I'm in Chicago for the weekend; it's beautiful, and great, etc. etc. GODDAMMIT I LEFT MY PHONE CHARGER AT HOME.

I've now tried 3 different T-Mobile vendors, a Best Buy and a Radioshack — no dice. Nobody bothers to stock a Sidekick-compatible charger. Sigh. Well, I suppose I'll survive somehow. But consider this fair warning: my battery will inevitable decline; my responsiveness will slow as I leave the device off for longer and longer periods; and finally I will lapse into utter, terrible silence.

All of which is to say you should call Catherine instead.

tommy got in last night! kriston will be here today! that is to say, blogging will be even lighter as i squire the two lads around town for the weekend.

I just got back from my free LASIK evaluation at LASIKPlus. I chose them after a careful, two part evaluation:

1. Who is my health insurance compatible with?
2. Which laser center requires the least human contact to schedule an appointment?

A personal-interaction-free webform won LASIKPlus my business, and I headed down to Old Town this morning to begin fulfilling a lifelong desire to have lasers shot at me.

A tech named JT put me through the initial battery of tests. They flew by; the only other JT I've encountered was the simpleton cousin from Step By Step who turned out to be an alcoholic and domestic abuser in real life, and I was thinking too much about that to pay much attention to anything else.

The first thing they start to tell you about is the doctor, who you never meet until your 15-minute procedure. He's done thousands of procedures! People fly from all over the east coast to have him do their operation! He can tear a phone book in half! He projects the excimer beam from his eyes!

They're definitely ready and willing to put patients through a hard sell. The initial medical form contains stealth questions to aid them in this process. In between "what medications make you die?" and "has/have your eyeball(s) ever exploded?" they sneak in items like "what's the first thing you'll do after LASIK?" This is so that later, when the attractive female doctor has come in for final eyeball measurements and begun to discuss the $10,000/hr rate they earn for surgery, she can touch your arm and say, "Won't it be great to throw away your glasses/look at your grandchild/watch a beautiful sunset?"

I was feeling weirdly adversarial, so I left those questions blank. When she got to that part in the form I decline to answer, and instead asked some more questions, pretending like I knew what a diopter is. Also, I didn't buy any of the lines they fed me about me being "one of the best candidates they'd seen in quite a while". I suspect their criteria are largely credit-score-based.

But the one sweet nothing I do believe is this: I possess utter corneal dominance. "Monster corneas," JT said, and you could hear the quiet awe in his voice. The biggest he'd ever seen! That's right. If I accidentally fall through dimensions into a society with an ophthalmologically-based hierarchy, I'm going to be sitting pretty. Also, it's apparently good for LASIK, in case they fuck it up the first time.

Then they dialated my pupils. I hadn't really been planning on this.

Right now I look like an anime character with a serious coke problem. But even better were the sweet temporary shades they gave me for the ride home:

Yes, this is how you're supposed to wear them. They're basically just a curly piece of plastic that clings to your face. My pride made me consider trying for the Metro sans-shades, but it was just so goddamn bright out. Besides, my Alexandria friends were at work-slash-Vegas. I think I made it to the Metro station in relative anonymity. Apologies to the children I scared along the way.

Anyway, the upshot is that, after insurance, I'll be out $2500. I've got a very good shot at 20/20 and a reasonable expectation of better than that. My enormous pupils (which are apparently also bordering on the superhuman) make halo-effects at night a real possibility, but the doctor said that judging by my current incorrect and glare-free-free prescription, I was probably getting those already and just didn't notice or mind them. So I think I'll probably go through with it. I hate wearing glasses, and I've been talking about doing this for years. I'm pencilled in for May 13.

This is probably the part where you should tell me your LASIK horror stories.

shall we?

UPDATE: you can listen to mike doughty's gorgeous song "i hear the bells" over here (it's number 8). the song was featured in the episode. i've managed to never listen to any of doughty's stuff before, but that is all changing!

Well, I'm at least glad to see that network neutrality is beginning to garner blogospheric attention. Kevin Drum posted an honest appeal for clarifying commentary on the issue, to which Atrios responded with, um, characteristic pithiness. This is all good; some folks aren't yet clear about what's going on. They want either additional nuance or for someone to explain a few more times that the situation really is as black and white as it seems.

