I've finally written up some release notes and cleaned the code up a bit (only a little; it's still a mess). If you'd like to play around with it or use it for your own project, you can get it here.

The code is released under the GPL; images are Creative Commons. It's slightly silly to bother with all these licenses for a 50kb application, I know. I guess my internet deadly sin is vanity (Catherine clearly gets dibs on wrath).

Does any DC reader own a pair of Shure or other aftermarket earphones that I could borrow for an evening? DCist is working on a feature, and we need more pairs to test. I've got ER-6's, I think I can borrow some ER-6i's, and there used to be a pair of Sonys kicking around the apt. But ignoring the biggest name in this market would probably be a bad idea.

Also, I forgot to wear a belt to work today. So, uh, if you're in Crystal City and have a spare, that'd be great, too.

I seem to be incapable of accoplishing much of anything today besides blogging. So here's some more of it. Besides, it's been a while since Catherine's put up one of her baked masterpieces.

Most guys have a some sort of culinary specialty. Sometimes it's pathetic, along the lines of this guy. Sometimes it's useful, like Kriston's famed breakfast tacos. I suppose my specialty is pumpkin pie. It doesn't really hit the masculine or practical notes that I'd prefer, but it's damn tasty. And I only have to make it once or twice a year.

Mom's recipe and associated pics below the cut.

i haven't followed what's going on re the smoking ban in d.c., but here in chicago, it passed the committee and the city council will probably approve it pretty soon. but the observer gives smokers one possible positive outcome to being exiled in the freezing cold while you suck down the sweet nicotine: love. aw.

i have to give d.c. the upper hand on costumes, based on tommy's photos, but just for fun, here are a few from my night.

also, an interesting aside: that black wig is apparently the magical key to getting hit on by the women. who knew? does it make me look like a lesbian? i guess i'll never know.

Speaking of party photos, I've got to say I'm a little surprised by sets like this one. I expected the Blue States Lose crowd to put forward a solid Halloween effort. But to be honest, it looks pretty much like any other New York/LA hipster party — except the participants might be dimly more aware of how ridiculous they look.

Last night was interesting. We made it to a good party, a great party, and a bar. More on the parties in a sec. First, the costumes. Adams Morgan turned out to have the best ones. We met all of the folks pictured on the street, and all in quick succession.

I hope you'll all agree that this is the year's clear winner.

Last night Charles, Matt, Kriston and I headed over to Julian's Halloween party. A good time was had, pictures were taken, schemes were hatched.

A zombie Pope? A zombie Mormon? Sweet zombie Jesus!

halloween party tonight. no real ideas except a cute black bob wig that i bought on a whim. well, i've got the ethers of ideas, but i would appreciate suggestions. what costume can one come up with that involves a bobbed black wig? and is not too slutty?

I know, I know, I'm ridiculously late on this one. But I can't help reemphasizing my love for this Do They Know It's Halloween supergroup single. It works as satire, it works as pop, it works as a halloween party soundtrack. You should really go give it a listen. If you decide to buy it off of iTunes, though, I'd suggest avoiding any of the remixes other than MAYBE the one authored by ex-Unicorns Tha Corn Gangg.

We're not throwing a party this year, but this has still gotten me thinking about a Halloween mix CD. It's harder to come up with one than you'd think (assuming, of course, that you avoid awful and obvious choices like The Monster Mash). Striking a balance between campiness and spookiness is difficult.

Here's what I've got. Suggestions?

• NAHPI - Do They Know It's Halloween?
• Southern Culture On The Skids - Werewolf [taken from a Halloween compilation; it shouldn't really count]
• Bloc Party - Helicopter (Whitey Remix)
• Jeff Buckley - Witches' Rave
• Unicorns - Ghost Mountain
• Flaming Lips - Halloween on the Barbary Coast
• Michael Jackson - Thriller [obviously]

And that's it. Well, okay, if you've got video capabilities, you should really throw "Backstreet's Back" on there, too. But I still I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

everybody's doing it...going to the zunta reader map and register yourselves, bitches!

sorry for the lack of blogging on my part lately. don't worry, i'm not off doing anything fun. i spent the better half of today in a zoning committee meeting down at city hall. on one hand, i felt like a Real Journalist. on another, i wanted to kill myself.

Congrats to the DCeiver, who's subbing for Wonkette through Friday. Looks like he picked a pretty damn good time to take the reins.

So it looks like somebody — I couldn't say who, of course — has put up a Butterstick CafePress store. There's only one design, and it looks like this:

Best of all, the $1 profit margin on the shirts will be donated directly to FONZ! Isn't that nice? Wouldn't FONZ be jerks if they sued whatever dashing man (or woman!) of mystery is responsible for this design? Of course they would.

So Kanishka's officially in the Foreign Service, and will be headed to Pakistan once the new year rolls around. Best of luck to him, of course. He was pretty excited when I saw him at Kriston and Matt's party on Sunday. Pakistan will be lucky to have someone with his talents and enthusiasm. And I'm not just saying that because he now knows how to shoot me.

Also pictured: the lovely Sommer. And me. And, uh, some other guy. Don't get me started on that guy! He's crazy.

Charles has some interesting news. Interesting if you like comic books, anyway.

You probably heard about the Post offering a video podcast. If you're like me you don't own a video ipod and can't stand using iTunes except when absolutely necessary, so you promptly forgot this news. But the segment about the baby panda really is worth watching. He squeaks, you know.

You can download it directly from here, then use QuickTime to watch it, despite QT not naturally recognizing it as a supported filetype.

A lot of military contractors work in Crystal City, and the ads on the Metro reflect that. Instead of ads for firming cream there are ads for fighter jets and night vision goggles. And for this thing — an ugly-looking boat under which are emblazoned the words

THIS IS WHAT LITTORAL DOMINANCE LOOKS LIKE.

Littoral refers to the coastline, apparently. Today, for the first time, the twelve year old in me realized that with the addition of a single letter this word could be made dirty, and therefore hilarious. I chuckled to myself through the gauze of my hangover. It'd be sort of naughty, but the phrase wouldn't really mean anything.

Then I got to work, turned on the radio and learned that the Amazonian (i.e. physically dominant) ex-WNBA player Sheryl Swoopes has come out of the closet in order to promote a lesbian cruise line.

So apparently the universe is as immature as I am. I find this extremely encouraging.

Thanks to DC Blogs I've just discovered Logan Circle News, a site that's doing a great job chronicling the area's recent uptic in crime (worried parents should probably not follow that link). Between this and In Shaw the internet has my neighborhood pretty well covered.

Ah, mid-week happy hours. They always start out so promisingly, as we sip sherry and discuss the prospects for the coming yachting season. Then all of a sudden I've drunk an ocean of beer, it feels like it's 3AM freshman year, and I've resumed my habit of trying to put the "ass" in "iconoclast". Or at least "bombast".

