I tried writing a lot this weekend but none of it ended up being worth posting. I need to post something though, because it’s driving me nuts that my last post (therefore the first post anybody landing on my blog will see) is about last week’s debacle in Ottawa — a topic that I’d frankly like to relegate to the archives as fast as I can. So I’m just going to share a bunch of stuff that caught my interest:
- B.o.B’s sarcastic ode to Autotune (aka robot voice, aka what makes every pop singer so, um, ’talented’):
- In stark contrast, here’s Neil Young’s great solo acoustic recording, Live at Canterbury House 1968, streamed free at NPR. Commentary by Bob Lefsetz:
You see I’ve been to this gig. Not this specific one. But at the Bitter End, clubs all over America. You were a fan of an act, you lived for an act, and you schlepped down to hear them along with a hundred other souls. Maybe two hundred. You got there hours early, just to sit up front. You hung on every word. It wasn’t the same rap in every city. This was a one off. Made just for you.
- Scientific research on “the dizzying diversity of human sexual strategies“: who wants what, how much, and how come.
- Video: A conversation about the economic crisis with the incomparable Nassim Nicholas Taleb: [to paraphrase] Banks are the turkey. Every day the butcher brings food, fattens the turkey up and makes him believe the butcher is his friend. After 1000 days, when the turkey’s comfort level is highest, something totally unexpected happens…
- Felix Salmon on the slow “End of Excess“:
Still, a look at the real-estate “bargains” shows how much further there is to fall: a Greenwich home which sold for $11 million after being listed at $19.9 million; a Hamptons rental for a mere $250,000, down from an intial asking price of $500,000. Yes, just for the summer. People are still mentally pricing off the highs: enormous numbers seem positively reasonable when they’re much smaller than they were a few months ago.
Last night I ate at a very expensive new downtown restaurant; it was packed. Maybe people feel that spending a few hundred dollars on dinner doesn’t make a difference when the big problems are with seven-figure salaries and mortgages. Or maybe they’re simply more likely to order the $50 wine than the $2,000 wine, and that way they can get most of the benefit at a fraction of the former cost. But I do still get the feeling that people need a little time to unwind from the culture of excess; that right now they’re just looking for cheaper flat-screen TVs, as opposed to not buying a new TV at all.
- and speaking of flat-screens:
So we go to Costco for lunch and formula Friday, my dad, the kids and I, and it’s a flatscreen frenzy. Like Rodney King-grade looting frenzy; every cart has a flatscreen and a bale of toilet paper, and I’m like, I have a flatscreen I don’t even watch, and yet I want another one. I couldn’t fit that box in the car, and I still want one. My dad and his wife bought the biggest flatscreen in the Triangle last spring, and I can see he wants one, too.
The kid’s sitting in the cart, and she sees a guy carrying a 19″ flatscreen, and she goes, “Look! He has a tiny one!” and the guy looks at her, looks at the box — I’m not making this up, my dad told me; he was investigating the flatscreen aisle while I was in the bathroom — and goes and puts it back, and picks up a 23″ flatscreen.
