen that before. Where was it. Matching old time marching band outfits. Oh, that's right. It was a little group called The Beatles. You may have heard of them. Jesus, Coldplay. If you're going to plagiarize someone's style, at least steal from somebody small and inconsequential, like, I dunno, NOT the most famous rock band ever. In the whole world. Ever.


Middlebrow Answer: A Rush of Blood to the Head
Okay, so "Warning Sign" is a nice song. As are "In My Place" and "Amsterdam." And "The Scientist" is the perfect tune for when you bring a girl back to your place and you're hoping to get laid and you want her to think you're thoughtful and sweet but not that you're gay. I thank you for that one, Chris Martin. And my 9th grade girlfriend Stephanie thanks you. Twice-in-my-basement-and-once-in-my-parents'-shower thanks you.

But still. Most of these songs are pretty dull. And has anyone else noticed that "Clocks" is just "Speed of Sound" sped up? Anybody? I mean, I know that "Clocks" came before "Speed of Sound," but come on. Have the decency not to write an average song that you will later adapt into a different, even more average song, but that is essentially the same as the first average song. Sheesh.


Highbrow Answer: Fuck Coldplay
Yeah, I know they sell tickets. And I know that people listen to them. But the truth is, they blow. Honestly. You've got to trust me on this. I'm your friend. I'd never lie to you. Here's how you can tell. Take a look at the following list and tell me whether I'm describing Coldplay or The Backstreet Boys:

- Highly melodic musical hooks that are catchy the first 5 times you hear them, but make-you-want-to-stab-your-own-ears-with-a-curling-iron the next 500 times after that.
- Lyrics so vaguely poetic they could have come from an 8th grade poetry slam.
- Singers whose vocal emotion is so monotone you aren't sure if they're happy or sad or excited or angry or, literally, anything besides "bored."
- An overproduced live show where each member of the band has a massive projection screen dedicated to showing just his image.
- A loyal fanbase composed primarily of soccer moms and their teenage daughters.

You can't tell, can you? See what I'm talking about?

We're Back Today!

After a long summer in the Alps hunting bears, elk, and small retarded children who would only weaken our strong Russian blood, I return to work today. Stay tuned for regular updates. Kisses, Karl.

Best Assassination?

Lowbrow Answer: Archduke Franz Ferdinand (killed in 1914)
Okay, sure, "The Black Hand" is a cool name for a gang of Serbian militants. But come on. Could these guys be any more inept? First, they try to blow him up, but they miss and blow another car up instead. Then they try to shoot him at a cafe, but he leaves before they can act. Then two of them get scared, eat their cyanide pills, and jump into a river. Except the pills don't really work and the river is only 5 inches deep. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. This is like Farrelly Brothers dumb.

Gavrilo Princep finally shoots Ferdinand in his car, accidentally killing his wife in the process. A month later, World War I breaks out. Nice job, Black Hand. Thanks a lot. Just to recap, you nearly botch the only assassination attempt you ever undertake, you send the whole of Europe into a horrible war, and you needlessly kill Ferdinand's hot Austrian wife. Are you trying to make me hate you? Because it's working.


Middlebrow Answer: Robert F. Kennedy (killed in 1968)
JFK's little brother was shot four times at point blank range outside a hotel by a man named Sirhan Sirhan. Now here's the best part: even with two holes in his chest and one in his head, RFK didn't die until 26 hours later. What a fucking badass. I start crying when I skin my knee; this dude's brain is leaking out on the floor and he manages to survive an entire day. Move over, Jesus. I have a new God.

I will say, however, that you could go bigger than RFK. Let's use a hunting analogy. Let's say guys like Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. are majestic twelve-point bucks. That makes Robert Kennedy, like, a really big swordfish. Making your name in the assassin community by shooting him is like being in the NBA and playing for the Golden State Warriors. Sure, you're a pro basketball player. But not really.


Highbrow Answer: Alexander Litvinenko (killed in 2006)
Litvinenko was a Russian KGB thug who secretly switched sides to join the "good guys" at MI6 in England. Although, in hindsight, he probably could have been a bit more secretive about the switch. While staying in a hotel in London, he drank a cup of tea that had been laced with Polonium-210, a radioactive metalloid element. He died three weeks later from radiation poisoning. Let me just make sure you heard that right: he drank a cup of tea that had been poisoned with Polonium. H-I-G-H-B-R-O-W, and that's how you spell highbrow.

