I never met a cheeseburger I didn’t like. Of all the wonderful foods in this world, I think cheeseburgers are one thing I could probably eat everyday. (In a world with no calories, that is.) However, not all cheeseburgers are created equal.

I took a recent survey amongst some of my Facebook friends and was surprised to find a pretty even division between In-N-Out and Five Guys lovers. I thought it might be interesting to compare them and see which cheeseburger reigns supreme. I’ve graded the burgers according to five categories: meat, bun, toppings, sauce, and overall taste. I think that pretty much covers the important stuff. Here we go…

“Well, well, well, the director of the first Budweiser frog commercial and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (listed in order of dramatic excellence), has combined the two and stuck them in a Western atmosphere for yet another CGI-candy-with-barely-enough-of-a-plot-to-hold-together-what-is-essentially-a-string-of-technical-showings-off, eh?”

That’s what you said to yourself upon your first exposure to a trailer for Rango, isn’t it? Well, that or “Yeah, I guess Johnny Depp hasn’t been a chameleon yet. :: audible sigh :: ”

Well, it turns out it was awesome.

The Strokes virtually defined an infant decade’s emerging sound when they released Is This It in 2001. Songs like “Last Nite” and “Someday” were the template for other melodic, garage rock bands hoping to receive the same level of universal critical praise and commercial success as the Strokes. End-of-the-decade lists revealed people still hold the band’s debut in high regard. Critic-aggregating site acclaimedmusic.net ranked Is This It as the third most acclaimed album of the decade.

That same list accurately depicts the reaction to the group’s next two albums. 2003′s Room on Fire is at No. 345, while First Impressions of Earth, released in 2006, finds itself at a lowly No. 2024. The Twitter account @Discographies, known for its 140-character summaries of artists’ catalogs, summed it up when they tweeted, “1 ‘OMG! The greatest band of all time!!!; 2 ‘It’s not as good as the first…’; 3 ‘Hey, can we listen to the Arctic Monkeys?’”

I don’t know if this kind of response really bothered Julian Casablancas and company or not — I tend to assume “indie” bands don’t worry much about what “the man” has to say about them — but regardless, their fourth album, Angles, seems like it was designed to restore our faith in the “greatest band of all time!!!” and convince us to stop listening to so much Arctic Monkeys.

There is this fantastic scene in Top Gun, just after the best fighter pilots in the country arrive in Miramar, where Chief Instructor Mike “Viper” Metcalf explains the objective of the Top Gun program. Essentially, with the advent of heat seeking missiles, fighter pilots lost touch with the nuance of flying jets. They let the technology do all the work and, as a result, U.S. fighter pilot records dipped sharply during the Vietnam War (or so says the film). Top Gun was created to train pilots in the art of dog fighting, shifting the emphasis back on individual performance. Success rates (again, according to the movie) radically improved.

Remarkably, men’s professional tennis has gone through a similar transformation.

With dance pop ruling the airwaves, it doesn’t seem like British soul singers in their 20s could sell many records. Somehow, 22-year-old Adele has done it though. Her sophomore album, 21, debuted atop the charts in ten countries, including the United States. In the UK, she became the first artist to have two top five albums and singles in the chart at the same time since the Beatles in 1964.

The secret to her success is her powerful vocals and the heaps of good press and critical acclaim she’s accumulated. Adele won the Critic’s Choice award at the 2008 Brits and followed that with a Best New Artist win at the 2009 Grammys. Although the critical acclaim and commercial success she’s achieved in the UK was deserved, breaking in the US was never a given. Making it big in the States is a difficult feat. For every Coldplay and Leona Lewis, there are dozens of Robbie Williams, Girls Aloud and Dizzee Rascals — artists that are superstars in the UK but can’t crack the American market.

HB 477 passed in about as much time as it took Charlie Sheen to break the Guinness Book of World Records for most followers on Twitter in the least amount of time — and before the public knew what hit them, they just got a heaping load of Sheen-style nuttiness in the Utah Legislature.