Home at last.

​As first reported by LA Weekly, the youthful new-west hip hop collective known as Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (AKA Odd Future or OFWGKTA for short, and OFWGKTADGAFLLBBLSBFBN for long) is finally seeing the triumphant return of (arguably) its most talented member. Earl Sweatshirt -- real name Thebe Kgositsile, now nearly eighteen -- became the talk of the entire internet when he released a controversial video for his self-titled single in July of 2010 -- one which depicts a then fifteen-year-old Earl and the rest of Odd Future mixing drugs and malt liquor in a blender and passing it around before leaving the house to skate.

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Patriots Lineman Dan Connolly will not be escorting Madonna during the Halftime show. He is from St. Louis, however.

​The Rams may not be taking the field on Sunday at Super Bowl XLVI, but someone from St. Louis will be: Nick Smarrelli, chief operating officer at St. Louis IT firm GadellNet Consulting Services. He'll be helping to escort Madonna on the field for her halftime show, as reported yesterday in an article in the St. Louis Business Journal.

With exactly one minute of Facebook stalking we learned a bunch about Smarrelli. He was married a few years ago, he does a bunch of traveling (Tibet, Australia, Jamaica, Lake Tahoe) and he has cute dog named Cooper. He seems swell and he has a very nice smile. We're glad we have a man on the inside and we want all of the juicy details when he comes home. (Was Madonna a bitch? Yes? In the good way or in the bad way? And seriously, how was her face without HD-ready makeup?)

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​Sure, Facebook filed its S-1 with the SEC yesterday, presaging one of the most talked-about IPOs in tech history -- and for college students, FarmVille users, amateur stalkers, and anybody who likes to talk to people they know, Facebook's performance on the open market will offer an interesting perspective on the monetary value of their social bonds. But what about people who were in high school in 2004 and then left the Internet forever, and glitter-art designers and bar bands?

For those groups -- our core demographic -- RFT Music has obtained a copy of MySpace's announcement of its stock market intentions, which has been lost in the furor over Facebook.

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​Blake Griffin can jump very high and has very long arms. Last night, his Los Angeles Clippers played the Oklahoma City Thunber, and he put those two skills to work in turning six foot ten inch, 260 pound Kendrick Perkins' into a wisp of smoke. We are lucky to have someone like Griffin in our current culture of bytes, so that we could all find out within an hour and watch it over and over in .gif form instantly. Fun is being had on the Internet, and we would like to play. So we've picked out the five songs we think most hilariously/awesomely/superlatively accompany the Dunk Heard Round This Particular Fifteen Seconds. It's an NBA clip, so in order to ensure it doesn't get yanked we've left their original video below with the audio posted separately. It's really easy: Just mute the video and start the audio clips at your convenience. Tell us your favorite, of the ones below or ones we missed, in the comments.

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​It's true: Megaupload has been gone an entire week, and for the millions of people who used the site because they like their totally legal for-pay cloud storage to come equipped with fake download links and massive flash banner ads I'm sure things have been difficult.

For copyright holders, massive intellectual property conglomerates, and people who couldn't bear to see this man happy and successful, it was a victory, but nobody involved seems particularly eager to gloat. After all, in the ten years and change since people discovered they could get out of going to a public place and buying the Hanson album they secretly desired, the same high-profile shutdown routine has befallen these earlier facilitators of piracy.

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​Wilco is uniquely positioned as a rock band with the resources to do whatever and a total antipathy for convention. In the last year, we have seen the emergence of Tweedy Family Band the Racconists, a Black Eyed Peas cover set, a guest spot forecasting the weather on WGN and an incredible shrinking tour of Chicago. So why wouldn't the band's latest music video, for "Dawned On Me," be commissioned in the service of creating the first hand-drawn Popeye cartoon in over thirty years? Watch below as Jeff Tweedy attempts to steal Olive Oyl's heart from Popeye.

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RFT File Photo

Mississippi Nights threw its final jam session on January 19, 2007. The venerable venue near the Mississippi River hosted a wide assortment of legendary artists over its history.

​In theory, music venues are interchangeable. If one especially great place shuts down, another spot surely will rise elsewhere.

But there's something disquieting about the closure of an especially memorable venue. Even years later, I'm still bummed about how Shattered - a Columbia, Missouri, institution - was, well, shuttered. A pool hall just isn't a suitable substitute for an up-and-coming band or an outstanding 80s night.

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Image from freebieber.org

​SOPA will silence your creative voice and jail your tween pop stars.

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The question you have to ask yourself is exactly how many people have Googled "lana del rey topless" today. Or maybe you're lucky enough to not be asking questions.

​We have categorically avoided the subject of Lana Del Rey in this space, mostly because we are generally of the opinion that no matter how you feel about her/her generated persona/her reflexivity online, to discuss it is to let the terrorists Lana Del Rey win.

And it's not this weekend's (ahem) lackluster performance on Saturday Night Live that has finally forced us to break our silence. No, it is Clams Casino, who we first took note of carrying Lil B behind him way back in 2009. And Clams, whose 2011 mixtape of instrumentals earned him some highly well-deserved notoriety, is the spaced-out soul mate Lana didn't know she was missing.

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​Yesterday I watched as two completely disparate things I like a lot for very different reasons collided and were completely satisfying in the process. (This is like getting your chocolate in my peanut butter, and my peanut butter in your chocolate, only the result is one of those still-pretty-good off-brand peanut-butter cups since the result was titled "DRUNK KARAOKE" and not "Beautiful studio version you will love forever.")

Surfer Blood, whose Voyager Reprise is as close as 2011 gets to an Adventures of Pete & Pete soundtrack song, performed a karaoke cover of that show's theme song, "Hey Sandy," for as-yet-undetermined corporate-Facebook-outreach reasons. Pull your best Artie, the Strongest Man in the World face and watch the video here.

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