I listened to this album after my son was born. It really moved me then and helped calm my troubled soul.

See, my son was born 3 1/2 months premature at 1 lb 14 oz. But REM and a lot of tears helped me through that day and many more to come.

Now when I listen to this album, the tears still come to the surface but don't seem to break. My son once saw me listening to this and asked if anything was wrong, and I looked him in the eye and said "No son, everything is just fine".

Just fine.

Maybe it is because their music is plodding, dull, limp-wristed and twee and that Michael Stipe's voice sounds like a constant whine. This could explain why their music annoys the hell out of a lot of people. Especially when they are so over-played.

What man hasnt thought at least once: "I wish i was him"

No, I never have thought that, but thanks for asking.
Sincerely yours,
Tom Cruise

I can't stand him, every song sounds the same, like a marching band

1) What marching bands do YOU listen to?

2) Are they on antidepressants? Are they on suicide watch?

I think expecting Radio Paradise to have a playlist of 8 billion songs, or even 8 million songs, is quite a bit of lack of perspective. Do you ever come out in the real world? Even in my country where FM radio doesn't suck as hard as in the US, you'll hear the same song multiple times a day unless you'd go working, shopping and dining while wearing industrial ear protection. Because you seem to like numbers, here's some mathematics. Suppose a station has a playlist of 10000 songs. I have no idea how many songs the active playlist of RP has, but this seems reasonable, especially in the light of the following assumption. Suppose this station is run by DJ Random, who gives every song a number between 1 to 10000 and uses a perfect random number generator to pick the next song. Suppose you listen to 120 songs this way (at an average of 4 minutes per song, that would take 8 hours). The birthday paradox says that in this case (see simulation below), there's a 50% chance that you'll hear the same song twice in this time span!

For a playlist of 50000 songs, the 50% chance of repetition is already reached at approx. 250 picks, not the expected 600. Of course, while many radio streams work this way, on RP this is not how it's done — luckily. First of all, Bill avoids the horrible transitions that DJ Random would produce, by combining songs that actually belong together. This reduces the amount of randomness, but of course Bill has a memory and will try to avoid repeating the same song often. To minimize repetition, he would need to create an ideal sequence of all songs once, and repeat this eternally. But that would become boring too, so as a compromise and to keep managing RP tractable, Bill recycles 'stretches' of playlist, slowly mutating them and discarding them after a while. And Bill is only human, so he'll play the songs that he likes a little bit more often than others. I wasted some of my time telling this story to show that things can be a whole lot worse, and I believe RP comes damn close to an ideal radio station. You just have to accept the fact that ideality doesn't exist and that some of the songs you don't like will be played, and repeated after a while.

As an example of how there's no quality control over typography these days, look at the album cover. There should only be one apostrophe. The way they have it, it's Sniff AND the Tears. But it's supposed to mean "Sniffing the Tears." So there.

I KNEW IT!!...an art director.

I thought he was saying: "You don't know you're bald"

oh well...

At least it doesn't last as long as the baby song-Christ felt like we were there for the whole pregnancy.