Last night's casualties of my ignorance:

• Piet Mondrian, whose signature work still seems pretty tiresome to me by the light of day. But I forgot that he did stuff like this, which I find genuinely fascinating for reasons that involve torturing cats. Note to self: don't try to talk about art when everyone else at the table knows more about it than you ever will. Next time, try to gently steer the conversation toward TCP/IP networking instead.


• Feminism, which I grossly insulted by suggesting that more men get arrested for sex crimes than women because the male sex drive is greater. A sane discussion of this question is here, but last night I wasn't very good at expressing reasonable reservations about the "rape is solely about power" conventional wisdom. The spectre of reactionary misogyny hangs over all of these chats — did Andrea Dworkin seem crazy because she was crazy or because I'm a sexist asshole? Tough to say. Deciding to table the question in favor of empanadas was probably the right call.


• My friends. You guys are troopers. I promise to try not to be such a colossal jerk in the future.


• Last and least, myself. Today is going to take a turn for the worse when sobriety finally sets in.

Hurry back, Catherine. I'm not sure that your habit of punching me in the arm actually keeps me from embarassing myself. But when you throw water on Yglesias it really helps to distract folks' attention.

I missed it last year, but SchmooCon happens in DC and is (relatively) cheap. And the Schmoo group offers some of the best work on wifi security/pwning teh noobz anywhere. But can I stand spending an entire weekend in a conference room full of people nerdier than myself? Hmm...

A: very awesome. Answers the Governess's question about the Unicorns, too! And no, I haven't listened to it yet. But confidence is high.

(Has everyone already seen this? Cliptip just put it up today, so I assume it's sort of almost newish.)

UPDATE: Man, this is better than I could have hoped. And it really makes me miss the Unicorns.

funny. seth stevenson comes up with a pretty good halloween costume idea, if i a) didn't have any shame b) didn't live in chicago where i would turn blue and die c) could get some friends to do it with me: the dove girls!

i think i came up (ie stole another blogger's last-year idea) with a costume idea, finally. it's a little slutty, but not so much that i feel shame for posting this earlier rant. we'll see if i can find all the components. if it works out: lots of pictures!

for anyone interested (which is, like, all of you, you know it), i've got some new photos up on flickr, mostly of my apartment. they've got captions, in lieu of me posting them on the blog and then writing about them, so go read them! and leave comments! on the photos! or here!

(crossposted at BTD)

Bill Gates doesn't like Blu-Ray, Sony's proprietary DVD replacement technology. He presumably really doesn't like the fact that Blu-Ray seems to be edging out the MS-backed HD DVD in the war for third-party support.

None of that's surprising. But despite his distinct lack of objectivity, Gates is completely right: it doesn't really matter. Optical discs will be a niche product long before the end of the next format's lifecycle. Hard disk storage combined with mature network technology makes discs irrelevant.

It's true that there's a lot to be said for Warren Jackson's famous quote about the bandwidth of physical media — mass-produced discs will continue to hold an advantage in sheer price per gigabyte. But the average consumer is about to see their bandwidth needs level off. A speedy cablemodem coupled with a healthy BitTorrent swarm can already deliver a movie in about as much time as it takes to go to Blockbuster and back. We need faster connections and business support for online distribution of films, but those things are already within reach. After that, the next bandwidth plateau will be on-demand HDTV streaming — a technical problem that pressed discs won't help to solve.

In the very near future I suspect that we'll see devices like this one integrated with consumer routers and cablemodems. Throw a download client daemon onto its tiny brain, an interface for telling it how to start transfers, and maybe a VPN so that you can access it from anywhere. All of a sudden your files are securely stored and available from any place and at any time. You could already hack something like this together for three or four hundred dollars. I expect that within a year or two we'll see a consumer-grade network device with 100 gigs of redundant storage selling for around $250. At that point, what use do we have for discs?

Don't get me wrong: lots of money will be made off of Blu-Ray. Discs will be on the shelves of Best Buy and Blockbuster. They'll still be used for archival purposes. But they will inevitably be eclipsed as a distribution medium. The Blu-Ray/HD DVD format battle promises to be as confusing and irritating as Beta versus VHS was. But this time it's a fight that consumers can safely ignore.

The various subversions of the Jesus Fish adorning people's bumpers are usually pretty off-putting — they're either lame or pointlessly antagonistic or both. But this is great. Background reading here, of course.

This evening I headed over to Vegetate, the new vegetarian restaurant that's opened up around the block from here. There'll be a real review up on DCist later this week (by someone else — probably Hemal), but my quick impression: not that great.

The four of us split two appetizers, which were quite good, although the roasted vegetable appetizer was ridiculously tiny. For the entree, I got the jerked tempeh. I hadn't had tempeh before — turns out it's kind of unpleasant. But even ignoring that, the jerk sauce was weirdly creamy, not at all spicy, and not particularly appealing. The potato latke and greens that came with it were nice, but making fried potato delicious is easy. I also had a glass of lemonade, which was small but tasty. For some reason they provide straws that I'm pretty sure are intended to be used as drink stirrers (seriously). They look pretty and nicely match the tiny glass, but they're extremely irritating to use.

Entree, half an appetizer, a glass of juice and tip set me back $30. Given the small portion sizes and the fact that vegetarian cuisine represents comparatively little ingredient cost, this is kind of a ripoff. Let's compare: add costs for meat and the booze that the restaurant can't yet serve and I'd guess that you're looking at about $50 a plate. You can eat much better than this for that amount of money.

Speaking for the defense: they've just opened, they're just around the corner, the space is beautiful, and their staff was very pleasant. If they become a little more generous and proficient in the kitchen, this place could really take off.

And it's hard not to sympatize with the owners: Shiloh Baptist Church has given them a very hard time. We spoke with a manager/owner after eating and he said that the church has actually been chartering buses to get people to the ABC hearings to oppose the restaurant's license application — yet Shiloh has refused to answer the requests for meetings or discussions made by the restaurant. Shiloh is acting in bad faith, imposing the will of a congregation that primarily lives in Maryland onto a street that badly needs revitalization. This isn't just a difference of opinions — Shiloh's members really ought to be ashamed of themselves. Vegetate didn't impress me, but they deserve the chance to try to impress others.

nice one, skins.

what a busy weekend! i finally have time to sit down for a bit with a beer, wilco on my ipod speaker stereo, and have got 40 minutes to blog before my new favorite crap medical drama, grey's anatomy, comes on.

seriously. i love that show.

what brilliance will pour forth from my nimble typing fingers now that i finally have a moment to sit down and type to my eager audience?

...............

.................................

i know! bullet steez!

yet another chicago bleg: does anybody know of a bar where i can go to watch the redskins? since i've moved here i've caught exactly one game on my noncable tv, and that was, uh, when they played the bears. i'm not a football fanatic, but if i had some free time on sunday i'd really like to watch them. they need my support! hmm. perhaps i will send my question to chicagoist.

The blog was down for a bit — in fact, it looks like much of the internet was. Everything seems to be better now, though.

