Things You Can Remind Me of the Next Time I Start Acting Like I Know Squat About Music

• I sat down last week to fill out WXPN's year-end survey, but ran into a minor problem while trying to list my 10 favorite albums of 2009: I've only actually heard 3 albums that came out this year -- Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (great), the Decemberists' The Hazards of Love (pretty good, considering I don't really like the Decemberists), and the Flaming Lips' Embryonic (I love the Lips, but boy oh boy, I didn't like that album). I also bought Everything Goes Wrong by Vivian Girls, which has been in my car for several months but is yet to make it into my CD player. Truthfully, this isn't so unusual, since I typically wait until the year-end lists come out before I catch up on the previous twelve months of music, but still...
• Maybe I'm not alone on this one, but it wasn't until a few days ago that I realized -- after wondering for the better part of a decade -- why Jay-Z calls himself Hova. It's Jay-hova, like Jehovah, right?