I am listening to Rather Ripped. The wonderful picture above is from the inside back cover of the CD. It was taken by Amanda de Cadenet, a onetime UK TV presenter who is now married to a member of The Strokes.
Here are the bands I have seen supporting Sonic Youth:
Robert Christgau is 64 years old. Since the early 70s he has been writing for the Village Voice. The best thing he does is the Consumer Guide, an authoratative set of pithy capsule reviews of records. He doesn't review a record until he's heard it enough times to know what he thinks of it.
Last month he went out to see gigs for 30 consecutive days. He writes about it in the linked article. When I was in college I once went out for 13 days on the run and that nearly killed me, although going out did often involve a lot of drinking in those days.
Here are some good albums I bought because of Robert Christgau (these are all records he rated A+):
Iris DeMent: My Life
Elmore James: The Sky Is Crying: The History of Elmore James
Girl Group Greats
Motown: The Classic Years
I hope he lives to be 100.
What would you expect from an ice cream that was double churned? Obviously that would mean taking a protein cloned from the blood of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, the ocean pout, and using genetically modified yeast to produce it. These proteins are called ice-structuring proteins.
“Ice-structuring proteins protect the fish, which would otherwise die in freezing temperatures,” said H. Douglas Goff, professor of dairy sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “They also make ice cream creamier, by preventing ice crystals from growing.”UK people don't be smug. It's in Cornetto too.
How to choose a service wisely? If you are a cheapskate then you should choose the cheapest service with the most add-ons, according to this article. The suckers who fall prey to the add-ons subsidise your use of the service.
This sounds good but I want the opposite: a simple service that does not require me to pay attention to details. I do not want to understand the phone company's calling plans.
One of the economists mentioned in the article is called Xavier Gabaix. I think I need to change my name to something more cool.
Were US legislators clever or stupid when they made the No Child Left Behind act? Caroline thinks they were clever (i.e. sinister) but are they just stupid? Do they realize the implications of expecting schools to increase performance forever?
Great vampire movie that is the biggest ever Russian movie. Many have complained that the plot is hard to follow, but they just weren't paying enough attention, or perhaps they want to be spoonfed. In the New York Times this week there is a quite interesting article on horror movies which sums up this problem:
When it comes to horror, Danny was saying, Americans crave explanation. “Every detail has to be logical. Why is the ghost flying? Why is the ghost walking? Why does the ghost attack that guy and not the other guy? They keep asking.” He shook his head slightly in frustration. “This is a ghost movie,” Danny said. “Ghosts are already illogical.”
One surprising thing is the low body count. The subtitles are done in a clever way, they move around. Even the cheesy soundtrack works. I was charmed. Much recommended for fans of intelligent action films. And two sequels are on the way.
Why aren't there memorials to the the troublemakers who helped form the nation? When Britain sometimes seems like one big heritage center there are some events that are still so radical that they aren't mentioned.
Malcolm Gladwell is a writer with The New Yorker magazine. Now he has a blog. Here he breaks the unwritten rule of blogs and actually says that blogging is not the future of journalism.
But newspapers continue to perform an incredibly important function as informational gatekeepers—a function, as far as I can tell, that grows more important with time, not less. Between them, for instance, the Times and the Post have literally hundreds of trained professionals whose only job it is to sift through the mountains of information that come out of the various levels of government and find what is of value and of importance to the rest of us. Why would we be without them? We’d be lost.
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