COME HERE, LOVERBOY:  Sylvia Robinson did two things you'd think were difficult to include within one lifetime. In 1957, she was the Sylvia in Mickey & Sylvia who recorded the #1 hit "Love Is Strange."  More than two decades later, as NPR reports ...

In 1979, producer Sylvia Robinson heard hip-hop music at a birthday party in Harlem and had a hunch that it would be commercially successful.

She called her son, Joey Robinson Jr., and asked him to gather a group of musicians who could perform like the rappers she saw in Harlem. She then held makeshift auditions for a rap group outside a pizza parlor in Englewood, N.J.

"She put these three guys together who had never met each other before, had the backing track all ready and created a record in a matter of minutes," says Dan Charnas, a former rap industry executive who chronicles the history of hip-hop in a new book, The Big Payback.

The group that Robinson put together, Charnas says, would become the Sugarhill Gang, and the track they recorded was "Rapper's Delight," the first hip-hop single to break into the Top 40 charts.

She passed away today at the age of 75, and we've got a pair of videos below the fold.

SHA LA LA NA NA! Do you want to watch a video of collected nonsense lyrics over the years? Of course you do, and you want to note the notable omissions--two that come to mind immediately are the chanting in Engima's "Return To Innocence" and "Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah, Roma-roma-mah, Gaga-ooh-la-la."

THIS LIST HAS 99 PROBLEMS:  Coming to VH-1 for five nights next week—the Top 100 Songs of the Aughts. It is, as the Stereogum link notes, a very pop/mainstream hip hop-centered list, with the top rock songs being Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" at #5 and Green Day's "American Idiot" at #13.

Most underrated: "Stacy's Mom" down at #88; most overrated is Madonna's "Music," which doesn't belong on this list at all, let alone #28. Among the MIA? "Ms. Jackson" and "B.O.B.," Outkast; "Work It," Missy Elliott; "Take Me Out," Franz Ferdinand; "One More Time," Daft Punk; "How to Save a Life," The Fray; and even though he appears four times in the top 21, Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'" and "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" belong on this list too.

SERIOUSLY, DOES EVEN CHRISTIAN BALE REGARD THIS AS A NECESSARY REMAKE?  Newsies, the Broadway musical? 

I STUDY NUCLEAR SCIENCE, I LOVE MY CLASSES: From the ALOTT5MA Totally 80s Desk, a Very Special Music Video from the cast of Head of the Class:

CLASSIC WINGER: We like Grantland, and we like Joel McHale, so Joel McHale writing for Grantland about his short-lived career as a walk-on football player for the Washington Huskies is something that we have to link to.

.108/.178/.157:  That was Dan Johnson's slash line heading into tonight. OMG, what a night of baseball. I'm speechless.

added: Tom Verducci has words:

They will go down as the most thrilling 129 minutes in baseball history. Never before and likely never again -- if we even dare to assume anything else can be likely ever again -- will baseball captivate and exhilarate on so many fronts in so small a window the way it did September 28, 2011.

Starting at 9:56 PM Eastern, the grand old game, said to suffer by comparison from football's siren sisters of gambling and violence, and said to suffer from America's shrinking attention span and capacity to contemplate, rose up and fairly screamed, "Watch this!"