What's up with Weird Al?

OK. So I got the new Weird Al album from and I've been listening to it for a few days.

This album is better than previous WA offerings, and some songs are really good, but there are some lingering niggles. First, the good.

• The lead track, White and Nerdy had several laugh-out-loud moments for me. MC Escher is my favourite MC!
• Virus Alert is also a brilliant take on oh-my-god-everyone-watch-out-for-this-virus!-eh?-what's-snopes.com? email that we've all received.
• And the piece that had me really laughing was Trapped In The Drive Thru. Some really well-observed dialogue between married couples there!

Now, the niggles.

• Pancreas is a bit short on lyrics, and almost-but-not-quite achieves the best lyric on the album. Is this a genuine oversight, Al, or is it poetic license or for scansion reasons? Because your pancreas attracts every other pancreas in the universe with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. So close to greatness, and yet so far, like Jonathan Coulton accidentally claiming that Garfield was assassinated in 1882 rather than 1881.
• Don't Download This Song seems to be a poke at the RIAA. The song itself is OK. But this is sort of like The Simpsons making fun of Fox. Al says one thing and does another. His label, Volcano, is a member of the RIAA. And his new album is released on DualDisc, a DRM-friendly format, rather than on a true CD. So I'm not sure quite what's up with him.

Overall, the album achieves a good killer-to-filler ratio – about 75% for me. Mrs Elbeno also laughed at some songs!

One more thing: the James Blunt parody You're Pitiful (linked at www.weirdal.com) didn't make it on to the album because of James Blunt's label vetoing it. Al could have gone ahead anyway (he doesn't need permission to parody) but he's always been a nice guy about things like that. Anyway, it's a fairly standard parody, not really special by WA standards.

PS. Al, if you're reading this (and if so, are you related to Kibo?), please remove the obnoxious flash splash-screen on weirdal.com.