Rachel Maddow goes ultra-fangirl on Metallica's Lars Ulrich, mis-pronounces his name

IN a monologue the length of which is usually reserved on MSNBC for Keith Olberman kidney-punching Karl Rove, RACHEL MADDOW last night launched into an impromptu tribute to Metallica's MASTER OF PUPPETS, in which Maddow recalled that, when she was 15, the album "blew my mind" and became the soundtrack to "the part of my adolescence where I was doing what I was not supposed to be doing." She's also got "Enter Sandman" as the ringtone on her Blackberry, which for obscure reasons makes certain people in this office (myself included) very, very happy.

One problem: in the setup (not included above), she refered to guest Lars Ulrich as "Ul-RITCH," as opposed to "Ul-RICK." Also, her half-hearted devil sign was -- let's face it -- a little gay. But she'd recovered by the time Ul-RICK made it to the desk to answer questions about Guitar Hero, the inclusiveness of San Francisco, the saving power of metal, and the use of "Enter Sandman" by troops in Iraq as an instrument of, as Maddow put it, "torture." About this last bit, Maddow asked Ulrich whether the band ever considered bringing a copyright suit against the Army -- the closest she came to a tough question, containing as it does a veiled dig at the band's copyright suits against its fans in the Napster era.

That question elicited a typically Ulrich-ian dissemble in which he made like a Republican president and managed to communicate the opposite of what he felt: "My first reaction was that it was all terribly fitting," he began, later adding, "because it all comes from a place of ignorance." What?