The problem is that the nuance-providers are ready to serve, whether their interjections are justified or not. In the process, they make the issue seem much more complicated than it needs to be. Witness Crooked Timber's fretting that imbalanced service will lead people to dial down their packet timeouts, flooding the net with junk in order to get their message through faster. Abandoning network neutrality would break the internet's tenuous social contract! Gasp!

This is an extremely silly idea. Application developers generally don't handle this stuff — it happens at the level of network libraries, or even lower, at the interface driver or TCP stack. There are fewer different implementations of these pieces of software than you'd think, and their authors are not going to break the internet just because Johnny's upset that YouTube keeps stuttering. These people regularly get into epic, months-long flame wars over differences of opinion about algorithmic implementation that are much smaller than this. Also, they use SpeakEasy. They're not going to break the internet without a reason so incredibly good that it only exists as a Platonic ideal.

Could there be rogues? Yes, of course. And they'd be caught and blocked, the same way that someone running a DoS attack, or voluminous ping scans, or an open SMTP relay on a consumer connection would get caught. Enforcement right now could use some beefing up, but in the unlikely event of abandoned-NN actually endangering the system's network infrastructure (rather that just its societal and economic infrastructure), you can bet there would be remedies. Contrary to Henry's assumed social contract, there are already a lot of jerks on the internet. We have ways of dealing with them.

The other side of the fake-shades-of-gray crowd is nearer and dearer to my heart: check out this lengthy series of posts over at Freedom to Tinker, which inspired the CT post. Call it the Garrulous Geek approach — to understand any technical issue, you have to start by talking about the different energy levels an electron can occupy. By part 36 of the series, we'll have gotten to principles of mass-producing crystalline silicon — almost there!

But I'm being unkind (particularly given my own guilt on this score). Ed Felten's discussion of how traffic shaping policies, inequitably applied, could degrade internet service is interesting and thoughtful. It's also beside the point: we're not talking about different ways of marshalling a limited resource. Is it important and worthwhile to think about how to prioritize traffic when a consumer's data connection is fully utilized? Yes, of course.

But dropped packets are, by and large, not what's at issue. Most of the time, most consumers are only using a fraction of their bandwidth. The average person simply doesn't have a gigantic Bittorrent download going in the background. If they do, then yes, it's good to ensure that VoIP traffic gets priority. But again, that's not what we're facing. Network neutrality is about cases like this one or this one, where Vonage customers lost service or were forced to upgrade their accounts by their predatory ISP, because the ISP didn't want competition to intrude upon its own plans for VoIP domination. They're getting more artful at these shady tactics all the time, too — rumor has it that Vonage customers using Comcast's network experience significantly degraded service shortly before Comcast deploys their own VoIP offering in an area. Ed's attribution of this problem to an architecture that innocently produces jitter problems is, I think, extremely generous — particularly given customers' earlier ability to use Vonage without problems.

We're not talking about preferentially scheduling cable company VoIP packets over Vonage ones when we face a bottleneck (although we should talk about that when we get a chance) — this is about a private firm intentionally crippling the services of another in order to provide an advantage to their own competing product, regardless of whether bandwidth is scarce or not.

So please: stop looking for nuance. It's simpler than you're making it out to be. Here, let's let AT&T chairman Ed Whitacre explain:

"They don't have any fiber out there. They don't have any wires... They use my lines for free — and that's bull... For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!"

But of course, they don't use them for free. They pay a broadband wholesaler. You pay the Ed Whitacres of the world for your home connection. And Ed and the broadband wholesalers (he's one, too) have complicated agreements governing how they exchange traffic equitably. Everything's paid for; nobody's getting away with anything.

It's as simple as this: Mr. Whitacre and the other ISP stakeholders have convinced themselves that when someone isn't paying them money, it constitutes an injustice. They're wrong — really wrong. Don't give an inch, don't give equal time, don't pretend there's more to it than this. There isn't.

click through for the atrocities to be worn by mischa barton and the other actresses on the prom episode of the OC. yeah, i remember when i wore vera wang to the prom...or was it the 75$ dress from hecht's? it's all blurry. barton's dress is quite possibly the ugliest thing i've ever seen. it looks like a mentally imbalanced puppy made it out of bedsheets. thank god i don't watch that show anymore or i'd go blind.

