Most-Played Tracks On My iPod

I'm not sure how some of these came to be the most-played, but here they are:

1. Frog Chorus, Echoes of Nature (used to play it while falling asleep)
2. Little Red Riding Hood, Sam the Sham
3. I Melt With You, Modern English
4. Barely Legal, The Strokes
5. Please Play This Song on the Radio, NOFX (there are many NOFX songs I like more)
6. Don't Be Cruel, Elvis
7. Carol Brown, Flight of the Conchords
8. I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor, Artic Monkeys
9. Song Against Sex, Neutral Milk Hotel
10. Supermassive Black Hole, Muse
12. Mack the Knife, Bobby Darin
12. The Hardest Button to Button, The White Stripes (Surpriesd this beat Ice Cream Soda)
13. Do What You Want, Bad Religion
14. Three Point One Four, The Bloodhound Gang (surprised other BHG didn't make the list too)
15. Judy Is A Punk, The Ramones (one of the rare songs that I wish was longer)
16. Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Queen (like this song, but have no idea how it made this list)
17. The Government Totally Sucks, Tenacious D
18. Move It On Over, George Thorogood
19. I'm Like Yeah, But She's All No, Mr. T Experience
20. A Boy Named Sue, Johnny Cash

Twilight: Career Suicide

Me: I'm reading about how they've finally landed a director for Breaking Dawn. Either they're paying him a shitload of money or he's looking to commit career suicide.
Maggie: Hahaha. You need to blog that line.

Why I like USA Today

#5 - Idol Chatter. I like their American Idol blogger. Sue me.

#4 - The run of Superman comics they published a while back, which was delightfully retro, and their bizarre fixation on cage-wrestling and ultimate fighting.

#3 - Their articles are longer and more in-depth than what I see on other news sites.

#2 - The goof-off stories are more easily discernible as such. On CNN.com, for example, headlines like "Alligator befriends turkey" and "Karzai threatens to join Taliban" are often literally side by side.

#1 - I've yet to detect any bias. Everyone knows MSNBC and the New York Times are left; Fox is crazy right; CNN is just plain crazy, but the headlines and editorial page of USA Today seem straight down the middle. In an age of frothy hyperpartisanship, that's refreshing.

Start the turntables!, Cont'd

I got an email from U2 today alerting me to a new remix album available... only on vinyl. I already own a couple of U2 records -- they're in frames on my wall, relics of an earlier, groovier time. I'm not about to run out and buy a turntable yet, but I do find myself craving this remix album. So big, so packed with tangible objects. Everything old is new again.

Start the turntables!

This month's Rolling Stone says that sale of records -- those big, grooved things made of vinyl -- has surged in the last couple years. While I didn't buy last month's claim that magazine subscriptions are up, I definitely believe record sales are. Last week when I paid a visit to Newbury Comics (to buy a CD) I was amazed how many records they sell now. There's always been a few on hand for the devotees, but suddenly the shelf-space devoted to records is starting to rival CDs.

Amazing, but maybe not surprising. The reason I went to an actual store to buy a CD is because lately it's dawned on me how much money I've sunk into albums that don't actually exist. Ninety-five percent of the albums I've bought over the last few years have been digital downloads, just magnetized dots on a harddrive. And that suddenly feels kind of shitty. It feels like I've only been getting half of what I used to get from buying CDs.

The whole premise of "digital" assumes that content (a story, a song) is the important experience and that the delivery system is irrelevant. It assumes that when you pay for music you're paying to hear a song rather than to own a CD (or a record). That when you pay for a novel you're paying to read a story rather than to own a book. And that may be true for fleeting things like magazines or news, things you consume and throw away. But it's not true for the types of media we define ourselves by and decorate our homes with. Digital has been a novelty because it's cheaper and easier, but I think we might be at the beginning of a backlash, as people realize that for all their collecting and all their money invested, they have nothing tangible to show for it.

Hence the records.

Graffiti in Rio

I'm writing a novel about a graffiti artist in Brazil so this story jumped out at me. Some people took advantage of maintenance scaffolding on the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, and painted on his head.

It's a heck of a target, and if it'd been done by an artist, it'd be pretty cool... But this is pichacao, scribbles, a style frowned upon by actual graffiti artists, and as such, it's just a mess. Somewhere in a corner of my brain, Mateo Amaral is fuming.