>> By God, it's beautiful: a collection of poorly-photoshopped CNN news graphics. Via Metafilter.

>> I'm really not trying to become The New York Times Blog, but the special Design Issue of the Sunday magazine has an interesting article about the design process of the iPod, both interior and exterior.

>> New York Times - 'Inventing A Nation': Gore Vidal Still Loves The Founding Fathers, For All Their Faults:

More spacious and moving are two quotations that raise prophetic questions in a time of corporate scandal and the doctrine of military pre-emption.

One is from Benjamin Franklin, a luminous man freely contemplating darkness. The government set up by the Constitution, he warned, "is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."

And John Adams writes Abigail to suggest that the arrogance shown by the British in seizing a couple of hundred American merchantmen is a trait to be found in his own countrymen. The United States, he declares, is Britain's "very image and superscription . . . as true a gamecock as she and, I warrant you, shall become as great a scourge to mankind."

I really do wish people would take the time to read some of the foundational writings from our country. It would open their eyes quite a bit in terms of their concepts of who created this country, why they did it, and what's changed since...

>> Wired: The Second Coming Of Philip K. Dick -- how one of the greatest writers of the 20th century (no shit, I'm totally serious about that one, and I've read a lot of the 20th century greats) has been reprocessed by Hollywood. For the record, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and the upcoming Paycheck are all based on Dick, though in every case the stories are (a.) completely different and (b.) way, way better. It's a long article, but you ought to read it -- and after that, you ought to read Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and Valis.

>> Stroke gives American woman British accent:

This is despite the fact that Tiffany Roberts, 61, has never been to Britain. Her accent is a mixture of English cockney and West Country.

Doctors say Mrs. Roberts, who was born and bred in Indiana, has a condition called foreign accent syndrome.

This rare condition occurs when part of the brain becomes damaged. This can follow a stroke or head injury. There have only been a few documented cases.

[...] The first case of foreign accent syndrome was reported in 1941 in Norway, after a young Norwegian woman suffered shrapnel injury to the brain during an air raid.

Initially, she had severe language problems from which she eventually recovered. However, she was left with what sounded like a strong German accent and was ostracized by her community.

THE WORLD IS CRAZY. (You can check the sidebar of the article for a 1999 story about a woman who developed a French accent by the same process.) Via The Plastic Cat.

>> From the New York Times: Building a highway across the Sahara. Impressive.

>> Oh my God... Boing Boing brings us the best Flash-video round-up EVER. (And yes, I'm desperately avoiding my AmLit reading right now.)

>> For fuck's sake, I've gone and done it again...

>> Everyone reading this needs to go out right now (or stay in and click the following link) and buy a copy of Underworld - 1992-2002 (The Anthology). It's the best electronic music ever made, all in one place.

I'm not just shilling for the record label I intern for, either; if my personal organizational scheme allowed for compilations of previously released material, then this would certainly be my album of the year. Get it, get it, get it. (And if you do it before Tuesday, so as to drive its first-week sales figures up, I'll be your bestest buddy.)

>> 
I took this picture earlier tonight. And yes, there are plenty that are clearer. More on who, what, where, and why at U2log (including some of the better pictures); a full report (from my perspective) in this space at a later date.

>> New songs for you, by the way; I'd been too busy to hype that earlier, though it's nice to see that some of you had found them already. Thank you for checking, you industrious little monkeys, you. (And thanks for the bug tip, Gordon.)

Well, half of the absurd week seems to have just imploded (no details yet), so... things will be slightly less stressful, I guess? I did finish my paper topic, though I turned it in a bit late and missed my classes this morning. Sigh. I'd be getting in bed right now if not for the laundry currently churning away downstairs... meaning I won't be in bed until 11:30 at the earliest, meaning yet another night of not falling asleep until 2AM. It hasn't been this hard for me to fall asleep since freshman year... I guess it's a combination of stress and the fact that my suitemates are fucking loud as all fucking fuck extremely late at night -- television, guitars, video games... I ask them to keep it down all the time and still something always ends up keeping me awake. The walls in this dorm are insanely thin.

Going to the White Stripes show tomorrow night, and I'm hoping that'll be hotter than hot. We shall see.

