It's getting so hard nowadays for celebrities to convince themselves that they occupy a higher, more dignified plane than the witless prole. It used to be enough to be seen toting the newest Louis Vuitton bag or being chauffeured around town in a luxury sedan, sipping a glass of rare, vintage wine. But here we are in 2009, when the biggest growth market for all three of these things is China. CHINA!

The world's turned upside down for America's most prized and self-prizing demographic.

So what's an attention-hungry celeb to do? How can they be expected to flaunt their worth when any spoiled teenage girl in Dalian can sport the same pair of Christian Louboutins or gallivant around town in the same Enzo as them? The answer is simple: They [force their personal assistant to] write socially-conscious op-eds for the Huffington Post!

As many a recovering Anglophile will recall, the 1995 chart-topping face-off between Blur and Oasis was the media-created rivalry to end all media-created rivalries, with both bands releasing singles on 14 August and setting off “The Battle of Britpop,” easily Britain’s bloodiest battle since Goose Green. A cursory glance around those damn internets reveals that Blur was the victor, with 274,000 copies of “Country House” sold to 216,000 copies of “Roll With It”, but with such subpar offerings from both bands, a teaspoon of hindsight and a small handful of smarts gives one the confidence to say that sans fake rivalry, both of these singles would have been quickly forgotten by a fickle British music-buying public. So let’s hop inside the Retrospective Record Review jalopy and take a ride back to 1995, to take another look at these two monoliths of Britpop and Shitpop, respectively, and declare once and for all – who’s the real winner?

Welcome to 2009.  We all make promises at the start of a new year, some that we speak openly about and some that we keep to ourselves.  This is a collection of the latter, because you deserve to know the truth.  Be prepared for a little darkness, some heart-wrenching tales of self-improvement, and another journey to the depths of Nate's soul in this column that we can proudly say all of Steve's Word's contributors managed to pull together to collectively write (except for one).  Please to enjoy our resolutions.

Pundits be makin' a fuss about the global Financial Crisis. I seen it on my 50-inch flattie. People are losin' they money in the stock market, companies are goin' bankrupt, old folks are losin' the value of their 401(k)s and putting off their retirement or gettin' tossed outta their houses, and all that.

It's a mess. Legit.

So, as a man who has had his fair share of personal financial crises, I'd like to put in my two cents on this important matter, to break this financial crisis down, girl, and put it into simple language. Because if there's one thing that Hammer knows, it's that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I ain't foolin'.