The big rumor was that Litvinenko was offed by a bunch of his former KGB buddies, although it was also reported that the Russian government was behind it. Awesome. I feel like I'm in the middle of a Hollywood spy movie, like "The Bourne Identity" or "The Bourne Supremacy" or "The Bourne Ultimatum" or "The Bourne Legacy" or "Spy Kids 3D."

Best Super Mario Kart Track?

Lowbrow Answer: Rainbow Road
This is what happens when you let a 7-year-old on methamphetamine design a race track. It's like somebody stabbed a disco floor then ran it over with a steam roller. I'm sure I'd be getting faster times on it, if only I weren't so busy having a seizure during Lap 3.

Where the hell was OSHA when they were building this abomination? Aren't there regulations for this shit? There are no walls, electrical stone faces are falling all over the place, and the whole thing is free-floating in space. Talk about a lawsuit waiting to happen. Can't we put in some safety fences or something? The last thing we need is Bowser careening out of control and smashing into a family of nuns or a litter of baby kittens.


Middlebrow Answer: Vanilla Lake 2
Nothing gets my nipples hard like ice racing. Yee-haw. The best part of this course is saving time by jumping onto the floating icebergs. Nothing gets the ladies going like the old jump-onto-the-icebergs-to-save-time routine. Yeah, girl. You know how I do. Cut right across that frozen lake. You like that? You want some more? Come here, I'ma rub my Donkey Kong all up in yo Princess Toadstool.

And yet, does anybody else think maybe we shouldn't be driving race cars through the arctic tundra? Aren't there, like, endagered baby seals and narwhals and dudes named Nanook wandering around up there? I mean, I know I'd be pissed if a family of Eskimos and a polar bear drove a bunch of race cars through MY backyard. Shouldn't we at grant them the same respect?


Highbrow Answer: Donut Plains 3
Good lord, this shit is impossible. I've been playing Mario Kart since back before I even knew how to masturbate, and I still can't win on this track. The turns are ridiculous, there's a gap in one of the bridges, and the whole thing is happening on some kind of rain-soaked flood plain. You turn too far one way - you're twelve feet under water. Too far the other - you're stranded on a patch of dirt with no hope. It's like 16-bit Hurricane Katrina.

And where are we getting these gophers that pop out of the ground and attack my kart? Is there Mercury leaking into a nearby water supply or something? They're terrifying. Here I am doing my best "Fast and Furious" impression around a corner, when a crazed, 5-foot ball of fuzz with dilated pupils and a tattoo on his arm that reads "Born to Fuck" jumps up onto my face. I surrender. Sweet Jesus, I surrender.

"I am Tagged in X number of Facebook photos..."

Lowbrow Answer: X > 500
Here's the funny thing about life. You're supposed to be living it, not documenting it. In all the time you've spent posing for pictures, you could have written a best-selling book or solved a physics equation or conquered some insignificant country like Azerbaijan or France. So the next time somebody whips out their iPhone to snap a hipstamatic photo, tell them to fuck off. You've got shit to do.

Now, I'm not going to start preaching Thoreau at you (because he was a spoiled bitch whose entire mantra is undermined by the fact that his parents funded his little cabin adventure) and I won't tell you to "Seize the Day" (because I refuse to take life advice from Robin Williams and a bunch of 1950s boarding school kids). But I will tell you to stop spending your whole life posing for photos. I promise you; you aren't worth taking pictures of anyway. Your arms are flabby and your eyes are too far apart.


Middlebrow Answer: X < 25
What are you, some kind of cave troll? Get out and see the world, man! Rent a paddle boat or join a hockey team or learn Nigerian Kung Fu. I don't care if you've got crippling agoraphobia; suck it up and get outside. The only people who are allowed to legitimately have fewer than facebook 25 photos of them are hermits, hobos, Uzbekistanis (they haven't even cured Polio over there yet), and 1820s prospectors. Otherwise, you gotta go make some friends.

It's not like it's difficult to get photos of you taken these days. Everything has a fucking camera in it. Phones, computers, MP3 players. I hear the ASPCA will even install a digital camera into whichever dog you choose to adopt. Photo technology has gone crazy. I mean, I'm taking a nude picture of you right now and you're still wearing your clothing.


Highbrow Answer: X = 163
Didn't see this one coming, did you? BLAM! King strikes again! While I don't advocate being a facebook junky, I understand that it's part of life these days. Like texting and iTunes and Justin Bieber. You can't avoid it. So it's okay to have a few photos of you. Just make sure they're cool. They should be of you winning the Stanley Cup or choking a walrus. They shouldn't be you drunk at a frat party or you eating hot wings at Applebee's.

