>> US Eating Habits, and Europeans, Are Spreading Visibly:

While Americans have a reputation for tilting the scale more than any other people in the world — and in fact they do — Europeans are fast catching up.

In Britain the percentage of obese adults is three times what it was just two decades ago, the fastest-growing rate in Western Europe. An estimated 21 percent of men and 23.5 percent of women are now considered obese here, compared with 27 percent of men and 34 percent of women in America.

The definition does not cover people regarded as merely overweight and is based on a body mass formula that factors in weight, height, sex and age. The trend is similar across Europe.

Krispy Kreme's at Harrods? Mmmmmmm.

Anyway, I did find eating like an American in London interesting... I had a lot more McDonald's and Pizza Hut than I probably should've (especially since it wasn't cheap), which I chalked up to homesickness more than anything else. And also to the fact that I could barely cook for myself -- all I ever made from the grocery store was tortellini with pesto. Which, admittedly, was delicious, and pesto of its like has not been found here in the US... anyway. My point is, McDonald's and Pizza Hut were kind of hilariously ubiquitous in London, so I can see the logical consequences of that...

>> Aaaaaargh.

I am very much in one of those "drop it all, run away and don't look back" moods. Just fuck it, fuck it, fuck it all. There's too much to do and not enough good reasons to do it.

I don't sleep enough.

I tried to go to the Fannypack show last night, but the first of three opening acts didn't go on until after 8:45 and I had a paper to write, so I ended up ditching out (and leaving Josh there, sadly). An entire blog entry could be written on what I saw of that opening act, but I'm writing that aforementioned paper and I got a very late start doing so (I overslept, seeing as how I haven't gotten enough sleep for the rest of the last month), so I've got to go work on that. Sorry.

>> Not much to say at the moment, really.

School is the usual mixture of surprising success and irritating setbacks. I'm still stupid with money. I need to do laundry pretty badly. I've got 48 hours to decide if I'm going to do NaNoWriMo, and I probably won't, since I've thought about it every year since 2000. I'm tired a lot of the time. Some things are going wrong. Some things are going right.

I always dry up after a redesign, don't I?

>> Fascinating article in the NYT about Peter Jackson's $20 mil-plus deal to make King Kong, including the stunning estimate that he and his team (himself, Boyle & Walsh) have split something in the neighborhood of $180 million for the two Lord Of The Rings movies so far released. Whoa.

>> OK, and I'm off to the ice of Boston. Well, there's no ice in New York at the moment, so there's not likely to be ice in Boston, but y'know, it's a cute musical reference and all that. Enjoy yourselves, I'll be back Sunday night.

In the meantime, why not start in on my boyfriend's Which Is The Best Kate Bush Album? Project, done in the style of Troubled Diva.

Oh, and I fixed a dumb omission on my part that was making the site look grey for some people (thanks for reminding me, Gordon). There's more to do -- little visual bugs with the Trackback and Search Results templates that I need to get on, for one thing -- but those will fall into place eventually. For now, I depart. If you haven't answered the question posed two entries down, then do it! All of you! It fascinates me! (And thanks very much to everyone who's spoken up so far!)

>> My credit card hurts me.

Today's weapons: Suede's Singles (a pricey UK import) and The Twilight Singers' Blackberry Belle. And we won't even talk about the pain of the lengthy, longing looks I gave to Kish Kash, Echoes, and Boy In Da Corner. (Though the latter's got a US release date, finally -- January 20th. Huzzah!)

Sigh. I'll never be financially solvent again, will I?

(And yeah, sorry, I'm really tired after the exertions of the past week, so this is about the best I can come up with before running away to Boston for the weekend. Keep answering my question below, I love hearing from all of you! And on the subject of music, there are new MP3s available... have you explored the Music section yet?)

>> It's ticked over to midnight, so it's fair to say so now: As of sometime later tonight, I'll have been running a weblog for three years. Happy blogday to me!

It's not really "special" for me to put up a new design these days, but I'm pretty happy with this one. I'll be introducing some tweaks over the next week or so, but I wanted a very functional yet still appealling design and I think that's what I got. It looks best on Safari, amusingly enough, because that's the browser I use and I'm tired of making things for other people at the moment. It should look fine on most all browsers -- I've tested it on Mac IE, Mozilla, and some Windows machines, and it looks all right there (the borders and fonts look best in Safari).

