I just flipped past live photos of the SUV burning a hole in the Glasgow airport. I stopped to watch, and very soon the anchor (who I don’t recognize) brought in a split-screen guest and said (I kid you not):

“Let’s see if we can connect this to the two car bomb scares in London yesterday.”

The expert is backtracking all over the place trying to be rational now. I know I keep harping on this, but I really still can’t believe what passes for journalism around here sometimes.

So I kind of went to town tonight — staying up until 2:00 digging up good YouTube music. Doug, if you’re stuck in bed recovering from your Delhi Belly, this might be good fun headphone stuff. I’ve been having far too much fun with it, anyway. Cowboy Mouth (at the bottom) translates poorly to YouTube. They are phenomenal live, though — they’re from New Orleans, and the uplifting, “fuck this mess, we still have music” stuff they did after the hurricane was great. You get a taste of it in the clip I link to, but you really have to see them live to understand.

Anyhow, to start, some Bathroom Sessions from the Barenaked Ladies — Ed Robertson singing some BNL favorites in his upstairs bathroom (with some great guest appearances from Steven Page):

• Another Postcard
• Thanks, That Was Fun
• Some Fantastic
• Maybe Katie
• Pinch Me
• One Week (the country version — very tight)
• Crazy (technique)
• Crazy (song, solo)
• When I Fall (one of my favorites by Ed Robertson)
• Light Up My Room (another of my favorites)
• King of Bedside Manor (with Moondance interlude — what is it with Canadians and Van Morrison?)

And a touch of Michael Penn — if you haven’t heard of him, he’s the brother of Sean and Chris Penn and a great acoustic performer. My buddy Marty turned me on to him this summer and got me to go see him at Schuba’s here in Chicago, and he was truly awe-inspiring. I started writing again because of that show (and because it happened when Lizzie and Nora were out of town, so I could come home and write until 4:00 — but that’s beside the point).

• Walter Reed

And finally this guy, who is doing a nice “ode to the bathroom sessions” of the Barenaked Ladies, but mixing in some very good solo Michael Penn stuff.

• Walter Reed (Michael Penn)
• Brian Wilson (BNL)
• Dim (?)
• The Old Apartment (BNL)
• The Old Apartment (actual BNL live video, for comparison)

Okay, and some gratuitous Tom’s Favorite Bands live stuff:

• Hello City (BNL)
• Love of My Life (Cowboy Mouth — bad audio, but I can vouch for these guys live)

The Entertainment Retailers Association in the UK has come out firing at the Artist Formerly Known As Prince for offering up a free CD of his music in the Daily Mail (I originally had this as the Guardian — sorry) this coming Sunday. Here’s one fun quote from the “entertainment” industry:

“The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.”

How is this not a protection racket? This is a threat, plain and simple. It is apparently lost on these people that Prince now refers to himself as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince because Warner Brothers trademarked his actual first name out from under him. Why should he play ball? They have his first name and a great chunk of his residual income. Now they want to blackball him for giving away his own new music (to which they have no legal rights)? Man, it’s as if he’s going to have a couple of Joints Formerly Known As Kneecaps. Between these bastards and the RIAA, the corporate side of music is looking more and more like the mafia that they are.

Another gem from the ChimpOMatic.

Will the highways on the Internet become more few?
George w. Bush
Concord, N.H.
01/29/2000

Tonight’s episode of Nova is about the Yamato, the largest Japanese warship during WWII. There are several things that are fascinating about it, but the one that caught my eye was that it was able to fire shells laterally much farther than American ships because they could make their ships wider than the Panama Canal — U.S. ships, as part of a two-ocean fleet, had to be able to fit through the canal. Kind of interesting, in my opinion — it’s the kind of thing you don’t think about, but makes perfect sense. And it’s the kind of simple physics that can make such a huge difference in practical things like warfare.

I haven’t watched The Wonder Years since I was much older than the Fred Savage character (Kevin). At the time, I thought it was great because it really seemed to pin down the torture of being a teenager in a world of eyes-forward parents (it was the later years of the show then, but his character really was only a year or two away from me for the whole run of the series). It’s being replayed now on various channels, and I got roped in to a Christmas episode tonight while Lizzie and Nora are both out of the house. It’s me and my TV, sitting here weeping quietly.