>> And it should go without saying: Thank you, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Birch, director of the gay rights organization Human Rights Campaign, said that the courts are not obliged to support a majority of the people.

"If not for courts, African-Americans would not have had the right to vote, women would not have the right to vote," she said. "The purpose of a constitution is to protect a minority group from the wrath of the majority."

My greatest fear, however: that this is going to cause enough right-wing polarization to get a constitutional marriage amendment passed... I shudder to think. If, as this NY Times article predicts, this weakens the Democratic party in the 2004 election... I don't even want to think about it.

And 59% of Americans oppose gay marriage? There's absolutely no difference between that and 59% of Americans opposing black people, or Jews, or Asians, and it continues to shock me that seemingly decent people believe otherwise. This country is fucking despicable sometimes...

I do love Sparky's response, though (from rabbits to human rights in two "via" credits):

It's not about religion, it's not about the children, it's certainly not about morality, it's not about whether or not marriage itself is an outdated social institution — it's just about autonomy and equality.

Which reminds me, if I hear one more gay person complain "Why would we want marriage? It sucks anyway," they're getting a kick in the fucking teeth. Compare that statement with: Why should blacks have wanted the right to vote? Your candidate is never going to win. Why should women have wanted the right to hold property? It just drags you down and you die anyway. Why should Jews have kept the right to move about their cities? They're perfectly happy with their own kind!

And here I go getting angry again and making very little sense...

>> Soooooooo tiiiiiiirrrrreeeed. Soooooo tiiiirrrreed. Operating on so little sleep. Argh.

This week is absurd, too, it's really honestly completely insane. I can't tell you about what's going down now, but if I survive it...

Sometime between now and 12:30 tomorrow, I need to come up with a final paper topic for American Lit and write a complete outline of it. Ridiculous. Of course, I've got lecture, which I've missed continuously for a couple of weeks, at 9:30, so I've got to go to that, giving me only an hour and fifteen minutes to write said outline tomorrow if I don't do it tonight. Which, let's be frank, I'm probably not going to do, since I'm sooooooo tiiiiiiirrrrreeeed and need a whole lotta sleep if I'm literally going to be able to function tomorrow.

My life is not kicking much ass right now. Although I did get the Pet Shop Boys single today, and I did make fajitas... so that was nice, I suppose. And I'm listening to Weezer's first album which is perfect in its every dimension, like a little snowflake, and it brings a moist, moist tear to my already-dewy eye. Ahhhh.

>> Whoever raised these rabbits should be shot. Oh my fucking God... how do they breathe?!? (Via Ultrasparky)

>> The Pet Shop Boys have posted the full video for "Miracles" on their site. It's almost offensively pretty. Go take a look at it, won't you? (Virgin had better have those singles on the shelves by Tuesday...)

>> Who wants to be Dennis Kucinich's potential First Lady? (via Jack)

>> Huh. I just spent entirely too much time away from my dorm room and my routine and it's totally messed up my head and I don't know what to do with myself right now. I should probably be asleep or something, but I already spent most of the day horizontal (*cough cough*), so that doesn't really have much appeal...

I haven't seen the Par1s H1lton $ex t@pe yet. (Google is the enemy for the moment.) I'm not missing much, right?

Oh, and by the way, I think The Plastic Cat is back, so you all need to start reading him right now.

>> CNN: GOP Extends Talkathon:

Democrats brandished posters saying "168-4," to emphasize their confirmation record. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, had a T-shirt saying "we confirmed 98 percent of President Bush's judges" on the front, while the back said, "and all we got was this lousy T-shirt."

This reminds me of something my creative writing teacher said a few weeks ago: Satire must be difficult for our generation, because every comic exaggeration her generation could think of has been exhausted by reality.

>> This post is for those of you who don't spend entirely too much time reading music criticism. I know I'm way, way, way behind the curve here otherwise; nothing about this post is "new" to anybody who's been paying attention, but.

I spent the evening reading the archives linked to from his site, and have since come to the determined conclusion that Sasha Frere-Jones is my favorite pop music critic writing at the moment (I can say "at the moment" because Tom Ewing is on his honeymoon). It's easy to spot his rhetorical crutches -- high-minded literary references, a tendency to rejoice in, and flail desperately for, linkage between artists, eras, styles, etc. -- but there's more than enough solid insight to compensate. And like I said, they're rhetorical crutches -- they do serve a purpose.