I've tried to automate most of the areas of the site (and everything linked to is now actually there for once!!! Go explore!), so hopefully I'll be generating more content than normal. But in the words of Wayne's World: "Shyeah, and maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt."

Anyway, thank you to all my readers for making this an absolutely amazing three years. (If you've been with me since the beginning, then you're astonishing, and you've got a really really high tolerance for crap writing. I salute you.) In fact, let's make a collaborative project out of this: Everyone who reads this site regularly, let me know when you started reading in the comments of this entry. If you can't remember you can search the archives for your earliest keyword memories (I have a search function now!), or just browse about.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, and I hope you enjoy what's on tap for the future. Now I've got school, work, and a family function in Massachusetts coming at me in the next few days, and they all conspire to stop me from tending to the site for the immediate future, but we'll see what I can squeeze in...

>> Every other responsibility in my life is currently disappearing into the black hole of this redesign. The bad news about it is that it's not 100% what I'd hoped it would be. The good news is that it's very near to done. Sit tight.

In the meantime, you really should read this hilarious interview with the Pet Shop Boys.

Chris: Ah, but what is a hit? We were at Number One in America once, and our A&R man said, 'Yes, but is it a hit?'

Neil: He was right, because you do know a hit. This year we've had quite a few. Tatu, that was a proper four-weeks-at-Number-One type hit. Elton. Beyoncé. The Eminem one from 8 Mile , 'Lose Yourself'. Fantastic record. We often sit down and say, 'Today, it's hit day!' But our minds go blank...

Chris: ... so we get in the car, drive to the local Woolworths and buy Now That's What I Call Music 94 , and go through it, saying, 'Ooh, don't like that. Or that. Crap. Rubbish. God, I hate pop music!' And then, we're back to square one.

Neil: But it's great going to Woolworths.

I found this the other day on their official site and bookmarked it to post later, but Prol beat me to the punch and now it looks like I jacked it from her when I didn't. I DIDN'T! IT WAS ALL MINE! I WROTE IT MYSELF!!! Ahem. Weblogging is doing bad things to brain and stop now.

>> Jessica Simpson to tour Ivy League schools for next season of Newlyweds.

Jessica's manager and father, Joe Simpson, said the idea of a scatterbrain beauty crashing prestigious campuses was inspired by "Legally Blonde," the comedy featuring Reese Witherspoon as a surprisingly successful Harvard student. [ ... ]

['Newlyweds'] is all about showing that Jessica's just a regular person and the Q&As are just another extension of that," Joe Simpson said. "Her album is about having self-esteem and the message is that anyone can achieve their dreams."

Errr, no. Newlyweds is all about showing the country a complete fucking moron and letting them laugh and pretend that they are smarter ("Sheeeit, I know what tuna is") when they obviously are not. Reality television has stopped passively parodying real life and has begun to actively mock other human beings. (Nobody else felt uncomfortable watching poor Ozzy Osbourne become the butt of a thousand jokes as he helplessly quivered on his sofa?) I feel truly sick right now.

And PS -- her own fucking dad?!? That's fucking cold.

>> I helped an old lady cross the street today. And by "cross the street," I mean "escorted her from 10th Street & Fourth Avenue to 8th Street & First Avenue." Uhh, whoa.

She stopped me as I plowed speedily down Fourth Ave.; I had forty-five minutes before my next class and planned to spend some time investigating the prices at Tower. She asked if I would help her cross the street, I said sure, and she linked arms with me, saying she needed to get to Eighth Street. Only two blocks, OK, sure. I've always been kind of awkward around the elderly but there's a boy-scout charm to this, I'm cool with it.

On the next block she said "You know where I need to go, right?"

"Eighth Street?"

"Eighth and First."

Hoo boy. At this point I tried to say that I could help her to Eighth Street no problem, but that I wasn't going to be going anywhere near First Avenue, I had somewhere I needed to be soon, et cetera. And the sick thing is, she begged me. Really, she begged me, honestly, said "please please please" as I waffled and just wouldn't relent. So of course I said "sure." What am I gonna do, yank my arm out of an old woman's and run away down the block?