I just got back from Whole Foods and I'm alarmed to report that it suddenly contains a large number of thugged out white guys. Shorts were pulled low; fake earring bling sparkled in the afternoon sun; and stupid hats were in abundance — particularly wrongly-colored baseball caps. And the latter were fully-utilized: I saw the gentleman ahead of me in line proceed through an amazing three distinct ballcap-bill positions during our brief time together in line.

They talked about this obscure "Magic Hat" beer they were buying, and one enthusiastically introduced the other to Washingtonian, an up & coming restaurant-finding resource. Then they asked the cashier if they could split the checkout amount across two credit cards. All in all, it felt like I was standing behind Turtle from Entourage, except twice. Deeply unsettling.

Two stories that are a little old, but suddenly coming into better focus:

1. Remember when Google ran this custom logo to celebrate Joan Miro's birthday? And Miro's family complained, prompting Google to take it down? I know, it all happened ages ago (Thursday). But until today I didn't realize that the takedown request had come from the Artists' Rights Society, which did something similar when Google paid tribute to Salvador Dali in 2002. I had initially thought that this was a case of a stupidly litigious family, but it now seems that the attitude may be characteristic of the Great Dead Artist establishment.

   I find it all pretty unseemly. I realize that intellectual property is the only real asset an artist has. But Google didn't copy a work, they emulated a style — and a style that was formed by works more than half a century old. In any sane society that IP would already belong to the public domain.

   But let's be generous and assume that the motivations of Miro's estate in this matter are non-venal — that they aren't just trying to squeeze licensing fees out of Google, and that they realize Google's tribute doesn't represent competition for Miro-related income. Let's say this is just about controlling the man's legacy. You'd still have to count me as unsympathetic. I don't think a person has the right to control how society views him or his work. I suppose an artist is welcome to take a stab at doing so, but I don't think it's unreasonable for society to expect him or her to quit bugging us when they die. Lobbying from beyond the grave is just tacky.

2. I hate to unabashedly stick up for GOOG — I've got first shift on the "How Long 'Til They're Evil" watch. But on the issue of net neutrality, they've already publicly committed themselves to doing the right thing: the search engine says they won't pay protection money to ISPs when the broadband providers start making the rounds with hands outstretched. Good for them! Maybe completely surrendering every shred of privacy to a commercial venture won't be so bad after all.

   As worked up as I get about intellectual property controversies, net neutrality is a much more pressing and unambiguous issue — I find it genuinely hard to see why anybody would oppose NN unless they're in the pocket of the telecom industry. If you haven't got an opinion on the matter or don't totally get what it's about, you might be interested in watching this brief video on the topic (thanks to Mike for the link).

so a lot of the el stops as you go along the purple line up to evanston have murals hung on the platform walls. i don't know who commissioned them, who painted them, or when they were put up, but they all have one grand unifying factor: they are so awful, both in painting and in subject matter, that they make your eyes bleed. but i think this one, at the dempster stop, is the worst offender:

what in the world is going on here? we've got a floating rhienoceros head, an enormous evil rattlesnake, weird silhouettes and faces, and some landscape that looks like a second-grader painted it. what exactly might have been going through the artist's mind during the creation of this shot? the answer is probably: lots and lots of bad acid.

so some brave classmates and i attended a a milwaukee brewers game yesterday, where the following things happened: the brewers tied an MLB record for the most homeruns hit in one inning (five); we went on an epic hunt for wisconsin custard; and catherine drank 32 beers. the backhanded compliment of the day? from a 22-year-old: "you sure can hold your liquor for somebody who's been out of undergradute for so long!" yes, i'm cementing my reputation as the old lush, thanks very much. anyway, it was a rollicking good time. photos may be perused here.

for those of you who have been reading for a while, you may recall my invective against the evils of powerpoint. it's something i still sort of vaguely stand by, but mostly because i really suck at powerpoint, not because of any particular reason. however, in our media management class, we've been forced to create powerpoint presentations no less than four or five times already, and the application will be a major part of our final presentation to the star tribune. so, you know, you suck it up.