Personally, I'm looking forward to some downtime of my own. Yesterday was exhausting. Getting a haircut after work was enough to make me ready for bed, but I trudged over to City Bikes anyway and took a bunch of test rides before finally settling on this:

The Jamis Coda Sport. It seems nice enough, and is maybe a little faster than my old bike... but I still miss that thing. It's not just the mountains of filial guilt associated with losing a present from my mom; I'd also gotten very used to it and its quirks. I realize the Jamis's fancy Shimano shifters are classier, but I liked being able to skip up several gears immediately with the old grip shifters. The saddle was a little more comfortable, even after I upgraded the godawful factory default on the Jamis. Most important, of course, is that the old bike was prettier.

I'm sure I'll adjust. For the record, the City Bikes folks were extremely helpful. I paid a little bit of a premium for buying there, but a year's worth of free tuneups makes it seem worthwhile. Everybody there was very nice and knowledgeable. I guess it's easy to be nice when you know the person you're talking to is about to hand you several hundred dollars, but they actually seemed genuine — the salesgirl who helped me with the bike even walked down to their warehouse to check if they had a larger frame for me, then suggested we race back to the shop when I ran into her on my way back from a test ride. Hijinks! Surely that's worth an extra c-note.

The whole experience was a pleasant contrast to Big Wheel in Lyon Village, where the customer service ranges from sunny apathy to confrontational recordstore-clerkism. Okay, I have once had a City Bikes mechanic answer an inquiry about a spoke wrench's price by saying, "For you, it'll end up costing a lot because you don't know how to use it." That was a little prickly. But from the looks of him, I'm pretty sure that the guy in question is Alan Moore, and I love his work, so I'll let it slide.

After fulfilling my duty to consumer culture I headed to DC9 and joined Kriston, Jeremy and Heather to see The Black, of which Jeremy's sister's boyfriend is a member. They played a great set of what I can only characterize as Texas songs. Jeremy and Kriston were in heaven, and I left feeling strangely upbeat for a 25 year-old whose new tendency to get exhausted at 9pm hints strongly at impending lameness.

And that's how I spent my summer vacation. Now it's time to plan for the weekend. Who wants to crash the Howard University Homecoming?

Well, hell. It seems like I just bought this goddamn phone, and now the rumor mill says that a new edition is already on the verge of release. I'd like to say I'll stick with my perfectly-fine phone, but the addition of bluetooth and a quadrupling of connection speed might be too much to pass up.

Pretty fucking boring, huh? Catherine IMed me a message along the lines of "Oh good a Sun and Jin flashback!" But c'mon — that's unlikely to involve anyone getting impaled by mysterious robomechanical and/or undead castaways. A lost wedding ring plotline? You're not really shooting for the "young males" demo this week, are you?

The teaser for next week was irritating. THIS WILL BE THE ONE YOU TALK ABOUT FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON, it promised. ONE OF THESE CASTAWAYS WILL DIE, it said, while showing shots of the main characters — and lingering on the increasingly gangrenous Sawyer. OH WAIT NO, it was actually a shot of Sawyer walking behind a female character who was introduced two weeks ago. I can't remember what her name is, but that's okay: I've got a feeling that that piece information will become useless in about six days anyway.

Veronica Mars continues to get better, and Kristin Bell continues to look hotter. I'm afraid I'm developing a little bit of a crush — I saw an ad for an episode of "Punk'd" this morning that featured her sassily talking back to a fake cop(!), and for once the sight of Ashton Kutcher failed to send me into a murderous rage.

I neglected to do this last week — Catherine's figured out how to use Bittorrent on her own, but I'll keep it up anyway. Here's last week's Veronica Mars (last night's isn't up yet). Here's last week's Lost. And here's the Lost that aired last night. There are 14,000 people in the swarm! This is extremely exciting to me for some reason.

Someone has brought donut holes in to the office this morning. I'm grateful for the free snack (even though they're making me feel pretty sick right now). But I can't approve of the basic donut hole design. The whole genius of the donut is the hole: not only does it allow for even cooking, but it affords more surface area. More surface area means more contact with the oil, which means more fat, which means more deliciousness. The donut hole is doomed to a poorer tastiness:mass ratio than its larger cousin.

One of the few things I remember from college math is that as a conventional geometric object is projected into more dimensions, a greater proportion of the points contained within that object exist on its surface. This seems a little counterintuitive, particularly since you can cram an infinite number of geometric points into any given space. But you'll just have to take my word for it (particularly since I don't remember how to understand the math that provides the justification): the ratio of points on a sphere's surface to those in its interior is higher than the ratio of points on a circle's circumference to those in its interior. This relationship holds until you get to seven dimensions and change, at which point it maxes out and begins to decline.

Two important conclusions follow. One, multi-dimensional string theory may hold the key to snack foods of unimagined delectability (the ideal hyperdonut exists in 7.25695 dimensions). And two, the donuts in Homer Simpson's 2D universe must be less tasty than those in our own. Dude must really like donuts.

She did kind of ask for it.

this will be of no interest to pretty much anyone but i thought i would ask anyways:

i was assigned to the arts&culture beat for my reporting class. we're writing exclusively about the far north side - rogers park, andersonville, etc (i think - my geography of the city is still shady). soooo if you have any tips on stories or good contacts in those areas, i beg of you, please email me! i will IMMORTALIZE YOU IN THE PAGES OF MY CLASS'S NEWS WEB SITE. fame and fortune, i tell you, fame and fortune.

But today's Post features a rambling column from Courtland Milloy that mentions the Butterstick campaign approvingly.

Thanks to Melissa of DCist for pointing it out.

thanks to the magic of the internets, i have an extra ticket to tomorrow's sold-out new pornographers show at the metro. $20. anybody game? just email me.

Now that we officially have a grievance, who feels like applying some arts and craftiness to a butterstick tee?

(via Make:Blog)

Our buddy Jeff now has RSS. Yay, hurrah, etc. Seriously, go add that feed. Your "Wacky Chemist Blogs" folder is feeling ignored.

I really hate getting mail. Sure, when I'm expecting a new lithium-ion powered something or other it's sort of fun, but mostly the mail just brings bad news. Car decal renewal notices. Guilt-laden postcards from mom. And, most recently, collection notices.

The creditor in question is CogniDial, and they and I have been through this before. I used their cheap phone service to call Catherine when she was in Italy, way back in 2002. They had some sort of automatic billing thing, for which I used a credit card that expired without my noticing. Much later some not-so-nice folks from a collection agency in San Luis Obispo informed me that I owed $45. After some tooth-gnashing, I ponied up the dough.

It was my fault, but I still made a point of never using their service again. For one thing, I didn't have to make any international calls. For another, I'd hate to be denied a mortgage because of another misunderstanding with some fly-by-night internet telecom.

