On Wednesday, some obnoxious pinhead writing for a frequently unreadable New York fish wrap (is that why it's salmon-colored?) mourned the death of the beef, which would've been a pretty dumb idea for an article in any other week but seemed particularly stupid in the middle of a week in which it was practically raining beef! Even if this morning's scuffle between Shakespeare and Verdi didn't turn out exactly like we'd hoped, there was still plenty of cultural altercating to be had:

Trent Reznor continued to do battle with the business-as-usual record labels (who charge money — ha! — for their albums), and random superheroes fought over who would get to be in the Avengers movie. Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott disagreed about whether Jason Segel is a little boy or a really ugly woman, and Gina Gershon made life difficult for the New York Times' fact-checking department. Iron Man's $100 million weekend looked pretty good — until Grand Theft Auto's $500 million first week smacked it upside the face.

Glory Days (or Glory Day, as the case may be) battled with the Tonys (like it really stood a chance against ham, anyway), and everybody had a quibble with Top Girls except Ben Brantley. Speed Racer tussled with our sanity, and Madonna took a huge crap right on her fans. Our commenters took issue with our characterization of The Dark Knight as "no fun," but they were all completely wrong.

Superconductor Richard Muti told New York Philharmonic where to stick it, and Harrison Ford battled George Lucas for a decade over what would be the appropriate amount of aliens to put in the new Indiana Jones. David Cook and Jason Castro squared off against American Idol viewers' eardrums with their terrible singing, but, luckily, TomCruise.com was able to reignite our broken enthusiasm for music. The Jonas Brothers tore a hole in space and time, and the makers of the G.I. Joe movie put our cinematic standards on notice, announcing that all acting in the film will be done by butts. Ralph Bakshi said nasty things about Thomas Kinkade and Bob Seger, and we said nasty things about the new Weezer album. Cripes, Doree Shafrir, do you have rocks in your head?