She seemed to be doing OK walking, mounting curbs and such with ease, though occasionally she seemed to have a little equilibrium trouble and would have to stop and shuffle for a couple of seconds before she could lift her feet again. We didn't talk much; I'm a God-awful conversationalist so instead of keeping the discourse flowing I kept letting it die, awkwardly, pathetically. Of course we commented on how nice the weather was, and on St. Mark's Place I spotted a Dalmation and we sang the praises of dogs for a while. But that was about it for the whole twenty minutes it took to get there.

At the Eastern corner of First & Eighth she let go of my arm, thanking me profusely; I said "No problem" a few times and started back across the street. I don't know where she was going in the neighborhood; as I looked back I saw her going into a bakery but I can't imagine she'd come all that way just for that? For a moment I wondered if she was going in to find somebody else to help her on her way, and I regretted not asking where she was actually going, but at the time I'd thought it her business and been content to keep quiet, as always.

In short, it was a really, really weird experience, and I don't know if I feel good about it or not.

>> NYU kids! Fannypack are playing the Kimmel Center next Thursday night! You want to go! You need to go! You will buy tickets when they go on sale tomorrow morning at Ticket Central! It's all terribly exciting and exclamation points are definitely warranted! ONWARD!

>> Sigh. I get depressed and angry and what do I do? Put on Radiohead, natch. I am just too fucking predictable these days... now I understand what fifteen-year-olds see in them. (What did I see in them when I was fifteen? Can't quite recall, honestly... just liked how strange they sounded next to everyone else, maybe? I wasn't much of a deep thinker at the time, no matter how much I seem to recall otherwise... ;-D)

>> Another night spent making tortuously slow progress on the redesign. I've got a deadline, though, and I don't plan to miss it. If you're wondering what that deadline is, then just do your homework and you'll figure it out.

I saw Mystic River this weekend, and I endorse it; it's overwrought in a lot of places but as dramas go it has a lot to recommend it. And you can be fairly sure it's gonna get Oscar nominations out the wazoo (any and all of its leads certainly deserve awards, especially Sean "God, I'm terrifying to look at on-screen" Penn), so go see it now; that way you're all edu-mah-cated when the nominees are announced and you won't have to rush to catch up.

I can't tell: Do I like Britney & Madonna's "Me Against The Music"? Several listens to it this weekend have lead me to think it would be a much better song if it was composed almost entirely of samples and quotes from their previous works. Try doing Madonna's "American Life" rap over the bit where Britney's talking really fast, swapping out "and you know I'm satisfied" for "and you know I wanna get in the zone." It works perfectly. Well, if you didn't think the "American Life" rap was ricockulous to begin with. I've got a fondness for that rap that most people really, really don't share, though I do think the rest of the album is poo with the exception of "Nothing Fails." And wow, now I'm off track. Anyway, "Me Against The Music" just might be a grower, iTunes needs to post a nice clean version for me to spend $0.99 on so I don't have to deal with a shitty radio rip from somewhere in the Czech Republic or something.

Oh, and speaking of iTunes... my apologies to all those Windows users who tried it out this weekend only to find that it bulldozed through whatever organizational scheme you have for your MP3s. I personally love the way iTunes keeps my library organized -- a folder for each artist, and within that, a folder for each album -- but in order for that to work, your ID3 tags have to be immaculately maintained, and as anyone who ever poked around KaZaA can tell you, not many Windows users bother with ID3 tags. So maybe you're reaping the whirlwind of metadata neglect, eh? Sigh, sorry, don't want to come off as another Macsnob...

>> HOLY FUCKING SHIT A BABY HEDGEHOG AAAAAAHHHHH. (Via Minor 9th)

>> I went into Forbidden Planet today to pick up New X-Men #148 (if you're following it too: Holy crap! My estimation of this plotline is growing), and something happened that hasn't happened to me in a long time. In fact, it happened not once, not twice, but three times: I was surprised and excited to see something on the shelf that I didn't know was coming out.

