"jimmy down the well" and "sheffield shanty" from monkey swallows the universe. via 3hive. i have never heard a band who wanted to be belle and sebastian more.

"pull shapes" from the pipettes, via my brother. cute video and cute girl singers, too. everyone looks like they're on smiley acid and in the 60s, which is fun! some other fun songs at their myspace page. pretty much all of them are 60s-girl-group-inspired - not exactly orginal, but happy and fun and catchy, and what more do you want?

as for an official album of the summer, after having finally got the whole thing on my ipod, i'm going to have to go with charles on, SURPRISE, phoenix's "it's never been like that." it just does it for me.

Rachael Ray is getting her own daytime talk show. This is old news, but I just saw an ad for it on TV. And I am disturbed.

I went to the barbershop in the lobby of the office today. It was a weird departure from my normal national haircut franchise habits. The place was operated half by authentic-looking old coots and half by the sort of intense Asian women that tend to staff the low end of the haircut market. I got one of the latter.

But that wasn't the remarkable part. Rather, the bit that stuck out was the overpowering Republicanousity of the place. There was a picture of W on the wall; that was the first and most obvious sign. But once the haircut began, they started flooding forward:

• On the recent rain: When I timidly pushed the boring smalltalk about the weather forward by making a not-very-serious reference to global warming, the lady cutting my hair objected. "It's all God!" she insisted. "The rain, the wind, the water — we don't make any of that stuff. Whatever it is, it's God doing it." Okay.
• On Warren Buffett's Recent Charity: "There's something fishy. There's some gimmick, I just don't know what," observed the gentleman in the chair next to me.
• On the oil sands of Canada: There's a lot of them! It's going to be great.

Seriously, this all happened over the course of maybe, maybe twelve minutes. No mention of brutalizing detainees, but if I'd had the extra time afforded by using a credit card instead of cash, I'm sure I would've heard something.

Gaze upon this bottle, ye blog readers, and despair. Chipotle beer. Yes. That's right. Chipotle. You thought that it was just getting into your ketchup, and mayo, and tortilla chips, but you were wrong. It's everywhere. Doctors are now warning pregnant women not to eat fish because of dangerously escalating oceanic chipotle levels.

I really, really don't understand the appeal. Jalapeno peppers have a perfectly nice taste when they're unsmoked. Smoke does not immediately make things taste better. Sure, it works well with meat and a few other things. But it's a great way to ruin perfectly good cheese, and when applied to vegetables it tends to completely overwhelm them. Plus it's somewhat bad for you.

The other lesson, aside from the seeming inevitability of a chipotle stripe being added to boxes of neopolitan ice cream, is that Rogue brand beer is terrible. You can't trust those people. I've seen them put chocolate — actual bittersweet chocolate — into perfectly innocent stouts (I know, other people do this too, but they're no less dangerously insane). Beware the beer iconoclast: he doesn't have your best interests in mind. He's just trying to look cool in front of his brewer friends.

Still, in my mind Rogue is only the second-most objectionable beer company. Worst of all is Dogfish Head. This is thanks to their Chickory Stout, which I had the misfortune of sampling some years back. I'm not sure what chickory is — I think people used to eat it during the Civil War, possibly to distract themselves from the pain of battlefield limb amputation — but I know it's terrible, and should never, ever enter a human mouth. That was far and away the worst beer I've ever tasted. And I've consumed entire glasses of skittlebraü (tip: drink it quickly, while it's still clear and delightfully rainbow-colored, rather than thick, chalky and brown).

since all of cnn seems to operate entirely using IM, i've been obliged to create a new handle: CNNCatherine. i'll still use pablohoney on my laptop in the evenings, but during the day, i will be rocking the cnn name. so add me!

UPDATE: or CatherineOnMac. that's right, i've got two computers, one of which is a mac, which is good, cause it'll help me figure out if i really want to buy one or if they just drive me insane. so far it seems more of an insanity type thing, but that's mainly because i'm just not that good at using them yet.