Handlebar, Handlebar, You Are My Handlebar!

I just got the most recent issue of Rolling Stone in the mail the other day and haven't really had a chance to read anything yet (except the piece on Matt Dillon, which seems oddly spiteful, though perhaps it's just not as gushingly reverent as most glossy magazine profiles I'm used to these days), but this exchange from the Q&A with Andre Benjamin that Stereogum excerpted yesterday cracked me the hell up:

RS: Are you with me on this: "Hey Ya!" is the best song of the twenty-first century? ANDRE BENJAMIN: Jesus. I don't know, man. That could be argued by a lot of people. RS: Can you think of anything better? ANDRE BENJAMIN: No.

Love it. Bitches, seriously, if you are not reading Green Pea-ness on some kind of regular basis, you are missing out on the best kind of celebratory exasperation the MP3 blogs have to offer. He talks a lot of shit about a lot of stuff, but always in service of wildly flipping out about something he loves. He reminds me of the Doc from Deadwood in that way; sphincter perpetually clenched and just barely resisting the everpresent urge to grab some motherfuckers by the throat who don't SEE! DON'T YOU SEE! the beauty and decency that's so readily apparent to his own eyes and ears. James celebrated the blog's first birthday last week with a five-day reappraisal of ten songs that have continued to stand the test of time for him, and, this week, gave us an inspired vision of how our musically inclined grandparents might have reacted to the shit-hot new singles of their era. Go visit now. "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" is all that's been in my head for the past three or four days. Sing it with me! "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" I can watch segments of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central's website or YouTube, I can rent TV on DVD from Netflix, and I can read wonderfully funny blow-by-blow wrap-ups of the VMAs from S/FJ and Fluxblog. Why would I ever pay good money for cable? It is revealed that Chicagoist loves Great Expectations every bit as much as I do. Yay! We've all seen Sufjan's facial hair by now, yes? I love how something as completely insignificant as a newly grown handlebar mustache has become this major issue being discussed all around the series of tubes. On quite the other hand, here's something actually worthy of being discussed all around the series of tubes: Robert Christgau got fired from the Village Voice. And now for our weekly requirement of cute-but-also-funny animal related items: bunnies yawning (via the Birdchick Blog) and Chicago's own cat circus (thanks, LK).