Now it's much later, and I'm told I somehow owe them $40some dollars again. I'm starting to seriously consider whether they're just shaking me down. I've left an irked message with the collection people, and an irate one with CogniDial, but what can I do? It's hard to convince nameless functionaries that you don't owe their bosses money. The computer says so, even though I asked not-so-nicely to be removed from the computer after the last fiasco. I had a similar experience in college when my phone started reliably ringing every Saturday morning, then playing a recorded message telling me that I owed money and warning me not to attempt to deny that I was [name other than my own]. Reality eventually helped me win back the right to sleep it off. But this time the only reality is that some people are getting paid to believe that I owe $40, while my own conviction is funded solely by righteous indignation — which is plentiful, but likely to produce poorer results.

so, is there, like, anything we can do to not get the bird flu? i'm starting to get a little worried. i wash my hands about 16 times a day and i take my vitamins. do i have to start wearing masks as well? and we don't have to worry about eating fowl, do we? cause i just ate like half a roast chicken and i would hate to have to give that up.

another day, another spinning class, another crappy musical playlist. highlight of the hour: hmm, it would have to be either that sappy corrs song or the five-minute out-of-the-saddle uphill climb set to jason mraz IN THE DARK. you don't know from inspiring.

sigh. at least at this point i've gone through most of the instructors so i know which ones aren't likely to cause me to think homicidal spinning thoughts. and i know i bitch a lot about it, but it's such an addictive workout, even if the music is crap and i can't see my water bottle and send it skidding across the studio floor. to wit: i hadn't gone running in a long, long time, but this weekend, after spinning for nearly two weeks, i was able to run five miles in just over 40 minutes. them's results.

one thing i don't think i'll be doing anytime soon, though: this, which i saw advertised in a poster at the gym. climbing two billion stairs? no thank you.

unrequited narcissism is now the #3 hit on google for "shrinking boobs."

due to this post. for those who care, the shrinkage seems to have stabilized. if only it would start on the stomach.

okay, i know "halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it," but when you see costumes like these, you know shit is getting out of hand. you should just give up on the entire pretense of having a costume and dress yourself in a saran wrap mini skirt or something. i mean, the slutty ref? SERIOUSLY? and WHY DO YOU HAVE TO GO SLUT UP STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE? fine, rape my childhood. that's cool.

i had hoped to be leela, but frankly, i don't think any of my school friends have seen an episode of "futurama" in their lives, so the joke might be lost. any other suggestions?

UPDATE: quote from the thread:

I love how any uniform can be made into a Halloween costume if you cut off six inches and throw on some fishnets.

I'm skanky fast food girl! Skanky chef! Skanky doctor!

I want someone to get a pink suit, cut off the skirt and go as skanky Laura Bush.

i forgot to mention that i went to see nada surf's show on friday at the metro. the show overall was pretty good - it was actually quite good the first 2/3, then lost all steam when the band decided to play all its incredibly slow, lullaby-ish songs for the last part. but it was still a good time, especially since matthew caws is adorable, and the bassist, though he is rocking terrible, terrible disgusting dreads, was fun to watch as well.

anyway, since i went to the show on my own i had the experience of eavesdropping on absolutely everybody around me, which was kind of fun. and what i discovered that many, many people seemed to be there solely in hopes of hearing "popular," nada surf's hit single from, like 1998. you know the song - the video got heavy rotation on MTV, and the song consists of spoken lyrics about rules for breaking up with your boyfriend with a chorus of "i'm a quarterback/my mom says i'm a catch," etc. it's a fun song, but the thing is, it's TOTALLY misrepresentative of all of nada surf's sound. nada surf is just good, solid polished pop with thoughtful lyrics and pretty harmonies. pretty straightforward guitar-driven stuff.

so anyway, a lot of people that i was listening to were seriously pissed that nada surf didn't play "popular." which, well, i don't understand. one, the song is like 7 years old. two, pretty much all of their other songs are better. three, are you seriously paying like $20 to hear one song that you liked when you were 17 and you're pissed the band doesn't play it? but i was wondering if in general bands like nada surf purposefully don't play their one hit single and if they should feel obligated to, especially if they have a catalog of material that excels far beyond the hit single. i've seen radiohead play "creep" twice in my times seeing the band, but most of the times they don't play it, not that they have to any longer - i mean, they're effing radiohead. but when i saw them in the years like '96-'98, people around me would be pissed if they didn't play "creep"/utterly ecstatic if they did. not that nada surf is radiohead. not at all. but judging by some of the audience's reaction, they were 'bout ready to riot because they didn't get to hear "popular." just, what is up with that? why do people feel like they deserve an old hit single that's not at all the kind of music that the band is really about?

anyway, whatever. it kind of pissed me off. i recommend that you go listen to three free songs on nada surf's site. they're purty.

Some DCist commenters are saying that Miles O'Brien mentioned Butterstick by name on CNN this morning — but the official panda-related video and transcript don't offer confirmation. Personally, I suspect a coverup.

You should still watch the video though — the cub is pretty goddamn adorable, whatever its name.

For those interested, my review of Saturday's New Pornographers show is up at DCist. Behold the fruits of taking notes at a concert like a complete and utter dork.

So, um... is this really a selling point?

"Pomegranate is the only juice that promises a decline that's both lengthy and lonely. Bury your loved ones — with the power of Pom!"

this is sure to rankle the cockles (i don't think that even makes sense) of anyone who is above the age of 25, but still: i felt superold tonight. and it is a weird, weird, sensation.

i was hanging out with my neighbor, his girlfriend and their friend, before i went out to a bar with some friends from school. the neighbor and co are all lovely, lovely people. very nice, funny, etc., and graduated in 2004 from their respective schools. we're all drinking beers, catching the last half of the uva-fsu game (HELL YEAH), and i'm telling the neighbor's girlfriend (whom i had not previously met) about my grad program. she asks me if i went straight from undergrad into graduate school, and i explained that i was three years out of undergrad - spent a year in italy, then two years working in publishing, then came to northwestern. she looks at me and goes, "yeah, i was thinking that you did look a lot older."

uhh.

yes, ancient wrinkly catherine, who is rarely at a loss for words, was then at a loss for words. must be my failing 25-year-old memory. sorry, 22-year-old wunderkid. in ALL OF TWO TO THREE YEARS you will understand why i was a little put off.

just wanted to say that it is frankly embarrassing and humiliating to be attending a premiere journalism school at the same time that a person like judith miller is breathing and living and calling herself a journalist. and everybody, EVERYBODY, at medill knows it.

also have had like 10 beers at the time of writing this, but still. screw her.

It's been a while since I did anything here besides bitch about work. My poor, beloved tech category has been suffering in particular. Let's do something about that. Here's a silly little hack designed to help you avoid the more pointless parts of the workday. This one is pretty sneaky. I like it.

Meetings are one of the most godawful aspects of the cubicled life. For me they're usually a tense internal struggle between keeping my mouth shut so that the meeting will end quicker, and piping up in order to steer the conversation away from initiatives that are likely waste my time in the future and/or destroy the company.