My four favorite articles for you to read, if you haven't already: When Critics Meet Pop, asking why stupid people don't like Justin Timberlake; Outkast Is Good, which posits the obvious; Rhythm & Blighty, drawing the lines between American and British R&B; and Sign On The Dotted Void, looking at three excellent but failed major-label dance-oriented albums (for two of those albums, I have worked for the people "responsible"). Our Best Of 2003 lists are remarkably similar as well, though that probably speaks more to the forces that we let curate our intake more than anything else...

>> Fascinating Boston Globe article about the nature of human music:

Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -- which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. Says Schwartz, "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se."

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analog to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. "Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," says Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument -- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us -- specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.

(via S/FJ)

>> I wonder if this will actually be any good at all: The Cure to release four-disc boxed set of b-sides. And we are, apparently, definitely going to get a new album next summer. Hmmm.

>> Kylie Minogue says there's too much sexual imagery in the music industry. Chris looks at her funny for a second, and then keeps walking.

>> I can't recall if I've ever registered my thoughts on it here on this weblog, so let's get it out of the way right now: Tom Coates is absolutely right about Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.

It really isn't enough at all that a show is -- quotation marks heavily stressed -- "positive" about gay people when it's perpetuating damaging and extremely fucking irritating stereotypes. I am a gay man who couldn't give a shit what you wear out your front door, and I'm certainly not on television. What the fuck good is Queer Eye doing me? Why should my peers ask me for fashion advice when I'm wearing an old concert t-shirt and jeans with soda stains on them? Sodomizing other men has given me magical motherfucking powers? I'm sorry, no. And have I noticed some kind of radical upswing in America's acceptance of us lovable gays ever since Queer Eye came on? No. In fact, this newly fashionable idea that "the gays are taking over" has galvanized the religious right into organizing a powerful opposition.

Here's a deal: I'll promise not to treat all straight men as beer-swilling contact-sports-loving brain-dead cavemen, and not to treat all straight women as whining beauty-obsessed hags concerned about landing a man. In return, you'll promise not to treat me like an effeminate sexless thing devoted to The Aesthetic Of Beauty and saying catty things about people around me on the social ladder. Does that sound acceptable?

And yes, yes, this is a raw nerve, thank you for noticing.

>> The quote-of-the-year award goes to Howard Chaykin looking back on his series American Flagg! (Please, please, please get this book reprinted):

Twenty years ago I did a comic book about a twenty-first century America with endless reality shows based on public humiliation; a federal government secretly selling off pieces of the United States; and a citizenry so drugged out on media they colluded in their own betrayal. Don't say I didn't warn you.

(via LinkMachineGo)

>> The iTunes Music Store is Time Magazine's Invention Of The Year:

Jobs has one more reason not to be concerned about the competition. "The dirty little secret of all this is there's no way to make money on these stores," he says. For every 99¢ Apple gets from your credit card, 65¢ goes straight to the music label. Another quarter or so gets eaten up by distribution costs. At most, Jobs is left with a dime per track, so even $500 million in annual sales would add up to a paltry $50 million profit. Why even bother? "Because we're selling iPods," Jobs says, grinning.

Related factoid: A $499 top-of-the-line iPod represents $175 in profit for Apple. Holy shit.

>> We spent all day watching MTV2 today at work, and I got to see "It's My Life," "12:51," "Me Against The Music," "Bad Day," "The Way You Move," and "Hey Ya!," which is all very exciting. But we also saw Chingy six times. Six motherfucking times in a five-hour span*. That is not right.

MTV2 plays entirely too much hip-hop, by the way. With the exception of the Hits Countdown hour and an hour of Chart2Chart, both of which included a couple of other formats, every minute of programming between noon and 6PM was hip-hop videos (And commercials for Tupac Resurrection, one in every single commercial break. Argh). The rock and pop videos listed above actually represented almost the entirety of the non-hip-hop airtime. The network's definitely being dominated by one type of music. Some of the hip-hop programming was great -- we enjoyed "A Lifetime Of Jay-Z," which highlighted his earliest video guest-starring work, he looked so adorable and baby-faced -- but some of it was Chingy. Or the abominable R. Kelly ("Step In The Name Of Love" twice in one hour). Why, why, WHY did everyone decide that man was brilliant all of a sudden? He has always, always, always been foul in my sight (and earshot) and is never, ever welcome as far as I'm concerned. THE MAN WROTE "GOTHAM CITY." End of fuckin' story.