I was surprised not because I'm normally so in-touch with what's going on in the comics world that things can sneak up on me; no, I was surprised because I've been so divorced from comics recently that the existence of things which could really excite me wasn't something I'd even considered. For a long time, New X-Men has been the only book I've followed regularly* (Grant Morrison's other series, The Filth, was only thirteen issues long and just wrapped up; of course, now that Warren Ellis' Planetary is publishing again, I've had to start following that too), and I'd barely even thought about other comics**. But on the shelves of Forbidden Planet I chirped with excitement at three different things: Garth Ennis' Hellblazer: Rake At The Gates Of Hell, Grant Morrison's Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina, and Alex Robinson's More Box Office Poison; all of which are continuations of, or supplements to, series that I used to really love.

I'm flat broke so I couldn't buy any of them (Hellblazer and Animal Man are $20 each, BOP is $10), but my yearning for them hasn't disappeared upon my leaving the shop, which is how most of my comic-book desires have gone recently. The competition for my entertainment dollar (more like nickel at the moment) really is getting very fierce...

* My most significant comics purchase of the last year or so was picking up the two gorgeous New X-Men hardcovers (Vol. 1, Vol. 2) a few weeks ago; they collect the vast majority of the run thus far, all the way through "Murder At The Mansion." Forbidden Planet sells them for $20 each, $10 less than cover, which is a fantastic deal and I urge everyone reading this from NYC to go down and pick them up; when Morrison finishes his run next year with #154 they'll pump out a third and then you can have his whole series in three lovely volumes. I'm such an X-Men geek at the moment... this is my current desktop. Sigh. If you're a fellow dork, you can get that image here.

** With the exception of my musings about the need to pick up the Sandman trades I'm missing, before the ugly new cover design replaces the printing with the classy trade dress that I already started collecting. I looked really, really hard for a picture of the unattractive new Preludes & Nocturnes trade online, but I couldn't find it... if you've got a link, then leave it in the comments.

>> I took a bit of a personal day today (i.e. I ditched most of my classes -- eh, it was the first time this semester I'd done it, and it'll probably be the last), but it wound up sadly unproductive. I'd hoped to study for the midterm in American Lit tomorrow, or at the very least work on the site redesign, but instead all I did was rip some CDs onto the hard drive and stare at my computer monitor a lot. Aaaaawesome.

Something interesting happened to me last night, but I'm not going to talk about it until I've spent some time working it out.

And I guess that's that. I've got the afternoon off tomorrow after my midterm, but I need to spend it catching up with Ulysses reading, so I probably won't blog. Or maybe I will. But it probably won't be interesting.

In other news, I have no clean socks and no laundry money. This is a problem.

>> Awww, this is sad. Goodbye, 8th Ave. Post Office -- first, the Republican party convention, and then the new Penn Station, will be taking over the building. I'll be sad to see it go, though I'm sure the new train station will be sort of amazing... (Link fixed from earlier, sorry about that)

Oh, and the Radiohead entry's been updated, scroll on down for some details.

>> Awww... The Modern Age takes a break. Do what you gotta and we'll be waiting when you get back...

In other music news, I bought my giant external hard drive this weekend. I can put every CD I own on it and still have tons of room. The mind boggles and ecstasy is being experienced. The future is amazing. (And unlike the CD drive, it installed and started rockin' with absolutely no hassle. I couldn't be happier...)

>> OK, so I installed a slightly different comments-spam killer and this time it worked like a charm. Lolita and her gang shouldn't be troubling us any more... I now need to implement this on the Photolog, which was spammed eight times in the last week. For fuck's sake.

>> I'll update the Radiohead post in more detail, I promise, but for the moment I'd just like you to take a look at a special report running at U2log, from a speech Bono recently gave at the United Nations. You probably made up your mind a long time ago about whether or not you were going to listen to him on an issue like this, and I won't presume to judge the process by which you came to that decision, but I still think you should read this.

What’s going on in Africa and the rest of the world is a different thing. It’s an emergency. Seven thousand Africans are dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease. It’s madness. This is jumbo-loads of people falling out of the sky everyday, but we have the drugs!

Right now, there’s a problem in the world with the way people perceive us in the West — America and Europe. With these drugs, we can change the way they see us because we can change lives and transform communities. I say to the President and to corporate America, “Look, see these drugs as advertisements for you. Paint them red, white, and blue if that’s what you want, but get them to the people who need them and the way the United States is perceived in the rest of the world will change.”

