A few signs that the end of the world is near:

One: Rampant greed has brought a great nation to its knees.

Two: A recipe calling for "two pounds bacon, two pounds sausage" has inflamed America's kitchens.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show is a tough gig. It’s fundamentally a fifteen-minute sideshow, as performers try to draw the attention of people who've spilled dip on their shirts and are waiting for the game to get going again.

Whew! (Deep breath) OK, here we go. Below are a random sampling of first reactions and inquiries regarding Lil Wayne's just-leaked "rock" single "Prom Queen," on which Weezy dialogues about lacey underwear and broken hearts through an Auto-Tune device and apparently brushes the strings of a guitar. An historic moment, indeed.

You can always count on the Academy Awards voters to blow it. But the Academy's failure to nominate Bruce Springsteen's "The Wrestler" for Best Original Song makes me wonder if the nods are decided by throwing darts at a board labeled "next best things."

Today’s Academy Award nominations yielded a few surprises: Revolutionary Road was almost entirely ignored (and rightly so), while the little-movie-that-could, Slumdog Millionaire, snagged 10 nods -- not far behind The Curious Case of Brad Pitt...

Since back in October when I first heard the new Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavillion, and later enthusiastically trekked through a windswept rainstorm to a listening party at Manhattan's River Room -- an oddly swelegant bar/restaurant ("Harlem's Tavern on the Green") perched hard on the Hudson River at the end of an endless concrete walkway off Riverside Drive -- I've be