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When it comes to exercise I’ve always been a team sports guy. Hoops, baseball, soccer – if there’s a ball to hit, throw, kick, dribble or shoot I could go all freakin’ day in just about any conditions you can imagine. But running for the sake of running? Hate it. Weights? I do it because I need to, but I don’t enjoy it, even if I do like the results.

This is just my psychology. So the music I work out to (these days I ride my bike more than anything) has to take me somewhere else, somewhere away from the boredom and pain that accompanies exercising alone. Full story »

Today Tim Pawlenty said “We can start by applying what I call ‘The Google Test.’ If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.”

If he really understands Google, Tim Pawlenty does not deserve to be president on moral grounds. If Pawlenty does not understand the implications of what he said, he does not deserve to be president on grounds of ignorance. Either way, he’s testing the bottom of the swamp.

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Would you pay between $4.95 and $9.95 a month to watch conservative talker Glenn Beck for two hours a day on the Internet?

Beck will launch, with partner Mercury Radio Arts, GBTV, an online video network, on Sept. 12. Here’s Beck himself in a five-minute pitch describing his “global plans” and how he will be “champion of man’s freedom” for the mere cost of a “cup of coffee in today’s world”:

Whether Beck is certifiably insane is not the issue here: Rather, he and his partner need to insure that revenues exceed costs. Now that he’s leaving the ready mega-megaphone of Fox News on June 30, that’s not a certainty.
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So much of popular music is about sex and nothing else, and we have seen more sexcess than we probably know how to process. Perhaps so much that we occasionally grow numb to it.

I can think of dozens of really sexy women in music, but since it seems like sexy is a prerequisite to even get in the door, it really takes a bit extra to rise above the noise.

Enter Alison Goldfrapp. Full story »

What makes a good Utopia? Are there minimum critical success factors that would allow the vagaries of human nature to be overcome? Does it mean a four day work week and personal jetpacks? A permanent rustic rural retreat, with all necessary services being provided by elves? A socialist workers’ paradise—ie, where no one expects to actually have to work? Is one even possible without robots to do all the gruntwork? Is there even a good definition of Utopia? Does it need to accord with John Rawls’ definition of a just society? Do we know what we’re talking about here anyway?

This is all prompted by the highly entertaining and interesting discussion this evening at the British Library, part of their discussion series that goes along with their Science Fiction exhibition. Tonight we had the redoubtable Iain M. Banks (and not, thankfully, Iain Banks, who writes different sorts of books entirely); Gregory Claeys, who has written extensively about the notion of utopias and whose Searching for Utopia has just been published; and Francis Spufford, general racounteur and author of three terrific and totally unrelated Full story »

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This one is actually fun. And pretty damned cynical about the world of business and advertising, to boot.

This year’s festival was outstanding, but I’ll begin by apologizing. If I had talent and/or a real camera I might do the artists in our annual festival justice. As it is, I’m a schlub with a smart phone camera, so please, imagine how awesome these would be live and in person. Next year we should take up a collection to fly staff photographer Lisa Wright out here to shoot the event. Start saving now, yo.

Up first, our friend (and 2010 winner of the Gusterman Silversmith’s Artistic Merit Award for Creative Excellence), Shawn Sapp.

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Nice local coverage of the death of Dr. Jack Kevorikan (aka Dr. Death) by the local Patch.com site.

I’ve noted a couple of times as I have worked through the original 30-Day Song Challenge and The Sequel how powerfully I associate music with family and my childhood. If you’d grown up where I did, you’d perhaps understand why the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? was more than just a really good comedy. The soundtrack was loaded with dark, downtrodden Appalachian hillbilly spirituals, the music of hopeless lives waiting on Jesus because there was nothing else to hope for. Full story »

The guy can’t sing (phrasing, anyone?) He can’t write songs. And while I’ve heard guitarists defend him, I’ve personally never seen or heard him play anything that strikes me as being more than sort of marginally competent.

I would ask you to explain to me what the big deal is, but I’m afraid you’d try. So here’s a song by Dave Matthews, and the less said about it the better. I don’t necessarily recommend that you listen to it.

Moving along…. Full story »

This morning, a pop quiz. One question. Compare and contrast the following two videos.

First video (the money shot begins around 0:13).

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It’s not like a major theme, usually, but writers of near future science fiction usually have one or two major disease outbreaks as one of the plot devices, even if it isn’t a major factor in the story. It’s always fun to speculate on the future, and it’s a good bet that there will be something along the lines of the Kansas City Flu, or the Helsinki Virus, both of which have figured in someone’s novel. Or it could have been the Kansas City Virus and the Helsinki flu. It’s fun to make up catastrophic disease names, and it’s so easy—pick a location, any location, really, and put it in front of the words “flu” or “virus”, and suddenly you’ve got a plausible near-future event. Hey, look, the Seattle flu wiped out one third of humanity. Who knew? But it wasn’t nearly as deadly as the Capetown virus, which took out the other two-thirds.

All good speculative fun, in its own weird way. The problem is that life often has a tendency to imitate art. So now we have this new form of e. coli bacteria (technically, Escherichia coli O104:H4 (STEC O104:H4)) that has killed a number of people in Germany and elsewhere (17 dead, and over 1,600 ill so far, and counting). And, contrary to earlier reports, it appears that the bacteria did not come from cucumbers in Spain. In fact, no one seems to know where it does come from. Full story »

Jack Kevorkian (aka Dr. Death) died early Friday in a Michigan hospital from complication of pulmonary thrombosis, not suicide. He was 83. He was frail and failing, weighing around 75 lbs.

It was breaking news on Detroit’s local TV stations and within minutes spread to the national media.

Physician-assisted suicide’s most prominent advocate died, in a hospital where he was being treated, of natural causes. Curious that. He was a long time proponent of the right to die and ended up doing prison time, eight years, when one of his patients decided he did not want to commit suicide in the middle of the procedure that Kevorkian, against his then-lawyer’s advice, was videotaping. Kevorkian gave the tape to CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the local prosecutor was finally successful in getting a conviction. In all, he helped 130 people to commit suicide. Full story »