i've also already become a more skilled powerpointer in part thanks to my friend andrew, whose partner cliff is a powerpoint guru. he literally wrote the book on powerpoint. apparently, since this quarter started, cliff was getting a bit miffed at andrew all of the sudden asking millions of powerpoint questions when he had never showed a real interest in his work before. so andrew did what any loving boyfriend would do: he called up all his media contacts on a friday afternoon, and voila: yesterday, the la times wrote a major business section article on cliff and his skills (which have of late been shown off in the vioxx trial). pretty sweet, no? it's actually a pretty interesting read, no matter what you think of powerpoint. the article was also the most emailed one on the site yesterday, and get this as an additional bonus: cliff's book shot up to #4 on amazon. not too shabby!

our class spent today at the chicago tribune building, talking to the folks of Red Eye (the chicagoan version of express, for you d.c. folks), chicagotribune.com, and tribune interactive. everyone there was lovely and smart, of course, but what was really great was seeing the inside of this gorgeous building. even better was the office space for tribune interactive, which was in the basement, where the printing presses used to be!!1!! i found that really cool, for some reason. it's very sleek and modern and loft-like down there - not your typical basement office. certainly a space where i wouldn't mind working. apparently it's won all sorts of awards. check it out.

i should also mention that we got to check out the printing plant of the daily herald last week, and for all i think of print papers, that is one impressive piece of machinery. check out some images of the press (not the DH's; a german company, i believe) here. though the daily herald is the third largest paper in illinois, it's still what many consider a suburban paper, but its printing presses are some of the newest and most sophisticated in the country. they also have scary machine forklift type robots that load the enormous 20-ton rolls of paper and i almost got run over by one. or, like, it came within 20 feet of me.

printing presses. i know! exciting! alright, more voyeurism - you can check out the pretty faces of some of my classmates here.

Let's nip this in the bud right now: just because an electronic device has two different embedded circuit packages in it does not make it "dual core". I'm going to find it pretty irritating (admittedly, for no good reason) if "dual core!" stickers start getting slapped on every new consumer gadget. In this case it's a particularly bad example: having a digital/analog converter outside the general-purpose processor is completely normal and unremarkable. If you were building an mp3 player out of off-the-shelf components (that weren't specifically designed as integrated solutions for building mp3 players), you'd end up with a separate DAC quite naturally — it's not exactly a premium feature. And you'd really be a dope to call such a solution "dual core".

But if you insist on it, you might as well call the iPod sextuple core. Check it out: it's got a genuinely dual core ARM processor, a DAC, a firewire controller, an LCD controller and (not listed on that page) I believe the video on newer models is handled on a separate IC. What does all this mean? Nothing, other than that — surprise! — electronic devices aren't magic boxes. They have pieces inside of them. Unless you know what they are, counting them won't tell you very much about which gizmo to buy. I suggest sticking with the traditional "shiniest" heuristic.

Apparently businesses aren't allowed to require a minimum balance for Visa card purchases — it's a violation of the license terms that merchants must agree to when they begin to accept Visa payments. Iiiinteresting. It's tough to begrudge small businesses the right to ensure that they make a profit on every transaction, but still: good to know.

well, well. i was strolling along this morning towards the journalism building, coffee in hand, when one of many of the taped-to-the-ground fliers advertising various student activities caught my eye.

"STEPHEN MALKMUS" it read, in huge block letters. in smaller type it went on, kind of weirdly i thought, "acclaimed singer, songwriter, formerly of pavement."

hmm. i would go see malkmus again, i thought. i've seen him twice, once in charlottesville and once in milan, and he put on a pretty decent show both times.

then, in even smaller letters at the bottom, it read: "with new pornographers and my morning jacket."

$10. the best part? they're playing in northwestern's crappy ancient gym that can't hold more than 1,000 people on a good day. i'm so going saturday night, after an excursion with classmates to a brewers game in milwaukee. first minneapolis, now milwaukee. that's right. when will my midwestern adventures end?

Saved By The Bell on Adult Swim? Unacceptable! AS is for stupid but beloved cartoons, not stupid but beloved sitcoms.

in the spirit of congeniality, and also throwing out a few interesting links, i thought i should do a round-up of medillian blogs, near and far, written by friends and acquaintances (and in one case a stranger). yes, even old-school j-school folks have learned this here blogging technology.

dinnertime, y'all!

the bottle of rum in the background is the second course.

just kidding! but this plate of butter will be eaten in one form or another. in fact, i magicked it up into cupcake icing for a classmate's birthday tomorrow. i nailed the cakelove icing - totally disgusting and buttery, but somehow delicious at the same time.