But sometimes silence isn't enough to make the gathering end, and you badly want to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Wouldn't it be nice to borrow a page from the annals of sitcom hackery and have a friend call your cellphone at a predetermined time? "I'm sorry... I have to take this," you say with a grave look on your face, before heading to Starbuck's. If anyone asks, mumble something about a medical situation, everything turning out to be fine, and not wanting to get into the details. Works every time.

The only problem is finding a friend up to the duty. Fortunately, your computer is the very best friend you have.

Sorry for the lack of blogging. It's 9:01 PM, and I'm about to head home from work. And that's only because I've run into a problem that will take enough hours to resolve that we'd miss our deadline even if I stayed.

Have I mentioned that everything — everything — related to Oracle, besides the actual database server, sucks hugely? Oh mighty googlers of the future: don't succumb to the siren call of the OraOleDb client. It'll just throw unhandled exceptions when you least expect it and make you recode your entire application.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

this totally ruins my trip home from november 21-27. (unless i get drunk with all you all, which i better.)

UPDATE: OH HOLY LORD OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND ADORABLE: i highly recommend that you watch this. butterstick, you've gotten so big!

the new cardigans song is pretty pretty. check it out at stereogum.

sawyer is totally going to have to get his arm amputated, isn't he?

UPDATE: an interesting image comparing the others to a few familiar faces from the last ep.

update on the noisy upstairs neighbor: up until this very moment, NUN has been the picture of quiet neighborliness. there's barely even been any walking. but right now, i am convinced that NUN is doing some combination of the following:

1. running laps
2. juggling small boulders, and by the sound of it, dropping many of them
3. running laps with a small child, due to some strange pitter patter sound that is accompanying NN's footsteps
4. harboring a small whale that enjoys flopping from side to side

seriously. what. the. fuck. could NUN be doing? there is no way normal apartment movements cause these kind of sounds.

in other news, i took ogged's advice and have started sleeping (very peacefully) with my earplugs in. all has been well except for one terrifying moment last night where i adjusted my left earplug and PUSHED IT ALL THE WAY IN MY EAR. the next five minutes were spent frantically racing around my apartment, digging in my ear only to push the plug in further, and imagining explaining the situation to the doctor at the ER and/or living as an earplug outcast, rejected by society for the bit of foam lodged in my ear canal. thankfully, a pair of eyebrow tweezers saved the day. but it was scary there for a little bit.

yes, i am a very special person, thank you.

....ok, i have to add a #5: gliding back and forth on a skateboard.

SERIOUSLY?!

UPDATE: #6 - dumping marbles on the floor...?

frank ahrens discusses the future of journalism technology in the post today, in both an article (referencing a wall street journal size change different from the asian wall street journal tabloid format change that i mentioned earlier) and online chat. the article discusses newspapers trying to become smaller or lighter to offset printing costs, and the chat reflects on the possibility of electronic newspapers that would elminate print editions completely.

they're kind of interesting, except for the obligatory retarded reference to how bloggers are idiots who get everything wrong and true, brave newspaper journalists are the ones who must right the wrongs.

This post of Kriston's reminded me of something that terrifies me — something that embodies a nightmarish vision of a future that I would prefer to avoid. One in which all banter between myself and my middleaged friends occurs in French. It makes me want to start pricing motorcycles. Fast ones, with poor cornering ability.

I didn't take French in high school. I took Latin. In college my Echols status got me out of the language requirement. I've picked up some Italian since then — enough that, with sufficient funds, I can survive on my own in that harsh wasteland for literally days at a time. But any discussion of my "language skills" is far more likely to revolve around compilation than conjugation.

So maybe it's just that I'm ignorant (clearly I am). Maybe it's lingering childhood resentment for my parents' secret dinnertable code. Maybe it's the imprecise instrument I'm using. But whenever I drag myself from Salon or The New Yorker or some lefty comment thread to translate some alleged bon mots on Babelfish, the results are just awful. Like, sitcom awful. Garfield awful, even. What's the French word for "banal", anyway?

Despite this, the farce that is my career has yet to come crashing down around me. But then, it's only 9:40. I'll keep you posted.

more lessons from j-school: i am apparently quite the natural at coming up with headlines. who knew? i'm going to take pride in this accomplishment because a) no one else is good at it and b) i suck donkey balls at everything else.

continued update on my spinning classes, since you're all so fascinated: since the original class disaster, where we barely broke a sweat while spinning uselessly in the dark in a black hole of twangy 70s rock, i've been to a bunch more classes and they are all excellent. i nearly fell down the stairs after the last one. not being able to walk is a badge of workout honor, i guess.

the bad news: since i've started working out again, i've gone down a half cup size. in my boobs, in case that was unclear. i discovered this during a totally humiliating trip to victorias secret this weekend to buy a new bra. i was all like, hey saleslady, i'll take this size! she's all like, uh, looking doubtful, are you sure? i'm like yeah, i've been this size forever! five minutes later i pop out of the dressing room and sheepishly inform her i need something smaller. the shame of my shrinking boobs.

if someone could market a drug wherein you work out and all the weight from your butt instead shoots itself through your veins to your chest, that would be awesome.

I just met Mrs. Vir/gin/ia. She works in this office, apparently (hence the googleproofing), and just got back from competing in the Mrs. America pageant in Florida. Sadly, she didn't place.

I figured she was probably sick of conversations about what her talent was, so I didn't ask. But based on our brief interaction and my time in this office, I suspect her talent may be remaining chipper in the face of soul-crushing tedium. It's certainly impressive, but I can see how the judges might not "get" it.

I can't say that I understand the idea behind the Mrs. America contest. Isn't the point of a beauty pageant, in the abstract, to identify the most fit physical specimen? It's eugenics for people who like small dogs. How can you mash that institution together with another that expressly forbids the directed procreation necessary to capitalize on it? How are we supposed to construct the tiara-clad master race that one presumes to be the pageant organizers' object? It's all very confusing.

Wonkette picked up my Google Maps Metro hack a little ahead of schedule, so I've pushed this sucker up to its final resting place — surprise surprise, it's DCist — and put up a forwarding notice.

Anyway, if anyone was biding their time to link to it, now you can go nuts. It's also had some bugfixes applied. There'll be an announcement on DCist later today if you want to trash me in a higher-profile venue.

Over at In Shaw, Mari notes that the neighborhood has been seeing a significant increase in crime — one that I was oblivious to prior to my bike getting taken yesterday. But looking through the Logan Circle Yahoo Group archives for the past week is discouraging. Some of the robberies were at gunpoint; several happened with bystanders present. With Catherine (and now my bike) gone, I find myself walking around alone a lot more than before. Maybe I'll take some time at lunch to gmail myself all my credit card info, and the phone numbers I would have to call to cancel them.

Also: turns out there is a reason for the city's bike registration system — but it just doesn't have anything to do with getting back stolen property. Citypaper article here.

Sorry to fixate on all of this. I could write a post explaining what terrible, terrible people you all are for having the day off from work, but I'm not sure you'd enjoy it as much as I would.

