Photo by avp17 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. There's a more interesting way to keep those "this year I will get in shape, no, really" New Year's resolutions than a membership to some stuffy gym that you'll stop using in a month and a half anyway-- a way that can even help you show off your new buffness and make you appear cooler on the dance floor next New Year's Eve, in the last......

Yesterday, while listening to NPR for the obvious reasons, we heard a terrific interview with Ralph Fiennes. Terrific because at the very end of the interview, Leonard Lopate throws a curve at the pointy actor by asking him why he pronounces his name Rayfe. A short pause follows, and then Fiennes cobbles together an answer along the lines of 'that is actually how it was pronounced historically.' Now if we could only ask Chloë Sevigny......

Given the relatively short existence of rap music, tracing its lineage appears fairly simple. The advances in the genre are well-documented: Kool Herc started turntablism, Kurtis Blow first brought rap to the mainstream, Prince Paul popularized skits, Afrika Bambaataa rocked the sample, and so forth and so on. Then there is Dr Dre's classic 1992 album The Chronic, which represents perhaps the most perplexing turn in hip hop history. The album essentially brought West Coast......