The moment MTV2 started programming in blocks was the moment it died. I remember the first time I turned that station on, they played The Pixies' "Monkey Gone To Heaven" followed by Outkast's "Rosa Parks" and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. And now they play Chingy once an hour like clockwork. SIGH.

Oh yeah, and Maxwell stood behind me briefly at the office as well. It was weird. And he was hot. (The girls in the office couldn't stop swooning.)

* F.Y.I., his six appearances were: one guest-appearance during a Ludacris live special, one "Right Thurr (So So Def Remix)" during the mix show, and four fucking plays of "Holidae Inn" between noon and four o'clock. Whottafuckizzdizz.

>> I really need to go to bed, but I end my night with this: go to The Pet Shop Boys' site. Listen to the audio clips of the three new songs -- "Flamboyant," "Miracles," and most especially, "We're The Pet Shop Boys," a song by My Robot Friend that they're covering as the b-side of "Miracles." The original's weirdly haunting, and to have its inspiration perform it is kind of brilliant. I didn't think anything the PSBs did could knock "Try It (I'm In Love With A Married Man)" out of its gig representing them on my Best Of 2003 list, but they're about to unleash three contenders. Wow. I can't stop listening to these over and over...

And speaking of "Try It," it's a good year for Bobby O covers, since we've also got Sophie Ellis-Bextor's shit-hot "Mixed-Up World," which hopefully I'll slap up on the site tomorrow. Later today. Whatever. Does she still not have a US record company? What gives?

>> OK, yeah, Gen. Wesley Clark's Rock The Vote ad is really, really, really funny. Via Moby (of all people).

>> Oh my God. Elvis Costello has released three Collected Singles boxed-sets in the UK which reproduce all of his singles from 1977 to 1987. Amazingly enough, there's still a load of shit in there that hasn't made it onto the Rhino reissues. Whoa.

In other news, I really like the titles of these last three entries.

>> Whoa. I scored a 98.45 on this surprisingly tough 80s lyrics quiz considering that I left so many blank, but that was with a 10% youth bonus. Hope I didn't miscalculate my dates... wasn't "Just say no" a 70s thing? No, shit, I've just remembered it was Barbara Bush, wasn't it... anyway, I didn't get a bonus for saying where I found it, which was Prolific, so we'll consider it even.

>> Well, that's the end of that: Jeremy and I just saw The Matrix Revolutions. The great trilogy of our generation has come and gone. (And yes, I know about Lord Of The Rings, shut up. Those are fun, but.)

This is a spoiler-free post, don't worry. All I can really say while running off of first impressions is:

(1) The climactic fight scene in this movie really might be my favorite sequence ever filmed -- it was pretty much exactly every action fantasy I've ever had compressed into one scene; and;

(2) The Matrix trilogy as a whole is a spectacular failure. They really could have been the most trenchant, pointed, thought-provoking and still jaw-droppingly amazing and entertaining films of the decade, maybe the century. But they're unbelievably awfully written, simply from a basic script-mechanics point of view (the dialogue and character-development never met an overly familiar cliche or trope it didn't like) and from an overarching perspective of plot and thematics, as well. The whole affair just doesn't work. It's a glorious mess, and there's unquestionably some spectacular entertainment to be gained from watching them... but the story that could have quite literally become the creation myth of modern society, the potential that we all knew and felt was there, has been completely squandered.

I feel a powerful desire to watch all three films and take extensive notes and write a paper outlining my case for what went right and what went wrong. In that sense at least, the movies do remain thought-provoking. But if you spend any time trying to construct a coherent cosmology out of them... good fuckin' luck. I think the reason the Wachowskis have stayed utterly silent on the films is because any reviewer with 30 seconds could stump them on their own plot.

Ah, well. Here's to the fun we had together anyways, eh? They're still good fun... and how about that highway scene in Reloaded, eh? Eh?