Well, my bike just got stolen. Again. I had locked it up outside of Logan Hardware and gone in to buy some oil for the chain. My cable lock wasn't the most secure in the world, but I couldn't have been inside for more than ten minutes, it was a busy street in the middle of the day, and I locked it to a lamppost that didn't look like it was going anywhere.

I stalked around the block for 30 minutes or so, literally shaking with anger. Ran into some cops who repeatedly scolded me for not having registered it, then took down my information for the hell of it. I don't particularly like my odds.

Oh, and did I mention that yesterday my laptop broke? Yeah, one of the fans has died and it now spontaneously shuts down from overheating.

This has turned into a very expensive weekend.

UPDATE: Yup, no mercy from the insurance people. And they were jerks on the phone. On the upside, they called me back within 6 hours of my initial phone call. If you value speed over usefulness, Traveler's gets my thumbs-up.

Remember that DC Metro Google Maps hack that I posted? Well, I've finished it. You can now use it to create your own maps, get directions, and do geocoding. I think it's pretty slick. Have a look here and let me know if you run into any problems.

i was recently added as a contact by this person, a 23-year-old girl who finds hairy women (and their arms) to be sexy.

this confuses me. my arms are not particularly hairy. right? witness this photo. my baby fine blond hair on my arm is nowhere to be seen. it is practically invisible!

then why would i be added by somebody who finds photos like this attractive? (not that there's anything wrong with hairy arms. but the sexual aspect is...weird. right? it's weird, isn't it?)

now i am full of doubt.

they're teaching kids poor journalism already! witness this article. it is hysterical. it is relentlessly upbeat. it makes an event sound like an amazing ocassion. it is about one of the worst days in my life. too long of a story. i love medill already, but that event was an effing disaster.

i did get an ethiopian dinner out of it, though. and for anyone who's worried that this blog will further devolve into me citing the ways in which chicago is superior to d.c., well, the district's tibs still hold first place by a long shot.

Laptops are breaking the $400 barrier, huh? Wow.

(Not that I'm complaining.)

hey, want to know how to become an unmotivated fatass? i have an answer for you: run a marathon! seriously!

i ran the marine corps marathon almost a year ago, crossing the finish line in a time of approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes. to train, i had been running 15-30 miles every week for five or so months. i was probably in some of the best shape of my life. i had cut out most alcohol; i was getting good sleep; i was drinking gallons and gallons of water. clif bars ruled my life, and i felt pretty good.

and then i became stay puft.

after getting through the marathon, i barely worked out again for an entire year. i tried the running thing again, honestly, but without an attainable goal i just couldn't drag myself out to do it. my running partners and fitness team had disappeared with the marathon training. and generally, i figured, hey! i just ran a marathon! i'm allowed to be lazy for a while. before i know it, a while had turned into 12 months. the only thing that prevented me from becoming hurley-sized was being blessed with a somewhat-enviable metabolism and the fact that i walked everywhere, including a mile to and from work every day.

so anyway, when i came to chicago, i figured newish life, new gym! i signed up at the chicago sweatshop, which seems great so far. adequate equipment, mostly gay guys so no gross ogling, and, best of all: lots of spinning classes! i heart spinning, as cheesy as it may be. a few years back i did spinning for an entire summer, and it's a kickass workout.

anyway, i took a spinning class last night for the first time at the new gym. we all saddled up, as it were, and the instructor told us to get pumped, warm up, find our pace, several other fitness class cliches, etc. i was spinning happily along and imagining how great my thighs were going to look if only i could stop eating boxes and boxes of kraft mac and cheese.

until my instructor a) turned out the lights b) put on a 45-minute soundtrack of southern roots rock.

for the ENTIRE CLASS we biked in the dark or near-dark, listening to the likes of CCR and other illustrious groups. "um, is this weird?" i wondered to myself, trying to gauge others' reactions. of course i couldn't, because we were in the FUCKING DARK. the only thing i could see was the enormous stereo system with its red, yellow and green blinking lights, which kind of made me feel like i was biking through space. in a bad 70s movie. while someone was yelling "CLIMB THE HILL FEEL IT NOW BURN YEAH!" at me.

i was scared.

but i'm going back tonight. i think it's a different instructor. maybe i'll actually be able to see her face this time.

last night, after grabbing a couple of beers with a friend, i went home and dove into my sweet, sweet bed for some sweet, sweet sleep. much-needed sleep, as school requires me to wake up at 6:45 every day, work for eight hours straight, and get home at 5. so, the sleep. i like it. it helps with the animals in churches reporting.

but horror: at 4 a.m., ominous clomping started resonating throughout my apartment. i knew right away what it was - my upstairs neighbor, trodding around. i'd heard him/her many times before. i don't begrudge them walking around - our floors are squeaky, and you have to get from the bathroom to the kitchen to the bedroom and back somehow, after all. i'm not expecting noiseless creepy ghost gliding.

but at 4 a.m. on a friday morning? AND FOR TWO HOURS STRAIGHT? i swear to god, it was like my neighbor had put on a pair of 20 lb. hiking boots and trod a rut in their floor. i tried everything to block it out. i put on the fan to create some white noise even though it was like 40 degrees out; i put in my shitty $1 earplugs from the 9:30 club. nothing worked. i even, and oh my god, i sound like an 85-year-old crank, took my broom out of the closet and banged it repeatedly on the ceiling. NOTHING.

what the fuck could they possibly have been doing? why are you clomping around at 4 a.m.? why are you wearing enormous clompy shoes while you do it? why do you hate me? why did you run down the apartment stairs at 5 a.m., leading me to believe you'd gone off to do your clomping on a street corner, only to come back 15 minutes later?

what's my recourse here for dealing with this kind of situation? do i leave a passive-aggressive note in my neighbor's mailbox if it happens again? do i storm up the stairs in my pjs and zit cream to berate them? or do i seethe silently until i can't contain it anymore and go beat them senseless with my broom?

As many of you are no doubt aware, some of my so-called friends have recently invented a hurtful new nickname for me. It came about as an intolerant reaction to a personal preference I expressed at our last get-together. A preference which, I should emphasize, I did not choose, but which seems as perfectly natural to me as it seems apalling to others.

But it's not the nickname that upsets me. If my friends can't accept me for who I am, so be it. I can take it. No, what really galls me is the hypocrisy displayed by my tormentors, as many quietly confided to me in private that they have the same feelings — and, on more than one occasion, indelicately asked me to help them pursue those feelings.

I can only assume that the abuse being directed at me is born of a profound sense of self-loathing. What are you people afraid of? Being happy? Being yourself? Or can you just not stand the thought of telling dad?

Well, I hope all you manage to work it out. I really do. But I refuse to be ashamed by the prejudices of your misguided Texan culture. Frankly, I feel sorry for you.

