It was an especially happy morning for the Rock Snob brain trust, for the Today show unexpectedly ran a long segment on Snob mascot and recurring Yacht Rock character Jeff “Skunk” Baxter–who, as anyone who has read page 9 of our book is aware, is not only an ace session guitarist and ex-Doobie Brother but an adviser to the Pentagon on ballistic missile defense! Click here to see the Today report and the sight of the Skunk in a suit and tie.

End-of-year tradition (and, to be honest, pressing deadlines on work assignments) dictates that, in lieu of new posts, we offer you this round-up of Snobsite’s finest moments over the course of 2005, its inaugural year. The headline above, as any Rock Snob worth his salt knows, is an allusion to the curious title of Jethro Tull’s first greatest hits album (cover below). If some Snob out there has any idea what “M.U.” stands for, let us know.

To see Steven and David’s “Honest” and “Rock Snob” lists of their Desert Island Discs, click here.

To see Steven and David confess their non-Snob-music guilty pleasures, click here.

To see Al Jaffee’s “Snobby Answers to Loser Questions,” click here.

To download a podcast of Steven and David’s appearance on WNYC’s “Soundcheck” program, click here.

To hear Meredith Ochs’s essay about Rock Snobbery on NPR, click here.

To hear the best parody ever of an insufferable Rock Snob, a comic bit by Tom Scharpling and Kenny Wurster called “The Music Scholar,” click here. (Scroll down to the part that says “The Music Scholar” and click the “Play Clip” button.)

To read our infamous VH1 parody, “I Love the Aughties,” click here.

We hope you enjoy this round-up, and keep an eye out in January for the new branch of this site devoted to The Film Snob*s Dictionary.

Robert Christgau (above), as all Snobs know, is the Village Voice rock sage who has been grading new rock releases in his “Consumer Guide” column since 1967. Though Bob is now 94 years old, he still rocks and has his own wicked cool Web site, which carries the modest tagline “Dean of American Rock Critics.” (Lest we forget, the poet, statesman, and Zappa fan Vaclav Havel is the Dean of Czech Rock Critics.)

One of our friends was trawling the Christgau site’s voluminous archives and found this review of a 1974 Gordon Lightfoot album:

Sundown [Reprise, 1974]
If Gordon had dyed his hair and taken a short course at the local car wash–you think he would have lasted a week?–he might have found a new career as Jim Croce II. Instead, he scored one of his periodic hit singles, thus securing his status as a weird new kind of purist: uncompromising proponent of commercial folk music. Two songs about the lure of the sea and one about urban despair go down as easy as the usual plaints about female perfidy. Chad lives? B-

Our friend writes to Snobsite, “I suggest we administer the Christgau Comprehension Test to one hundred randomly selected rock writers across the country and see how many of them can figure out what the hell ‘Chad lives’ means. I’m guessing zero. I’m guessing this is one of those many instances in which Christgau attains his creative and spiritual goal of Complete Obfuscation.”

Sounds like a capital idea, this test, but why not ask this site’s very smart readership if they can help out! “Chad lives,” anyone?