We Gotta Hit!

Proof that people are still buying music, it's just that they're buying singles, not albums.

First Lines of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either."
- Chuck Klosterman, from "This is Emo" in the Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs collection

Space Art

Take a look at this!

A NASA satellite has caught a stunning, yet eerie, video of a huge plasma twister rising up from the surface of the sun. The video, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows a plasma eruption that swirls up like a tornado to a dizzying height of up to 93,206 miles (150,000 kilometers) above the solar surface.
"Its height is roughly between 10 to 12 Earths," solar astrophysicist C. Alex Young of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

The whole thing reminded me of the amazing shapes described in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. In that book, the ocean planet creates a number of different strange formations that are classified variously as "tree-mountains," "extensors," "fungoids, "symmetroids," "assymetroids," and "mimoids." These creepy yet seemingly intelligent extensions of the planet lend another dimension to the novel's overall theme of the impossibility of communication between races - and it's that bittersweet feeling, tinged with awe, that strikes me when I see incredible space art such as this.

Quote of the Day

When you pick up a pencil and sharpen it up
When you're kicking the fence and still nothing will budge
When the words are immobile until you sit down
Never feel they're worth keeping, they're not easily found
Then you know in some strange, unexplainable way
You must really have something -
Jumping, thumping, fighting, hiding away
Important to say

When you sing through the verse and you end in a scream
And you swear and you curse 'cause the rhyming ain't clean
But it suddenly comes after years of delay
You pick up your guitar, you can suddenly play
When your fingers are bleeding and the knuckles are white
Then you can be sure, you can open the door
Get off of the floor tonight:
You have something to write!
...
You can walk, you can talk, you can fight
But inside you've got something to write
In your hand you hold your only friend
Never spend your guitar or your pen
Your guitar or your pen
- Pete Townshend, "Guitar and Pen" off of Who Are You

Song of the Day

Not a song, but the Sleepbot!

Because we all need a little calm in our lives...

Quote of the Day

We do not, in fact step out of the movement of things, ask "What am I to do" and, having obtained an answer, step in again.
All our actions, all our questionings and answerings, are part of the movement of things, and if we can work on things, things can work on us...
- John Anderson

Debt Theatre

I've tried to tune out this debt ceiling theatre, but the sheer insanity of it all keeps pulling me back in. Explain to me why the situation is configured that Congress can vote to spend a certain amount of money, but then needs to turn around and approve that can borrow the money that it needs in order to spend the money it just voted to spend? Does any other country in the world work this way?

Speaking of the rest of the world, they seem pretty united in their aghast confusion on the situation.

At the end of the day, I have no idea if the deal that's currently being proposed is a good idea or a bad idea. It certainly seems like Obama lost big time, conceeding most of his main concerns at the start of the negotiation process and thus being forced ever-more rightward. But i've also read two articles stating that things might not be as bad as they seem. As always, time will tell. But man is the process ugly.