Linkstew

Instead of one single item, I'll make you a deal and give you 7 short items instead. Consider it one for each day I haven't blogged in the last week. ;-)

• Metroid Prime comes out in a little less than a month, and Nintendo just posted the commercial. It's a pretty nice commercial (much better than that awful Super Mario Sunshine commercial), and it got me even more excited about the game. Hopefully it gets some non-Nintendo folks to check out the Gamecube.
• Check out the video of Verbal, the single of Amon Tobin's new album Out From Out Where.
• If you're wondering, I didn't go see Stallman speak -- Instead, I went and listened to Lakoff talk about causality and the mind for 80 minutes.
• Just like Kevin got a new Wells Fargo Platinum Visa card a few weeks ago, I got my new Bank of America Visa Platinum Check Card today. Unlike Kevin, though, this is actually exciting for me. Not only does this increase the amount I can spend at once from $500 to $1200, but since my card number changed, it also means I'll finally be able to use Paypal.
• I'm happy to see the World Series tied 2-2. On the one hand, I want the Giants to win it all because of that Disney thing with the Angels, and because duh, it's San Francisco. On the other hand, I want the Angels to win it all because I like the AL better, and I like seeing underdogs do well, and because all the news about the Giants seems to be Bonds Bonds Bonds. Really, I want to see it go to Game 7 again.
• As for that First Circle concert I went to a couple of weeks back, it was pretty good. First Circle didn't come on until after 12:30, but they played until 2. And between First Circle and the two other bands that played, we got around 4 hours of music for a mere $6. I highly recommend checking out concerts at Blake's, and I think I'll have to try to get back there a few more times before I'm done here.
• Oh, and finally, check out the Perl IAQ - Infrequently Asked Questions. It's pretty amusing. I especially like the answer for "How do I convert a string to a number?"

Here are entries that I was going to write in the last week, but were aborted for one reason or another:

• Mention that any of Chimay's beers have surpassed my previous favorite beer, but in particular, the Chimay Blue (aka Chimay Grande Réserve) is my new favorite. It's a nice dark Belgian Ale with a smooth texture and complex flavor, and it's easy to drink despite its 9% ABV. Of course, it's a little too expensive to drink very regularly, but what do you expect from something brewed by Belgian Monks? It's still damn good, though.
• A discussion of Berkeley's proposed law on requiring local businesses to brew only Fair Trade coffee, and attempting to draw out a corollary on how this could potentially apply to beer. Aborted because I couldn't make said corollary into a joke that made sense.
• I was going to comment that with Star Trek X apparently being "A Generation's Final Journey," that means we won't be getting a Star Trek movie with Q. Then I was going to make a joke that if it meant we had to wait until Star Trek Q for Q's movie, then maybe it was alright, because the thought of that many Star Trek movies makes me ill. The joke died, however, when I rememembered that there is no Roman Numeral Q. D'oh.
• Discussion of the disturbing discovery that They Might Be Giants songs are 18.71% percent of my music 3875 song music library (though only 12.73% of the duration of my library). NIN was a distant 2nd, making up a mere 3.4% of my songs. Perhaps more disturbingly, though, is that different versions of a mere 4 TMBG songs (Istanbul, Particle Man, They Might Be Giants, and Birdhouse In Your Soul) make up 1% of my entire music collection! What's even worse about this is that there's only one version of Istanbul, Particle Man, and They Might Be Giants I really like, but I keep the rest around because I don't want to delete a song out of the middle of a bootleg or other collection. At least I listen to at least half the variants of Birdhouse that I have. Anyway, the point is that if you had any doubt that I'm a TMBG fanatic, you now have incontrovertible evidence.
• Yesterday's iPod software update made me a very happy camper, because now my iPod will update my iTunes library with updated Play Counts and Last Played times, so my iPod listening habits can be taken into consideration when creating smart playlists.
• TMBG is going to be on Conan O'Brien again on Wednesday, August 14th. By which I mean the will actually air on the 14th, as in the one that starts 30 minutes after the 13th ends. Hopefully they don't play Robot Parade like they did last time. Four of Two would be a much more reasonable choice, I think.
• While reading alt.music.tmbg last night, I came across a link to this interview, wherein John Flansburgh and John Linnell interview each other. It's very amusing and very revealing, I think. They talk about everything from other's perceptions of their music to their high school science teacher to emotion killing bacteria.
• The guy who cuts my hair (which happened today) looks totally like Tom Cavanagh (Who plays Ed on the TV show Ed).
• And finally, if I weren't completely busy with work, I'd totally be at TMBG's 20th anniversay concert next week in Central Park. ::sigh::

So now that you know what I would have written about, aren't you glad I didn't write about it at length?