1. The Figurines album: pretty good. UPDATE: Especially "Other Plans", which is the album's standout track. Between this and "Rough Gem" (mentioned below), I think we've got a solid start to a summer '06 mix CD.
2. The Islands CD, I'm sad to say, is not. I was pretty excited about it when I first got it. I've been slavishly devoted to the Unicorns from the moment I saw that their press photos were a set of shots of them being brutally murdered (as seen here). Plus, you know, the music is great. But then they broke up. Based on the also-excellent NAHPI one-off and some early tracks, it looked like Islands, the Nick Diamonds/J'aime Tambeur half of the Unicorns diaspora, would be the (horned) pony to bet on.

   But their debut album — meh. "Rough Gem" is a great song (although once you realize it's a pun on Nick's name, it gets considerably more irritating), but it's the only undeniable highlight. "Swans", for instance, is one of the better songs, but it's too long and rips off an Arcade Fire melody (forgivable, since AF members play on the album). So yeah: disappointing. This Pitchfork review, which gave it an 8.something/10, is wrong in just about every possible respect. The album does not simultaneously "present a more linear approach in their arrangements" and "[enjoy] the freedoms of exploration and discovery", for example. Sure, it's more linear, but it feels boxed-in and boring compared to the rest of Diamonds' work. And "Volcanoes" isn't "ridiculous but fun" — it's about the motherfucking Yellowstone supervolcano, and when it blows, Mr. Pitchfork, you and your stupid haircut are going to be entombed in burning hot ash.

   The album's okay, and I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility of a musical revelation on my part. But right now it simple doesn't appear to be a great an album, no matter how much I wish it was.

3. There was controversy today on the DCist core list, and later via IM with Catherine, as we debated whether to include a contributor's Christian Rock pick in the week's music agenda. Catherine thinks I/we am/are being unfairly biased in jumping all over an act because they're faith-based, when we might allow any number of sucky secular acts to pass by without the type of detailed vetting that this Christian band received. She might be right. My personal feeling is that CR is an inherently flawed genre whose participants should be considered guilty until proven innocent, and that a bands inclusion in the category naturally and justifiably provokes skepticism. A few of the genre's more obvious problems:
   1. Despite its musicians' protestations, the genre's raison d'etre is clearly non-artistic — the tunes are meant for proselytizing or worship. Putting artistic quality second or third behind other aims leads to naturally worse music (in rock music, at least).
   2. In most cases Christian Rock is lyrically confined to explorations of one kind of relationship: the one the artist (or song protagonist) has with god. Real rock and roll is about drugs and sex — that's twice the variety!
   3. Based on some long-past Youth Group experiences, CR fans are among the most musically insular people I've ever met. Most haven't been exposed to much variety, so they don't demand much quality. The music serves a social function for all of them and a religious function for some of them, but that seems to be about it. It's not art that provokes emotions of its own — instead it just helps its listeners recollect emotions evoked by other works.

   I feel that I've given CR at least somewhat of a chance — in the past, people have tried to push DC Talk and Newsboys on me, but were hindered by those acts' innate awfulness. But those are the cream of the Christian crop — Charles assures me that it gets much, much worse. Pedro the Lion is the closest I've come to a messiah-oriented rock act that I genuinely enjoy (although I do get the feeling that the Polyphonic Spree could accidentally begin falling into that category at any moment).

   But I'll admit that I haven't checked in with the state of the art in devout pop in quite a while. I'm sure a lot has changed — I can only imagine the travesties that occurred when the CR world internalized emo, for instance. So if any CR adherents can suggest an act that approaches the depth of PtL, maybe I'll adjust my opinions. Until then, I'm remaining happily closed-minded.

if that's your bag. three years ago i was celebrating easter in naples, where i saw the madonna dell'arco procession down via tribunali. here's a nice photo of this year's procession from mafaldablue.

I've been threatening to mess around with Asterisk for a while now — it's the voice-over-IP hotness at the moment. Well, with taxes finished unexpectedly early and a professional motivation for getting it under my belt, I took the plunge today. Signed up for a $5/month DIY account with BroadVoice, compiled the tarball (@Home is for the weak!) and immediately ran begging to the #asterisk IRC channel for help.