…There was a report last week, the Bush Administration commissioned a panel to examine America’s image in the Muslim world. It concluded that hostility toward America has reached shocking levels and recommended that the U.S. increase its spending on public diplomacy. That seems right to me, but I’m not really in a position to judge. I can’t rightly say what the return will be, but I can see what a dollar a day will get you in Africa. It can buy a future. A dollar a day spent on anti-retrovirals, on what it cost to keep a person with HIV alive. And if we’re talking about public diplomacy, these pills are like diplomats. They are the embodiment of global goodwill in 50 or 100 milograms. And imagine if they reached the poorest parts of the world in that red, white, and blue. Coca-Cola and Elvis used to represent America around the world. Maybe they still do. But in this new century, in this time of crisis these drugs — these lifesaving drugs — are how America should be known.

Continue reading if you're interested.

>> Radiohead setlist, Madison Square Garden NYC, October 10 2003:

• "The Gloaming"
• "There There"
• "2+2=5"
• "Where I End And You Begin"
• "Exit Music (For A Film)"
• "Talk Show Host"
• "Myxomatosis"
• "Paranoid Android"
• "In Limbo"
• "Sail To The Moon"
• "Creep"
• "Scatterbrain"
• "Go To Sleep"
• "Just"
• "Idioteque"
• "You And Whose Army?"
• "Sit Down, Stand Up"

Encore 1:

• "Lucky"
• "The National Anthem"
• "A Punch-Up At The Wedding"
• "Street Spirit (Fade Out)"

Encore 2:

• "Airbag"
• "No Surprises"
• "Everything In Its Right Place"

Throw rocks at me if you want, but I'm not sure I actually enjoyed this show that much.

It was a combination of factors. First off, I'd seen the setlist for the previous night and it was pretty much everything I'd been hoping for, so I knew going into this show that they probably wouldn't be playing a lot of songs I really wanted to hear. That in itself is not really a problem, sometimes it's fun to be surprised, but sadly my fears about the setlist were completely borne out. They seemed to be focusing on their jangly guitar material this night, which disappointed me in a big way since it's the least interesting to me, at least in a live-show context.

Second, the audience were irritating. They weren't quite at a "destroy the show" level, but they did manage to wreck "Exit Music (For A Film)" -- I'm not 1000% psycho into that song anyway, but I sure as hell wasn't going to be able to let it wash over me when everyone was yelling and cheering that their favorite mournful dirge was being played throughout the whole first two minutes. And then some fuck yelled "Go Yankees." I hope he was hit by a truck after the show. I hope that so strongly. (Note: that's not a Yankees bash, it's a drunken asshole fuck-bash. I support the going of the Yankees.)

And third... I just didn't think the performance itself was that great. For one thing, there were some minor staging issues -- the floodlights were turned on the stage between every song, which completely killed the flow -- but the most disappointing thing was that the majority of the tracks sounded exactly the same on stage as they did on record, right down to the bass flourishes and electronic squawks. "Where I End And You Begin," which was my #1 most-anticipated live song, just sounded like a boring, badly mixed album version; and during a by-the-numbers runthrough of "Just" I wondered why they were playing the guitar freakouts in a manner that was note-perfect identical to the studio version. A few tracks did stand out -- "The Gloaming," "Talk Show Host," "Myxomatosis," and "Idioteque" -- but everything else was predictable, dry, and unengaging, which was the last thing I expected of Radiohead. Even "Creep" failed to really get me going (though I am glad they played it), especially since it was placed in a truly bizarre spot in the set. You can't ask me to care about "Scatterbrain" when you've just played one of the best pop songs of the 90s.

I'm still happy that I got to see Radiohead, and I'm sure I'll see them again in the future if I can, but I am a bit depressed that my first experience with their live show was such a letdown (no pun intended, seriously). They can't all be R.E.M., I guess.

>> I just installed an anti-comments-spam hack (via Prol), so hopefully you'll be seeing less of that around here. I deleted two lovely messages from my best friend "Lolita" a few minutes ago, and that was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back. If you see one (they tend to show up in the less recent posts), let me know so I can add their URL to the blacklist...