>> The Guardian (UK) lists their Top 40 American Musicians. Why aren't R.E.M. higher? Where the fuck are Jay-Z, Beck, Bob Dylan (c'mon, this list was made by forty-year-olds, what's going on?) Garbage (they're 75% American, they count), maybe even No Doubt... and what the fuck are the Kings Of Leon doing at #20? Does anybody in America listen to them? Does anybody outside the offices of the N.M.E. listen to them? Ah, whatever, it's actually a compelling list that made me feel about fifty times more patriotic than anything else I've seen in the last couple of years. And it's amusing that I saw it immediately upon returning from a meeting with a teacher wherein she asked me for musical recommendations and I gave her the Strokes and White Stripes... via Cha Cha Cha.

>> Damn it. I really wanted to go to my American Lit lecture this morning -- we were going to be discussing Thoreau's "Resistance To Civil Government" -- but as per fucking usual, I overslept. Badly. As in, my alarm clock started going off at 8:30 and I slept until 10:40. The worst part is, I spent that whole time squeezing the snooze button every five minutes. (My alarm clock has no cord and is small, so I can just pick it up off my bureau and hold it next to my head when it starts going off. This is a problem.)

Apparently I need ten hours of sleep a night if I'm going to wake up smoothly in the mornings, and since that doesn't sound terribly feasible...

Well, I draw up my schedule for next semester in the next two weeks anyway (yikes! That crept up on me), so I'm going to try very, very hard to avoid 9:30 AM classes. This semester I have them four times a week. Ugh.

>> Wow, I really like August's newest comic: Victim-Girl News-Star Halloween! Go give it a read.

>> Well now, THAT'll stop me from updating to Panther any time too soon: a bug in the update process is wiping out any and all information on connected external hard drives. Yikes yikes yikes. If your drive isn't connected at the time of the upgrade, then you're OK, but if it is, you might be in trouble...

And may I take a moment to babble on about something completely irrelevant?

God, I love the laundry room at my new dorm. There's plenty of things I'm not in love with about my current living arrangement, but the laundry situation almost single-handedly makes up for it. The machines are only $1 each, they never crap out in the middle of a load, they take both quarters and Campus Cash (which is useful since I sometimes don't have one or the other), and most amazingly, there are always machines available; I've never had to wait. It's a huge and beautiful laundry room just brimming with machines that are only a couple of years old. I washed everything I owned in just over three hours this afternoon, and I couldn't be happier. So thank you, NYU, for getting at least one thing about this dorm so, so right.

Ahem. Back about your business. I'm gonna go get a quesadilla or something.

>> For anthropological interest, these are the songs I've bought through the iTunes music store, in order of purchase, in my history of using it (since the end of August). It's not as long a list as it could be, but that's probably a good thing for my wallet.

1. Beyonce w/ Jay-Z - "Crazy In Love"
2. Dido - "White Flag"
3. New Order - "Touched By The Hand Of God (12" Version)"
4. Pulp - "Last Day Of The Miner's Strike"
5. R.E.M. - "Bad Day"
6. Wyclef Jean - "Perfect Gentleman"
7. Salt-N-Pepa - "Push It (Remix)"
8. No Doubt - "It's My Life"

Every one of those has been well worth my 99 cents -- yes, even Dido, shut up, I like the melody. The latter three were all bought tonight for a combination of reasons, each of which single-handedly vindicates the entire concept of an iTunes Music Store:

--In the case of "Perfect Gentleman," I realized I didn't have it with me on this computer (it's on a CD-R back home) and I absolutely had to hear it right now.

--In the case of "Push It," I realized the MP3 I'd downloaded off of Kazaa or wherever this summer was kind of poor quality and I liked the song too much to let things stay that way.

--And in the case of "It's My Life," I wanted to hear a high-quality version of it before the record came out on the 25th.

Yes, if I was using filesharing software I could've solved all these problems for free, but I really love how fast, convenient, and ethically acceptable this whole process is. Anybody want to buy me a gift certificate? (Keep in mind that I'll probably use it to buy Mandy Moore's cover of XTC's "Senses Working Overtime"...)

>> The Case Of The Incredible Shrinking Blockbuster -- what happened to The Producers? I'm apparently seeing it with my family over the Thanksgiving break, so I'm vaguely curious...