Well, I eventually got it figured out. Disappointingly, the text-to-speech project Festival is already installed under FC4, and not in a way that Asterisk can use. However, there's a handy little hack out there (bottom of this page) that lets you get away with generating then throwing away WAV files instead of actually streaming sound from the Festival server.

All of which is to say that, in a new feature that will doubtless make your life much richer and easier, you can now dial a phone number and have a robot read you the latest RSS headlines from this blog. I know, pretty useful. Give 202-318-0196 a ring if you want to hear what a wasted Saturday sounds like.

This may not stick around that long — it's just a proof-of-concept science project. And yes, I realize how stupid it is.

As usual I waited until the last minute to do my taxes this year. I've just finished them a moment ago, and this year's experience was the smoothest yet. Allow me to share some of the sagacity that allows me to so effectively flit through the paperwork:

1. H&R Block's online tax prep thingy is pretty great, and gets progressively more great every year as more and more of your data collects in it. Well, except for this stellar moment in interface design:

   

   The original field? That contains sensitive financial data. We'd better keep it secret. But the confirmation field, where you're supposed to enter the exact same data? We'll just leave that un-obfuscated. It's like not accepting a xerox of a form, I guess.


2. If you have income that you don't know how to claim, it's probably best to just ignore it and pretend everything is fine.


3. Catherine learned last year that if you try to file part of your year in Virginia and part in DC, the city government will a) not let you file online and b) eventually present you with a bill for thousands of dollars that you pretty clearly don't owe. Moral: the DC tax office doesn't like to be bothered. They are like a hibernating bear, DO NOT DISTURB THEM. Just try to creep by quietly.


4. Most importantly, remember that your tax preparation will be easy and worry-free if you simply begin the process resigned to doing it incorrectly.

Worry-free for a while, anyway.

Dear, sweet IRS agents: the preceding should be considered a joke, and totally not admissible in court, I hope. Of course I conscientiously rounded up all of the forms surrounding the $5 in savings account interest I made this year, and the three days-or-so worth of work I did at my new job in 2005. And the apartment in DC? I'm just house-sitting for Charles. While he's home. Hey, shouldn't you be auditing poor people?

Warning: gibberish ahead. Those of you who don't find Perl and Javascript really, really fascinating should probably stop now.

There, I'm all disclaimed. On to what I've been messing with this week:

1. WWW::Mechanize is fairly awesome — I wish I'd known about it back when I was doing everything with LWP. However! It isn't really up to the task of interacting with ASP.NET sites. I've generally had a pretty positive outlook on Microsoft's current web platform, but trying to interact with it via Perl is changing my mind — the Viewstate and Javascript stuff is just a mess.

   The site I currently want to talk to changes some dropdown options via Javascript based on what you select in other fields. This is a fairly bad idea, but it really sucks in this situation: because of a "feature" in HTML::Form, you can't submit a value via Mechanize that isn't available for that form element in the page's original HTML. Because of this Javascript situation, the value I need to submit isn't available and Mechanize throws an error.

   The solution seems to be to download the page to the disk, rewrite the parts that don't match my requirements, then point Mechanize at that local copy with a URI::File. For those who don't speak geek, take my word for it: this is a huge pain in the ass. And I'm still not sure it'll work, although I have all the different pieces working in a proof-of-conceptish way. Perl gurus would be welcome to chime in at this point.



2. Earlier this week Emily pointed me an an old post of Michael's complaining about PDF links that don't label themselves. I feel his pain, and because I felt like wasting 20 minutes writing Javascript, I wrote a GreaseMonkey script to fix the problem. That's not that exciting. What is exciting is that when I tried putting it through the GM script compiler, it actually worked (previous attempts were, um, less successful). So voila: a Firefox extension that does the same thing as the script without having to have GM installed.

   I've tried to mess around with writing FF extensions before, and it's been a mess (I've got no talent for XUL). The GM compiler still won't give you access to the cool, chrome-y things you can do with a real extension, but you can get a lot done with this.

Broken Social Scene - Shoreline (quicktime). Via cliptip.