Well, almost. Dell home has the Canon SD400 for $263; they've also got the SD300 for $206. They're both very tiny and are supposed to take pretty good pictures. The difference seems to be a megapixel and perhaps some very slight image quality differences. I think that's enough of a reason for the splurge, although if anyone feels strongly that I'd be better off blowing that $60 on videogames, please let me know.

UPDATE: I pulled the trigger, and an SD400 should be winging its way to me shortly. And yeah, I went with Dell, despite the warnings. It's true that I've been through lengthy waits getting my orders in the past, but that's the worst Dell-related headache that I've encountered. And I'm not in any hurry.

Some light googling for The Turn Of The Screw (prompted by last night's episode of Lost) turned up a pleasant surprise: free ghost story ebooks from Amazon. Yeah, these are all out of copyright and therefore already available via Project Gutenberg. But it's still nice to have it packaged as an ebook — the format almost makes reading on a PDA pleasant.

Oh, and after dragging my uncultured ass through some plot synopses, it seems like the book probably doesn't have many implications for Lost other than a rededication to spooky ambiguity — which we already have plenty of, thanks.

But hell, I'll read it anyway, breaking my longstanding rule of avoiding all literature that isn't directly related to contemporary television shows.

The torrent for this week's episode of Lost can be found here.

The torrent for this week's episode of Veronica Mars isn't up yet, but I'll post it here when it becomes available.

And if you prefer your Lost catching-up to come in text form, head over to DCeiver's place for a full and hilarious recap. Catch it now before TWoP snatches him up and forces him to expand each of these summaries to 20,000 in-joke-ridden words.

UPDATE: Catherine found an S2E02 Veronica Mars torrent here.

Wolfson posted this link in a thread over at unfogged, and it seemed interesting enough to pass along. The gist of it: Tom Cruise may carry a genetic defect that could/has affected his ability to give his wives viable pregnancies. Don't follow the link to the photos on that metafilter post if you're easily upset.

If this is true, it's sad. It kind of takes the wind out of the sails of my Cruise-hatred, delicately balanced as it is between intense loathing for a Scientology advocate and sympathy for a guy who appears to have had a pretty tough first act.

Here's hoping that Cruise isn't the father, and that Holmes was artificially inseminated with L. Ron Hubbard's frozen sperm in an elaborate church ceremony. Not only would this be entirely plausible, it'd also go a long way to bringing moral clarity back to my homicidal hatred of celebrity culture.

a few scattered thoughts behind the cut. yes, sorry, remiss in the blogging lately. i'm busy, writing about budgets and animals in churches and what have you, etc. not to whine, or anything. i knew i'd be busy. it's not like i thought i was signing up for a mediterranean cruise or anything. but i am missing the ability to blog at the drop of a hat.

anyway, unrelatedly: anyone who can whip me into shape to use flash, dreamweaver and improve my knowledge of photoshop will be vastly rewarded. or point me towards things that can do so. email.

Well, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has just been awarded, and yet again it's gone to somebody other than my friend Jeff.

Seriously, what's the problem here, Jeff? Get your ass in gear.

Anyway, the winners received the prize for inventing and refining a reaction called metathesis, which is apparently a big-deal reaction. I assume that's some sort of formal classification.

I've got a review of last night's show up at DCist. To be honest, it wasn't a particularly review-worthy show — good but not great, with nothing particularly unusual happening. But I went to the trouble of bringing a pad and pen and jotting down notes throughout the show like a complete dork. So it's getting a review, goddamn it.

Also, it was nice to run into Sommer, Natalya and Audrey at the show (as promised in comments!). So let's try this again: Architecture in Helsinki on Friday. Who's going?

I've coming looking for your wisdom, o great and powerful internet. Since I can no longer borrow Catherine's digital camera without involving Fedex, I think it's time to buy my own. I know that a lot of you are excellent photographers who are experts at this kind of stuff, so I'm hoping you can help cut down on how much of dpreview.com I need to wade through.

So here's what I'm looking for (besides the obvious stuff like USB2). I'd be grateful for any suggestions you've got.

• Something that can shoot in low light.


• Something pocket-sized (I do have a somewhat liberal definition of this).


• Something that can shoot photos in medium-to-quick succession.


• Something that produces pretty good pictures without expert knowledge — but also something with enough options to keep a one-semester-of-high-school-photo wannabe like myself from blowing my savings on a digital SLR in two months.


• Something that, ideally, costs less than $350. Cheaper is better, and if there's a last-gen camera that's worthwhile and can be had for $150, I'll opt for that.


• Extra bonus point: something that can take a lithium ion OR AA/AAA batteries. This is pretty unimportant, though.


• Extra extra bonus point: something with accessories that'll let it talk to my PDA, either via bluetooth or some other interface (in case I feel the need to blow additional money).

Anybody have any suggestions? I'm guessing 3 or 4 megapixels are enough to keep me happy. But if someone can make a case for a higher-res camera that eschews optical zoom for decent digital (and is consequently smaller), I could be convinced.

Via Justin, I see that Microsoft has handed Peter Jackson a sack of cash to lend his name to the upcoming Halo movie. Isn't that adorable?

I can't tell you what a kick I get out of videogame creators' complete inability to differentiate between financial and creative success. Bungie is easily one of the worst offenders — just look here. A whole jokey cult, invented and nurtured by Bungie, has sprung up around cheesy cartoon depictions of the Halo series' protagonist, the Master Chief. Who is — guess what — a clear ripoff of the unnamed marine from Doom. The reason for this persistent aesthetic? A) because you don't have to animate faces that go inside helmets and B) keeping the uniform consistently colored has technical and gameplay payoffs.

But what about the game's actual plot? Well, it's about a personality-free cyborg with a sassy computer sidekick, a gruff sargeant, a setting ripped off from Larry Niven, and marauding aliens. It's all highly original.

Some people just can't understand that they were in the right place at the right time. The truth is that nobody gives a shit about Halo's story; or at least, nobody ought to. People like the game because it did a decent job of being a console-based multiplayer FPS after Goldeneye primed the mainstream pump. Some of them play enough and are dumb enough to start thinking that the game's aesthetic is more than a placeholder. A number of those people seem to work at Bungie.

I don't blame anybody for cashing out when Hollywood executives ask to buy a storyline that read "PLOT GOES HERE" until 3 days before the game shipped. All I ask is that they try to be a little more quiet about it. Let the goddamn movie come out, pay for itself, then gracefully fade into the annals of cinematic embarassment. You're not going to fool anybody except the fanboys. And they were fooled by default.

No, not here. But John A (creator of ScaryGoRound) has a pretty funny post up on his blog.

Wow. The daytime blogging has been suffering, hasn't it? Catherine's stuck without an internet connection for most of the day, and I'm on a project that, unbeknownst to the MBAs, was destined to be 12 months late the moment the contract was signed. Also, you know: adjusting to new lifestyle, lack of sleep, existential malaise, etc etc. All of the usual blogger complaints. Sometimes I go through phases where writing code is much easier than writing English. This is one of them.

