Radio Free Meredith

Everyone has their guilty-pleasure music -- the tracks you'll gladly belt out along with the car stereo as long as no one else is in the car with you, the CDs you listen to over and over but don't keep out on the shelf where people can see them.

What are yours? Anonymous commenting is enabled and I'm disabling IP logging.

And, to encourage you to contribute to this little experiment, my answers will be in the comments somewhere ... but only once enough people have commented that I feel I have a sufficiently large anonymity set. ;)

I learned a few weeks ago that the Pet Shop Boys had released a new album, Fundamental, back in May. I hadn't gotten around to previewing it on iTunes until this morning, and while most of the clips didn't do a whole lot for me, both the music and the lyrics of one track, "Integral," got my ears pricking up. I quickly grabbed a copy, and a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for the album revealed that yes, it is indeed as political as it sounds, and not only that, it's a criticism of Britain's national ID card plans -- and an homage to Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic novel We. I could happily go on...

( But I'll let Neil Tennant do the talking for me. )

If you're a geek, then run, do not walk, to the nearest machine with a sound card and treat yourself to So Much Drama in the PhD, a computer-science gangsta rap that puts MC Hawking to shame. Check out the lyrics here, as well. /i/ is a popular terminal vowel in English, apparently.

I maintain that it is the responsibility of the CS Mafia to respond to this imminent east-coast-west-coast rivalry, since we're pretty much the Wu-Tang Clan of computer science already. We even have the names.