And how fucking cool a number is 163? God damn. It's the largest value of d such that the number field Q (√−d) has class number 1 (meaning that its ring of integers is a unique factorization chain), it's the last instance of a quadratic field having unique factorization, and it's the first instance of a real cyclotomic field not having unique factorization. Awesome. I just got a math boner.

Best Marginal Genre of Music?

Lowbrow Answer: Popera
"Popera" is a strange musical No Man's Land that exists somewhere between Pop and Opera. It's not quite catchy enough to be on regular radio and it's not quite good enough to be called "classical." Never heard any of this shit before? Just look for large groups of white middle-class women; there's bound to be Popera nearby.

Josh Groban is the Czar of this travesty, and with good reason. He has the perfect mix of semi-talent and quasi-attractiveness that moistens the panties of every housewife in America. Just like Coldplay or Regis Philbin.


Middlebrow Answer: Horror-Core
I don't care what you say about the Insane Clown Posse; at least those guys put on a show. They've got jugglers and strippers and midgets in hobo outfits and pregnant manatees and all kinds of other crazy shit on stage when they perform. None of that haughty Radiohead ignore-the-audience bullshit here. You go to a Horror-Core show and you're getting an experience; a nightmarish, pulsating concert complete with soda cannons, horny hillbillies, and all the herpes you can take.

Of course, lyrically, Horror-Core falls a bit short. There are only so many ways you can talk about murdering a Bitch-Nutz with your Juggalo Hatchet. I'd like to see some of these groups branch out. I wonder what an ICP song about clouds or endless love would sound like. Probably something like, "I'm a murder that Cloud-Nutz with my Endless Love Hatchet."


Highbrow Answer: Post-Rock
Welcome to the User's Guide to Making Post Rock.
Step 1: Collect five non-Americans and put them in a band together. Make sure one of them is a girl. She should be shorter than 5'5" and be from Japan.
Step 2: Force the band to play their guitars with screwdrivers and wine glasses and anything else that isn't normally used to play a guitar.
Step 3: Every song must be longer than 10 minutes.
Step 4: No song is allowed to have lyrics.
Step 5: The band's name must be something obscure and strange like, "Godspeed You! Black Emperor" or "Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band." (those are both real acts, by the way) Bonus points for misusing punctuation in the name of the group.
Step 6: All artwork must be grainy and shot in black and white.
Step 7: At least 80% of the group's music must be amelodic and unlistenable.

If the first thought in your head after reading that list isn't, "HIGH-FUCKING-BROW" then stop reading this blog.

Best Team in Major League Soccer?

Lowbrow Answer: The LA Galaxy
Nothing like watching soccer surrounded by an orgy of upper middle-class white people in David Beckham replica jerseys. Galaxy fans are all the same. They show up late, spend the entire first half in line to buy their bratty kids $28 worth of food, and then they leave 20 minutes early so they can beat the other soccer moms out of the parking lot and get home in time for CSI: Miami. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. These are people who think that Manchester United and Real Madrid are European mortgage companies.

Also: What the hell kind of sports name is "The Galaxy?" You're from LA, for Christ's sake. You can't even see any stars here. And what's your mascot? A big white cloud of mist? "The Galaxy" should have been about 978th on your list of possible names, right behind "The Rape Whistles."


Middlebrow Answer: Seattle Sounders FC
Alright, so your average attendance at home games is like 200,000 people. And sure, your team colors are pretty cool and you've got some good players. But Seattle? What a dump. It's always raining, it's the home of Microsoft, and it's full of aging hipsters with pixie haircuts and Amazon Kindles. Move the team to somewhere nice, like Montana or New Hampshire, and maybe I'll be interested. Until then, take your granola bars and your Chacos and shove it.

The face of this team is Drew Carey, who is a minority shareholder. Now, you might be thinking; "Drew Carey, the famous lion tamer and wine parachutist?" No, not that Drew Carey. We're talking about the Drew Carey who had his own show back in the day and now hosts "The Price is Right." The Drew Carey who was supposedly funny at one point in his life, but can produce no hard evidence thereof. Fat bastard.


Highbrow Answer: CD Chivas USA
A distinct absence of star players? Check. Wild and Crazy Mexican ownership group? Check. Defensive-minded, unattractive style of play? Check. This is what pro sports is about; worshiping a team that continually lets you down and causes you emotional drama. Fuck yeah! Sports! Despair! America!

Chivas is awesome because they have this little thing called personality. The fans are nuts, the mascot is a goat, and the team is the only one in the league without a city in its name. Why? Because fuck geography, that's why. Chivas USA cares not for your plebeian cities and states - this team lives by its own rules. And Rule #1 is Cartography Blows.