UPDATE: Umm, I just tried to test this by posting to my comments with a URL that I blacklisted, and the comment went through just fine. That sucks. Is this working for anybody else?

As discussed last night at an absolutely delicious dinner with Josh, Fiona, Jen, and Karen (pictures to follow, oh yes), Britney Spears' In The Zone has hands-down the worst album cover of 2003. And that's with David Bowie's Reality already on the books. Yow. Also, Britney Spears had a vagina relocation. But shhh, don't tell anybody.

I'm redesigning again, but you probably already knew that. Since it seems to happen occasionally.

Oh, and I'm seein' Radiohead tomorrow night. Am crossing my fingers for "Ripcord," because it's funny. (Am sort of unironically crossing my fingers for "Thinking About You," which they absolutely won't play, but it's always fun to think of reasons to be disappointed in a concert before you even go.)

>> Happy birthday, Gavin Friday. Time to celebrate by putting those damn fine albums on. And speaking of which... COUGH COUGH AHEM already, dude! It's been a long while since 1996... (though Peter And The Wolf should be fun.)

>> Oh yeah, this is just what I needed today.

President Bush has declared National Marriage Protection Week; marriage, of course, being a union "between a man and a woman." Which is offensive enough in my book. But as August points out on Metafilter, it's certainly a coincidence that Marriage Protection Week begins one day after National Coming Out Day and on the anniversary of Matthew Shephard's death.

Now I really don't like the gay-rights argumentative trope of invoking Matthew Shephard's name every time opposition is faced. But come the fuck on. Somebody please give me a reason to not hate George W. Bush with every single fiber of my being. Please give me a reason to not think he is a subhuman piece of shit. Please, somebody. I don't want to be as angry as I am. (Man, I can hear the filing clerk at the FBI slipping this one into my file as I type...)

>> I am so very tired of a lot of things right now.

Just to tie up the loose end, I downloaded Mac OS X 10.2.8, which supposedly fixes my burner problem, a few days ago, but I haven't been able to test it because I don't have enough space on my hard-drive to burn a CD and I'm too much of a stupid asshole to just delete and re-rip a couple of albums. Maybe I should just shut the fuck up and do it right now, I'm in a crummy enough mood to be merciless...

>> OK, I can't promise this is 100% accurate, but here's the setlist from tonight's Madison Square Garden R.E.M. show as best as I can remember it:

• "Finest Worksong"
• "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?"
• "Driver 8"
• "Drive"
• "Animal"
• "Fall On Me"
• "Daysleeper"
• "Bad Day"
• "The One I Love"
• "World Leader Pretend"
• "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville"
• "The Great Beyond"
• "Country Feedback"
• "Losing My Religion"
• "Find The River"
• "She Just Wants To Be"
• "Walk Unafraid"
• "Man On The Moon"

Encore:

• "Life And How To Live It"
• "NYC" (Interpol cover, Stipe solo acoustic again)
• "Nightswimming"
• "The Final Straw"
• "Imitation Of Life"
• "Gardening At Night"
• "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"

It was fucking amazing. Ten times better than Jones Beach. It helps to have a roof on the venue that you can blow off, I suppose...

More later, but I've got laundry-folding and sleep and tomorrow some kind of picnic ahead of me before I can get more specific (and no doubt correct the setlist above -- as soon as you hit "World Leader Pretend," I'm unsure of the order until "She Just Wants To Be").

>> R.E.M. setlist from last night's show at Jones Beach:

• "Begin The Begin"
• "So Fast So Numb"
• "The Wake-Up Bomb"
• "Drive"
• "Animal"
• "Sitting Still"
• "Exhuming McCarthy"
• "Bad Day"
• "The One I Love"
• "Strange Currencies"
• "Losing My Religion"
• "All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star)"
• "Maps And Legends"
• "Everybody Hurts"
• "At My Most Beautiful"
• "She Just Wants To Be"
• "Walk Unafraid"
• "Man On The Moon"

Encore:

• "NYC" (Stipe solo acoustic, one verse of the Interpol song. Whoa)
• "Little America"
• "Nightswimming"
• "The Final Straw"
• "Imitation Of Life"
• "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"

It was fucking great. It was also fucking freezing cold. But it was still fucking great. (Josh nearly died, though. Sorry, baby.)

