I Like Any Sport Where You Sit Down Quietly At A Table And They Serve You Alcohol Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Astronauts Lose Tool Bag In Space
  I wonder if they checked under the couch. Usually, when I lose stuff, it turns up under the couch. Also: I would really like to be the first person to lose keys in space.
• Spate of piracy draws Indian counterattack
  Pirates vs. Indians? Sounds like something that we played when we were kids.
• Bill Clinton offers steps to help wife get State job
  Step 1: Divorce? That would certainly clear things up for Hillary.

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I Got The Disease Where You Wake Up In Strange Places Drunk Edition

Todays links of interest:

• The embarrassing e-mails that will keep me from working in the Obama administration
  Seriously. Do they want anybody under 50 working in the new administration? Or just voting for him?
• TypePad - Why Blog - Journalist Bailout Program
  Hmm.
• A beginner’s guide to Twilight
  Sigh. We have people on the ‘loper staff who love the vampires and love romance novels and who have said that the "Twilight" series is, er, sub-par. Better to watch the 2nd & 3rd seasons of "Buffy" again.

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Circles, my head’s going round in circles
— Pete Townshend

Circles, circles, everywhere I see circles. Right now, on three main things I use to access the world — Microsoft Vista, Firefox, and the iPhone — I’m always seeing circles, making me wait. Or, more to the point, letting me know that I am going to be waiting while an application or my email or a web page loads.

And they’re all slightly different: Apple has their rotating series of lines; Mircrosoft Vista has a rotating blue circle, while Firefox has a series of dots that chase each other. Extra fun: when you load a Firefox page on a Vista machine, you get both of their circles simultaneously!!

My question is simple: when did this happen? When did a rotating circle become UI shorthand for “your request is very important to us, please wait?”

And furthermore, who thought that it was a good idea? Because I’m not so sure that it is.

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Fwarfs Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Get Ready For Beatles? Hidden Track!
  Yay? We don’t hold out much hope that a song that has been deemed as too experimental for over four decades to be anything but a historical curiosity. The guess here is that if it wasn’t The Beatles, nobody would care. And shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t a "new" Beatles song remind you why they conquered the world in the first place?
• The bad economics of stopping gay marriage
  Focus on the Family cares more about spending money trying to hold back an inevitable historical tide than they do about the families of the people who work for them.
• Bye Bye Bye: What We’ve Learned From Pop’s "TRL" Era
  A thoughtful look at the influence of TRL over the what might be remembered as the final era of unified pop music.

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Forgetting Sarah Palin Edition

Todays links of interest:

• The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla
  Whenever I hear Winky speak, all I can think of is Miss Teen South Carolina explaining "some people don’t have maps."

Friday Night Is Killing Me Again Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Hubble Snaps First Photo Of Planet Circling A Star
  D’ya think that they’re as fracked up as we are?
• MSNBC retracts false Palin story; others duped
  Apparently Sarah Palin does know that Africa is a continent, not a country. What still must rankle is that so many people took that at face value.

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You can talk about genres, artists, albums, or even songs, but sometimes what keeps us coming back to music is the discovery of the transcendent musical moment. For me, “the moment” is the part of the song that fully and utterly engages me; the reason that I keep coming back to it.

I’m not necessarily talking about hooks here, because the purpose of a hook is the draw you into a song. I’m really talking more about traps: the part of a song that that keeps you there.

The is the fourth in a series. The first one had 25, the second one has 24, the third one had 23.

And good news! The latest version of Flash solves the problem that was going on with Windows, Flash and Firefox. You might wanna download it.

Every single moment I’ve listed below kills me single every time I hear it.

Oh, and this isn’t in any kind of order, despite the numbering.

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Ice Cold Ice Cold Ice Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Jeff Jarvis Is Kind of Jerky About Journalism
  When grown men enter into pissing matches…
• Noah Robischon to Leave Gawker for FastCompany.com
  In other Gawker news, rumors has it that both Consumerist and Valleywag are on the endangered species list.
• How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You
  Remember: as long as we’re the species in possession of opposable thumbs, we have a chance.

When He Died I Was Hopin’ That it Wasn’t Contagious Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Layoffs hit Al Gore’s Current Media
  Cue inevitable inconvenient truth pun.
• The Best Show Nobody’s Watching
  That would be "How I Met Your Mother," which is the funniest thing on TV that isn’t "30 Rock" or "The Office."
• Gmail Adds Video and Voice Chat
  This? Potentially huge.

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Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Palin sorts clothes to see what belongs to the RNC
  Coming soon, commemorative RNC laundry bags. Palin’s post-election life really should be a reality TV series. Fox clearly dropped the ball.
• Olbermann Signs Contract Extension with MSNBC
  Well, it was either that or go on the road with George W. Bush in an updated version of the Gordon Liddy / Timothy Leary tour.
• Maker’s Mark & Rock the Vote
  Apparently, Maker’s Mark, one of our favorite inexpensive bourbons, was doing a special "Rock the Vote" edition of their bottle. However, these just showed up in our favorite grocery store last weekend. That’s right, after the election. Nice timing. As far as the story to which we are linking, it starts with "elections and booze should not be mixed." As if!! Who didn’t want to toast the results last week? And it only gets more shrill from there: apparently underage drinking is bad. Wish somebody had told me at 14. Our only problem with these bottles is that with the red wax augmented by layers of white wax and blue wax, they’re incredibly difficult to open!

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