I've mostly been listening to this CD and the Wolf Parade album this week, and although they don't sound much alike, it's occurred to me that both bands have a willingness to let a song reach its bridge/transformation/crescendo, then continue to explore that new state for another 60 or 90 seconds before wrapping things up — and to do it without descending into the jammy noodling that characterizes every Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction performance. I like that.

A hybrid vespa? Hmm. Seems sort of pointless to me: why not just ditch the gas engine entirely? Sure, I get that energy density is a problem, but surely a scooter has a weight and expected-range advantage over electric cars, which are at least on the edge of plausibility. Besides, those tiny scooter motors are dirty and inefficient — surely you could pack a day's worth of use into a vespa's-worth of batteries if you ditched the pollution-spewing lawnmower pieces.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this since the last issue of Make's feature on homebrew EVs. It's cool to see that people are spending some time on building electric vehicles for applications where they could shine — namely urban transport — rather than just waiting for them to become all things to all people.

the pitchfork festival line up has been updated again, for those interested:

Saturday, July 29

Main stage:

• Silver Jews
• The Futureheads
• Ted Leo/Pharmacists
• Art Brut
• Destroyer
• Mountain Goats
• Band of Horses
• Man Man
• Hot Machines

Biz3 stage:

• Dominik Eulberg *
• Matmos
• Ada *
• Ghislain Poirier
• 8 Bold Souls

Sunday, July 30

Main stage:

• Os Mutantes
• Spoon
• Yo La Tengo
• Devendra Banhart
• Mission of Burma
• Aesop Rock
• The National
• Jens Lekman
• Tapes 'n Tapes
• Chin Up Chin Up

Biz3 stage:

• Diplo
• Tarantula A.D.
• Tyondai Braxton
• Bonde Do Role

tommy, sommer and kyle will be making the trip. will you?

UPDATE: mother effer. i am not changing all those crapped out bullet points. sorry.

UPDATE 2: I'm enough of a dork that I will. -Tom

Ezra's excited about the trailer for Al Gore's new film, An Inconvenient Truth. I can understand his enthusiasm. I'd love to see Gore enter the '08 field, too (who else can save us from a Democrat-sapping Hillary run?), and we should certainly all be paying more attention to global warming. But this hyperbolic trailer makes me wince. "Did the planet betray us... OR DID WE BETRAY THE PLANET!?!?!" Ugh.

Also: "By far, the most terrifying film you will ever see." I donno, trailer guy. Receding glaciers are bad and all, but that one dude used an ice hook. And that leather-winged thing that drove the truck to kill the kid from Ed? He was pretty bad, too.

Sadly, I think you have to decide up front whether you're making an important environmental documentary, a launching pad for a candidacy, or an alarmist blockbuster (pitch: "it's like Deep Impact meets lecture series! The Day After Tomorrow, but even more boring!"). Declaring that it received three standing ovations at Sundance doesn't really help, either — I'm sure the film has also received glowing reviews from PETA and the in-house critic for the American Communist Party, but that may not translate into a big opening weekend.

And really, if you can't sell this to me, you aren't going to be able to sell it to anybody. Hell, I even buy the invented-the-internet bit — and as you might guess, I'm kind of protective about my internet. Recut the trailer, guys. I'm sure you've made a perfectly nice documentary (the footage looks beautiful). But if you think kids are going to start bring Inconvenient Truth lunchboxes to school, you've got another thing coming.

courtesy of npr, i think i have my weekend plans set. though i'm not going to do it IN MY MOUTH.

i think i kind of want to work for npr.

i agree with matt - the chicago lakefront is one of the city's best attributes, and on a nice day, running along it can become an almost enjoyable activity instead of the life-draining suckage of suck that it normally is. you see park, you see pets, you see rollerbladers (i love chicago. people rollerblade here unironically. i feel like that wasn't really the case in d.c.), you see bikers, runners, beach, water, statues, and a fabulous view of downtown as you round the bend around north avenue beach. i even had a moment while running out on a narrow concrete pier that curves around into the water that felt like i was back in cinque terre. beach, wind, sun, happy.