High points: "Animal" grew on me exponentially in the time it took to get from the first chorus to the second; "Little America" was punked-up and rockified to the extent that I didn't even recognize it until I got home; and, of course, the song I requested (along with, apparently, everyone else in the venue), "Nightswimming," which was ever so lovely beneath the moonlight. In the freezing cold. The best part, though, was suddenly discovering that I am wildly attracted to Michael Stipe. I'd never felt even a stirring of it before, but the man's an on-stage God. His movements, his singing, his phrasing, his between-song monologues... every last little thing was perfect and charming and hilarious and dare I say it, sexy. I already warned Josh I could spent the rest of my life with that man. (It's OK, though, because he keeps a list on his computer of celebrities he would leave me for. Should I worry about that?)

Low points: Certain segments of the audience booing the mention of France in one of Stipe's monologues (I mean, what the fuck), and "All The Way To Reno," which I actually have grown to really like on record but which just tanked in the live context. Ah well. Also, it was fucking freezing cold. I think I mentioned that, but it was fucking freezing cold.

I'm seeing them again tonight too at Madison Square Garden. Ah, R.E.M., I'm sorry I ever stopped loving thee with the ardour I once possessed. Bring on the new record!

Oh, and here's a list of completely random R.E.M. songs I'd really love to hear tonight, regardless of their probability: "Let Me In" (my request for the MSG show), "What's The Frequency Kenneth?", "The Great Beyond," "Cuyahoga," "Get Up," "Turn You Inside-Out," "Orange Crush," "Be Mine," "Leave," "Lotus," "Daysleeper," "Pretty Persuasion," "Make It All OK" (a new song they've only aired in concert once), "Find The River." And others I'm forgetting. Really, most anything will please me at this point.

>> So last night, after refilling my iPod with a fresh batch of complete albums, as opposed to the piles and piles of random songs that had been cluttering it, I took a look at the surprisingly short Artists list and thought "Wow. I don't think my iPod has ever been this gay." To prove this assertion, I figured I might as well do some math.

The following artists have been ranked on a Gayness Scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most homoeroti-tastic and 1 being the most beer-soaked Midwestern "not even once in college" straight. Here goes.

Abba: I don't need to explain this one, do I.
Number of albums: 1 (Gold)
Gayness Score: 10

Andrew WK: There's really nothing very gay about Andrew WK at all, except for his unmanly habit of really honestly loving everything around him with an open heart.
Number of albums: 1 (The Wolf)
Gayness Score: 3

David Bowie: He's butched up quite a bit in recent years, but he remains a gender-shifting homoerotic icon. He did shtup Mick Jagger, which is disgusting, but also very gay.
Number of albums: 1 (Reality)
Gayness Score: 8

Duran Duran: They fall into the Depeche Mode category of "Straight boys that add up to a very gay unit," though not to the same extent. Everyone loves them regardless of sexual preference, though, so their score slips.
Number of albums: 1 (Greatest)
Gayness Score: 6

Elbow: Again, not much gayness here. Gay boys do tend to love dark and atmospheric mellow-music, but not when sung by unattractive, slightly heavyset men from the north of England. Who refer to their music as "prog rock."
Number of albums: 1 (Cast Of Thousands)
Gayness Score: 3

Elvis Costello: Really, just not very gay at all. What can I say?
Number of albums: 2 (Get Happy!!, North)
Gayness Score: 1

Massive Attack: This is the kind of dark and atmospheric mellow-music gay boys love. Loads of straights love 'em too, but I've never met a gay guy who, once exposed to Massive Attack, didn't at least like them.
Number of albums: 4 (Blue Lines, Protection, Mezzanine, 100th Window)
Gayness Score: 7

Oasis: Not gay. Or are they? Witness the scene in Live Forever where Liam Gallagher puzzles over the meaning of the term "androgynous." Hmmm.
Number of albums: 2 (Definitely Maybe, (What's The Story) Morning Glory?)
Gayness Score: A generous 3.

