The Rolling Stone that comes out this week includes a big "Best of Rock" package, in which we call out the best metal band (Mastodon), best festival (Bonnaroo) and best radio station (Indie 103), among other superlatives. I worked on a piece that called out Baltimore (my hometown) as the best scene. This involved a 24-hour club-hopping tour of the city with awesome photographer Josh Rothstein. We hit rock clubs like Ottobar and Talking Head, the underground Floristree performance space and late-night diners Paper Moon and Golden West, but the most memorable moment was the hour Josh, Jason Urick of local band WZT Hearts and I spent trying to carry an old, drunk and angry (and heavy!) man we found face-down on the sidewalk to his house. Baltimore rocks!

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There is nothing in the world your average music blogger loves more than Rolling Stone magazine. RS can do no wrong in their eyes. No matter whom we put on the cover — be it Guns N' Roses, Zac Efron, or Miss Piggy — the blogosphere rises up as one to applaud our wit, taste, and good looks.

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We were brainstorming how to present a bunch of information about the huge explosion of summer festivals this year the other day, and I had this idea that doesn't really fit this magazine (or any other, really), but that I still thought was funny. What if you predicted what festival Simpsons characters would end up at? After the jump, you'll get what I mean.

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One of the most entertaining, funny and informative movies in recent years is Charlie Wilson's War. The DVD is out next week and if you haven't seen it yet, definitely check it out. Directed by Mike Nichols, the film is a geopolitical romp that both enlightened and left me with more than a few unanswered questions. So I was excited to get the real Charlie Wilson on the phone and ask him a few things that I was left wondering about at the end of the movie. If you don't know the story, here's the basics: In the Seventies and Eighties, Charlie Wilson was a licentious horndog of a congressman who after the Russians invaded Afghanistan became the unlikely architect of the United States' covert support of the Afghan freedom fighters. Essentially Wilson spent millions of tax-payers' dollars arming and training the Afghan resistance, an effort that eventually drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. But that not-so secret war, of course, had lasting consequences that we are still dealing with today. Here's what the always colorful and genuinely charming Mr. Wilson had to say when we discussed the topic of blowback.

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One of my favorite YouTube memes is the phenomenon of teenagers re-enacting dance moves from music videos (had YouTube been around in 2000 at the height of boy-band mania, this would have been even more amazing). Miley Cyrus is not immune to this. In the above video, she goofs around with her friend Mandy for a minute until they somehow morph into a tribute to the video for Madonna & Justin Timberlake's "4 Minutes." I haven't spent a ton of time contemplating Cyrus' place in the current social fabric (or even in the pop music social fabric), but at least part of the whole pop star alter-ego deal is that Miley is just like you and me (well, not very much like "me," and only like "you" if you're a fifteen year old girl). But I feel like that message keeps getting lost in the fact that she is who she is. During the goofy portions, she's just a teenager making wacky voices at her friend. But then it becomes an expensive video homage, complete with choreography, back up dancers and an obviously hired stand-in for her dancing Grandma. So the message should be: Miley Cyrus is just like you, as long as you're the centerpiece of multi-platform Disney-fueled media empire.

That being said, this is totally awesome and is probably the weirdest thing that a teenage star has done in a long time (at least that doesn't involve pregnancy). The bizarreness is refreshing. But I'm most certainly not the target audience. What's the verdict on this video, and Cyrus in general?

In last week's intern dispatch, we presented a short vignette detailing our bread and butter here at Rolling Stone: transcribing. But much like the dead air that can come between any interviewer and his subject, there's the dead time we suffer through in between assignments.

Let me make this clear: Sure, we procrastinate, but sometimes — especially during closing weeks, when editors are glued to their computers like a weave to Beyoncé's head — there's genuinely nothing to do. I recall one particular afternoon in which our inbox was so barren that not one, not two, but five of us opened the mail. That was a dark day.

When work becomes rarer than the sight of a fully-clothed Iggy Pop, there's only one thing left to do: Rickroll.

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Ray Davies is bossy. "Is that how you want to sound?" he asked the crowd as it sang along to "Sunny Afternoon," at the sold-out Beacon Theater Tuesday night. "Diction, diction," he reprimanded when the audience's enunciation got too mushy. No one minded being chastised. They were having too good a time at one hell of a rock and roll show. From the menacing first chords of "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," Davies was in great form, forever the vaudevillian showman inhabiting the elastic body of a rock star. The guy is simply one of rock's greatest songwriters: if he had wanted to he could mine his catalog all night long. Check out the set list stocked with classic Kinks:

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As a fact checker at Rolling Stone, I have an enviable position — nothing gets printed unless I say it's okay! As you can imagine, fact checking is a high-stress job. If Ashlee Simpson's name is misspelled in the magazine, it's my head that's on the chopping block (not unlike Ashlee's nose was in 2007. No wait, 2006. Yes, I'm sure of it.). Up until recently, I dealt with the pressure in part by sucking down cigarettes. This meant frequent trips outside, which meant less time at my desk checking facts. Not good. (I missed out on the days when those in the journalistic profession could smoke at their desks — a blessing and a curse.)

But this year I resolved to quit smoking. After a few false starts, spread out over a few months, I've been able to remain cigarette-free for thirty days. Hooray for me. How did I do it? Two things got me to where I need to be: Allen Carr's The Easy Way To Quit Smoking and Wolfgang's Vault.

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So I’m at the Ray Davies show last night (one of best shows I have seen recently; I'll have a post on that later) and a really strange thing happened. The wife and I are enjoying "Sunny Afternoon" and “Waterloo Sunset" and the rest of the fantastic Kinks songbook, when we notice the middle-aged dude in the seat in front of us is holding up his iPhone, and — no shit — he's watching porn.

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There's a long tradition in rock of bands taking to the streets and having the foresight to capture it on film or video: think the Beatles' rooftop concert in Let It Be, or U2 playing on the back of a flatbed truck driving around NYC to promote How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. More recently, thanks to YouTube and video-capable cell phones, we've been able to view dodgy footage of Arcade Fire busking New Order and Cure covers outside the Union Square subway station in Manhattan or the White Stripes playing Hotel Yorba on a Winnipeg city bus.

The live music video sites Take Away Shows and Black Cab Sessions combine the spirit of the spontaneous performances caught on YouTube with nonshaky, often auteurish camerawork and surprisingly clear audio.

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