that said, i have no plans to ever go running in a skirt. what is up with this? (via bexgirl)

even with the gorgeous lakefront trail mere minutes away from my apartment, i have been getting somewhat bored with the running routine lately. so i briefly thought about fulfilling my promise to give yoga a shot...but ended up back in bed with spinning. except, apparently on thursdays now, they do a fun bit o' a thing called "big spin," which is 80 minutes of spinning as compared to the normal 45 or so. it was great! "big spin" makes you want to die, be resurrected so you can vomit and roll around in it, then die again. but i'm sure my butt will thank me for it later.

it's a beautiful sunny day up here in fabulous evanston, and i'm spending the day in the computer lab thinking about what women aged 18-24 who live in minneapolis really, really want to do and see on the internet. (um, any ideas? i'm struggling here, folks.) but all is well when you've got some pretty music. 3hive has got a bunch of pretty, poppy mp3s up, and npr has a few songs from the new flaming lips album. go forth and listen.

All due respect to DCeiver — who, in addition to being America's greatest living playwright is also an insightful rock critic — but the Wolf Parade doubters are dead wrong. I'll admit I'm biased: in the midst of the dark days of fall '05 I'd put on Apologies To The Queen Mary during my daily escape from Crystal City, and feel myself begin to thaw. It was the soundtrack of feeling returning. So I'm inclined to cut them a lot of slack.

But that wasn't necessary tonight. They played a beautifully loose, powerful, and faithful-but-not-slavish set. If these guys come to your town, go see them. I don't really have much more to say than that.

That is, unless we're talking about the opening act, the optimistically-named Holy Fuck. I don't really mean to pick on them — they weren't unique in their sound or level of suckiness. It's just that I've finally hit my breaking point for this kind of shit: I am officially done tolerating bands who spend their live shows trying to replicate the work of a sampler. "Hey!" they say to themselves, "We've got six people up on stage and at our disposal. Surely that's enough to authentically recreate the experience of listening to a 14 year-old learn how to use GarageBand."

To which I reply: you're right. It is. But why would you want to do that? I know, I know: my middlebrow, bourgeois notions of things like "song structure" bore avante gardists such as yourself. You're deconstructing pop music, man. Barbershop is in danger of growing stale. You're taking it to strange new places.

Except that after you spend all that time deconstructing it, the only part you bother to put back together is the three chord progression — and maybe, maybe a hook-y riff. Then you proceed through variations on that underlying structure for 6 or 7 minutes per song.

I have bad news for you. There's a word for people in this line of work: it's "jam band". Your audience might take different drugs than the Disco Biscuits' key demo, but the principle is the same. The only real difference is that jam band musicians can play their instruments. Rather than developing chops, you spent your time figuring out how to look musically ardent while tapping a MIDI controller trigger extra-fast, or waving your hands around a theremin, or, as in tonight's particulary ludicrous case, manually threading film stock through a device that presumably was supposed to read its audio track, but in practice seemed to have no effect on the speakers' output at all. So when it's your turn to solo, you generally rise to the challenge by playing your instrument slightly louder or faster or more frenetically. It's simply not that interesting.

So there it is. You have better facial hair, but otherwise you're just a shitty jam band. And when you consider that jam bands are really just shitty jazz bands, your case starts to look pretty weak. So c'mon — humor me. Sink to my level. Write a goddamn verse, chorus and bridge, then play them in less than five minutes. Then draw a crowd. I dare you.

Becks is stumped about finding sandals that are comfortable. I sympathize, but my needs are humbler*: I'd just like some that leave me my dignity.

Men have no good sandal options. Flip-flops? Frat boy. Tevas? Hippie. Birkenstocks? California hippie. I like wearing all of these, but short of the classic Roman centurion sandal, it'd be hard to call any open-air male footwear respectable. And even if this last option was available, you'd still need to be sporting a cloak and crested helmet to really complete the look. That's just not practical for the beach.

The only solution may be surrender — that's right, the old man sandals-over-black-socks technique. I used to think it was an early sign of dementia, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't just a big fuck you to fashion norms.

* Probably because, as a member of the podiatric patriarchy, there's no onus on me to wear shoes that are really really uncomfortable.

a friend told me a while back about this, but it's still nice to hear it confirmed: According to sources in the industry Radiohead will play the Auditorium Theatre on June 19 and 20.

matt had the gross-funny post for last night, and this morning, kevin gives you the hysterically-funny-yet-sad one of today.