Outkast: Well, there's Andre, but he's gay the way Prince was gay ("Just looked her in her eyes, and said 'No, R U?'"). So it doesn't quite count. Still, it is there.
Number of albums: 1 (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below -- does that count as one? I actually say yes.)
Gayness Score: 5

Patti Smith: Not really that gay, but there's just something that makes me want to score her kind of high.
Number of albums: 1 (Horses)
Gayness Score: 6

Pet Shop Boys: There are no words.
Number of albums: 7 (Please, Introspective, Behaviour, Very, Bilingual, Nightlife, Release. Actually is only missing because I haven't ripped it yet)
Gayness Score: 10

Pixies: Pretty much un-gay.
Number of albums: 1 (Surfer Rosa)
Gayness Score: 2

Prince: See Outkast.
Number of albums: 1 (Sign 'O' The Times)
Gayness Score: 5

R.E.M.: They've got a gay frontman, which is unusual, but don't add up to very much queerness at all. Imagine that. Someone's got to balance out Depeche Mode, I guess.
Number of albums: 13 (Complete album discography, with selected random tracks that might add up to a 14th album)
Gayness Score: 4

Radiohead: Many gays do looooove Radiohead. But many gays also don't. It's a toss-up.
Number of albums: 6 (Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings)
Gayness Score: 5

The Raveonettes: I think the frontman's gay, even though he clearly isn't. And "That Great Love Sound" contains the line "Talkin' to you makes me wanna come right out," so I'm gonna score them unreasonably high. Plus there's the girl-group thing going on.
Number of albums: 1 (Chain Gang Of Love)
Gayness Score: 6

Richard X: Eighties electroclash and a suspicious number of those beloved-by-gays British pop groups. Hmmmm.
Number of albums: 1 (Presents His X-Factor Vol. 1)
Gayness Score: 7

Rufus Wainwright: He'd get a ten, but I met a straight boy the other day who likes him, and that tarnishes the whole enterprise.
Number of albums: 1 (Poses)
Gayness Score: 9

Serge Gainsbourg: He's ugly, he's straight, he likes underage girls. But the rhythm sections save him.
Number of albums: 1 (Comic Strip)
Gayness Score: 5

Sinead O'Connor: She's a lesbian! She's not a lesbian! She likes Jesus! But he's a man!
Number of albums: 1 (I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got)
Gayness Score: 8

The Smiths: "Let me put my hands on your mammary glands"? Who are you kidding, dude?
Number of albums: 1 (Hatful Of Hollow)
Gayness Score: 8 (I know straight people like the Smiths a lot, and I'm sorry, but it makes you sissy sissy gay.)

Suede: It's all just an act, and we know it, but the line "We kiss in his room / to a popular tune" is very, very hot.
Number of albums: 1 (Suede)
Gayness Score: 8

Tori Amos: Straight boys like her, but see The Smiths.
Number of albums: 3 (Under The Pink, Boys For Pele, From The Choirgirl Hotel)
Gayness Score: 8 (This is getting repetitive)

U2: Hmmmmm. The gay community has always loved them... their first album is called Boy... they like supermodels but can't commit...
Number of albums: 1 (October. Yeah, I know it's weird, but I figure I'm sick of everything else...)
Gayness Score: A generous 6.

Underworld: Karl Hyde: Is he or isn't he? He shimmies awfully well.
Number of albums: 1 (Beaucoup Fish)
Gayness Score: 5

White Stripes: ...Nope, nope, sorry.
Number of albums: 4 (White Stripes, De Stijl, White Blood Cells, Elephant)
Gayness Score: 2

Wire: Yeah, no to this one too. That said, the album's called Pink Flag so they score unintentional points.
Number of albums: 1 (Pink Flag)
Gayness Score: 3

XTC: There's a little bit that creeps around the edges, methinks; perhaps it's just the extremely non-masculine qualities of Andy Partridge's voice?
Number of albums: 2 (Nonsuch, Wasp Star)
Gayness Score: 4

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Sexual abandon is a little bit gay. And how hot would "Bang" be if played by a sleazy rockin' homo idol?
Number of albums: 1 (Fever To Tell)
Gayness Score: 5.

Whip out the calculator aaaand... my iPod earns a cumulative average gayness score of 5.86 out of 10, which is way less gay than I expected. This post is entirely without merit and I could have been sleeping instead. Good night.