But since the blog apologia is a truly pathetic genre, allow me partially redeem this post with a personal note: is anybody else going to tonight's Nada Surf show at the Black Cat? If so, lemme know. Also, Architecture in Helsinki on Friday. Let's co-rock.

courtesy of preshrunk.

Pitchfork loved it. I was skeptical — not too long ago it seemed like Montreal could do no musical wrong, so I downloaded Wolf Parade's last two EPs and was unimpressed.

But Apologies to the Queen Mary is good, and you should get it. Two things, though:

1. Who mixed the drums? You guys should probably fire him. Also, the guy who miked the drums. And the guy who sold you the kit. It sounds like somebody's pounding on an unusually flimsy cardboard box. And do you even own a bass drum? On some songs this works out fine, but on the uptempo numbers you could really use a driving rhythm section. Maybe I've just been prejudiced by all these recent dance rock albums; I donno. But the album frequently sounds anemic.


2. We need to set up some sort of background-check system for young men buying Modest Mouse albums, so that it can be determined prior to purchase that they're not planning to pursue careers as rock vocalists. Cause this shit has gotten out of hand: approximately every new front man in indie rock now apes either Isaac Brock or David Byrne. Oddly, with Wolf Parade it's not to conceal an inability to actually sing. But they still do it. It's not super-irritating, it's just a little more boring than it could be.

It may surprise you to learn that since Catherine left I have played exactly zero games of Halo. In fact, I've barely played any video games at all. Instead I've been immersing myself in a number of tech projects (one of which should launch later this week). But that can only last for so long. Soon enough I'll ease myself back into the lifestyle of a dissolute twentysomething guy.

On that note, have I mentioned how much I love the WWE? Sure, I don't watch it as much as I used to. But tonight's broadcast of RAW is some sort of three-hour spectacular celebrating the program's return to the USA network, and it's providing an excellent way to reacquaint myself.

Tonight the backstage is packed with luminaries of yesteryear. Tatanka? Hacksaw Jim Duggan? Ted "The Million Dollar Man" DiBiase? Yup, they're all here. Hell, Ric Flair is even still wrestling, if you can believe that. The sight of his overtanned hide flopping around evokes both nostalgia and disgust, like the "salmon loaf" entree that my parents inexplicably served during my childhood.

There's something very compelling about professional wrestling. No, I don't think it's the homoeroticism. No, I don't think it's because I'm stupid. Well, it's not just because of that, anyway. It's that it's a very specific and unappreciated dramatic art, with its own tricks, terminology, traditions and code of honor. It's only fake in the way that a circus performance is fake: there are real feats being performed. But they may not be the ones you think; and (of course), despite the stated motivation they're actually being done for no particular reason. Other than spectacle, that is.

There's a minimalist aesthetic working in wrestling's favor, too. The in-ring promos are just two people playing broad archetypes, with perhaps one prop. The crowd — which, yes, is in on the joke — adds its contribution, not only with boos and cheers, but, in recent years, with specific, formalized chants. Greek chorus, anyone?

Finally, there's the industry's seedy underbelly. The backstage fights; the injuries; the predatory business dealings made possible by the WWE's monopoly. And, of course, the drama is aided by the fact that seemingly every performer is or has been addicted to painkillers (or worse). Anybody else see this? If you haven't, keep an eye out the next time you're at Blockbuster and in the mood for a harrowing documentary. It's fascinating, I swear.

The quality of the product goes in cycles. I tend to get bored after a few weeks. But when a show is well-booked and well-executed, it's pretty goddamn entertaining. I'm not saying it isn't stupid. I'm just saying that more thought goes into this particular type of stupidity than you might imagine.

crapola. when i went to the dreaded ticketmaster to buy new pornographer tickets, i found out the show was sold. out. nearly three weeks in advance. and i thought i was being clever, buying tickets this early. THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN D.C.! mostly because chicago has about 10 billion times the hipsters that d.c. does, but still.

i am sad. can anyone help a sister out?

I know Harvey Danger has some fans around these parts. You might be interested to hear that the band is giving its latest album away. Not streaming, not samples — the whole thing. Here are their reasons why; here's the download. I hope this pays off for them.

This blogospheric singularity stuff is getting out of hand. Don't get me wrong, I find it all pretty interesting. But it's not a new idea, nor is it being pursued very thoroughly. Nerds have talked about this stuff for ages. I haven't ever bothered to delve into it very deeply, but even I realize that the current discussions (seemingly led by Kevin Drum) are fairly superficial (no offense, Kevin). This seems to be because they're being shaped by a single book. So, because I can't help myself, a few quick points in response to Drum's latest:

• The word "singularity", at least in the formulations I'm familiar with, is used in a technical sense to denote a moment in history beyond which the future cannot be predicted. This is commonly expected to be the rise of machine intelligence, or the digitization of human consciousness — it doesn't really matter. The point of the term is that the consequences of the event for society cannot be predicted. This is where the name comes from — the analogy that provides the name is to matter that has entered a black hole (where its information was thought to be lost). Stephen Hawking has made this analogy probably incorrect, but still: trying to figure out the singularity's implications is incoherent by definition. That isn't stopping anyone, of course, so let's just plunge ahead.


• Drum quotes Kurzweil citing Libet's experiments showing that motor planning for a voluntary action precedes our perception of the corresponding volition. I'm actually very sympathetic to Kurzweil's interpretation of this evidence, and think it does strongly suggest that traditional conceptions of free will are wrong. But it's worth pointing out that further investigation has shown that people may be able to, at the last minute, "short circuit" the motor program that formed before they become aware of their impulse. Some people grab onto this milliseconds-long window as a refuge for free will. I'm not a fan of that position, but (last I checked) the debate over Libet's work isn't as clear-cut as the quoted Kurzweil indicates. Now, if you consider consciousness to be an epiphenomenon, the problems presented by Libet's work recede. But then you have to decide what free will means in the context of a consciousness that is caused but doesn't cause anything else. I'm okay with that, but most people don't like it much.


• Finally (and most germane to Drum's post), I'll point out that "if a) free will proves to be an illusion then b) humans will give up and cease trying to preserve their existence" isn't very well-justified. Drum realizes this, and admits that it wouldn't be a free-will-style choice. But he doesn't offer any compelling reason for the initial doubt — why should out hard-wired behavior lead us to existential defeat? If conscious will is out of the picture, what's going to counteract a strong inbuilt drive for self-preservation? So far as I can tell, the "give up" hypothesis really has nothing going for it.

Anyway, it's all probably irrelevant: as always when thinking about free will, the most important thing is to ignore your conclusions. If anything, that's what we're hard-wired to do.

Or is there really a bone medication called "Boniva" (pronounced "bone-eeva")?

Yup. It's the second option.

How many tens of thousands of dollars do you think were spent coming up with that name? And have I mentioned that I do freelance brand consulting? C'mon, just throw out a prospective product. I'll brand the fuck out of it.