German electronic label Mille Plateaux has always been a hit-or-miss affair with me. They specialize in very minimal music, best exemplified through the archetypal Clicks & Cuts series, in which the barest of sounds and glitches serve as building blocks for their artists' work. Sometimes, it works wonderfully and sometimes, it's just too dry and insubstantial. The best artists (Kit Clayton, Vladislav Delay) take these simple elements and build something shimmering and immersive, but too many others just lack the imagination.

Twerk is the alias of Shawn Hatfield, who uses found sounds and field-recordings to build music …

I've heard alot about the lovely '60's "ideals" of peace and love, but this is just frightening. People with nothing better to do with their time take the coward's way out and attack the issue of "gun violence," pinning the blame on those of us who choose to own firearms.

Why the "coward's way out?" Because the real cause of gun violence in this country has nothing to do with the fact that law-abiding citizens own guns, it has to do with deeper issues. Our violent crime-rate stems from many factors, most of which I'd expect …

Well, the Firefly movie is on schedule for a release date next spring. The original cast are all on board. As usual, Harry Knowles claims to have a leaked first-draft script, and he quotes a very apropos and encouraging bit of dialogue:

Wash: Yeah well if she doesn't give us some extra flow from the engine room to offset the burnthrough the landing is gonna get pretty interesting.

Mal: Define "interesting."

Wash (calm suggestion): "Oh god, oh god, we're all gonna die?"

Nice to see Whedon's still got it. Incidentally, rumor has it he's also working on an X-Men script.

Well, the Firefly DVD's out, and it was worth the wait. All the original episodes are here, as well as two others that weren't shown. What's nice is that they're arranged in chronological order, rather than the shuffled mess that Fox chose to present them in.

In case you don't know, Firefly was a great sci-fi/western show written by Joss Whedon (Buffy, etc). It received a lackluster push from Fox, and like the much-deserving-but-ultimately-slighted Futurama (which also received a great treatment on DVD), it ended up dying in relative obscurity. Despite this, the show had a fervent …