for those who missed the earlier post:

naomi's italy photos are here.
sara's are here.
and now, teresa's are here.

sorry for the lack of blogging. i really do want to write about the villa and creepy cortona and creepier etruscans. but a week sans catherine, and work is falling apart! well, minorly. well, not at all. but there is stuff to be done. see you at the DCist happy hour!

International gambling organizations! Mysterious Russian extortionists! A lone wunderkind facing overwhelming odds, and a tale stretching from Phoenix to Costa Rica, with occasional stops in Scotland Yard. It's all right here.

Of course, the locales in said places are all climate-controlled server rooms, and to the layman victory or defeat in this battle would have most easily been detected by how quickly various LEDs were blinking. But even if you only find it half as interesting as I do, it's still a pretty good read.

Alright, it's time to admit it: I'm fixated on Ratatat's Seventeen Years. Catherine got it on a CD sampler; I subsequently downloaded it from iTunes when I was frantically larding my iPod for the plane flight.

Yes, it's the song from those Hummer H2 commercials. But I can't help that. Don't blame Ratatat for creating music that's so perfectly congruous with a hated artifact. The song sounds like the soundtrack to Optimus Prime having sex, then falling asleep. Clearly, this is an artistic statement that deserved to be made, and one that's necessarily compatible with the promotion of monstrous SUVs. Blame the Hummer people who don't understand that the appropriate outlet for machine fetishism is Bjork videos (and trips to Microcenter). You don't have to commit a goddamn truck out of it.

Anyway, Seventeen Years is great, but has anyone heard the rest of the album? Pitchfork seems to have liked it, but the review's awfully written, and not in the usual Pitchfork way. So what's the verdict?