For those who haven’t seen the show at all, it’s a great, sad, happy, miserable, painful, hilarious show from episode to episode. We’re currently watching Arrested Development from the first season on, which is a dirty, terrible, fantastically funny show. But not heartwarming in the same way.

As I type, the Wonder Years episode is about Kevin trying to find Winnie (played by Danica McKellar, who was not a great actress but certainly filled the bill of the unbelievably attractive and completely unattainable girl-from-school) the perfect Christmas gift without overplaying his hand. Three years running, I did this for Lizzie. The first year I rebuilt and edited a Calvin and Hobbes strip about Christmas — I’m not sure she has it, but her mother seemed quite impressed by it at the time. And she kissed me for it (Lizzie, not her mother). The second year I tried to make her jewelry (a tiny silver heart with a peace sign in it — I burned the hell out of my hand and ended up blowing up a piece of my mother’s Pyrex by heating it unevenly with a propane torch). I don’t remember what I did the third (our senior) year — that being the case, I suspect it involved a blow to the head or a low oxygen environment.

We’re now married with a five-year-old, but it stunk every year through high school. And when I was doing this, she was only passingly aware of my true feelings as I was one of several guys singing songs of her beauty. I managed to make the cut, though, and we are now happily married for almost eight years. Thankfully, I found a path to expressing my deep and true and unyielding love for her that still allowed me to revert to the expressionless prick that I am now. I don’t know how I threaded that particular needle, but there you go. We all get lucky sometimes.

BUT ANYWAY, the point is this — this particular episode is about them ragging on their dad (played magnificently by Dan Lauria) about getting a color TV for Christmas. (Personally, I had one of a few barfy Christmases with my uncle staying in my room the year we got a color TV — the holidays always made me a little nervous.)

But I digress. The first time I saw this episode (which I remember well), I was all about the angst of Kevin trying to buy Winnie a Christmas gift. It still makes my stomach wiggle to watch it — that’s not gone. But now I realize that the parents are written and played masterfully and painfully. The urge to blow everything (the mother says at one point, “you don’t have to get me anything, and we can eat hot dogs for a month”) and get some fancy whatever for your family when you are faced with the responsibility of making an example of fiscal responsibility is miserable — it feels like holding your breath longer than you can under water. It reminds me of watching Parenthood a couple years ago — I had no idea when I saw it the first time (when it came out) how well it portrayed the pain of parenting. But it does. I think it should be required viewing for people who want to have babies, and should be couched with the urging that the viewer cannot possibly know yet how accurate it is in all its pain and joy.

Megan, I’m sure these are all available through NetFlix — you’ll do better watching these than forty-nine seasons of Mama’s Family. Trust me — I’m as big a Ken Barry fan as the next F-Troop geek (I wrote a computer game once with the Heckawi as the native tribe where my character went), but this will serve you better in the long run.

Overall, I’m amazed at how it speaks directly to whoever is watching it — I remember watching this episode before and loving it from Kevin’s perspective, and now here I am feeling for the parents. That’s a well-written show.

When I was a kid, I was an Egyptology geek. I even knew how to read hieroglyphics for a while (a bit of advice — when your school goes to the Field Museum, being able to phonetically read hieroglyphics, particularly if you also have a stutter as I did, does NOT in any way bag you more girls).

Now they’ve found what they think is the body of Queen Hatshepsut — the most powerful female Pharaoh in Egyptian history. Everyone talks about Nefertiti and Nefertari, but Hatshepsut was hard core. And now, she’s the most important find since King Tutankhamen. Cool.

Zahi Hawass buys it, so it’s likely true. He’s the chief of antiquities for the Egyptian government and kind of a cross between Walter Cronkite and Bill Kurtis as far as Egyptian antiquities and their coverage on U.S. documentary TV. He’s kind of a skeptic, and has shot down a bunch of very tasty assumptions by western archaeologists in the past.

On a side note, one of the things they used as evidence was a tooth engraved with the cartouche for Hatshepsut, held by some British dude for years after it was found in the 1880s or so. When they brought it to the mummy, it fit perfectly into a hole in her jaw. DNA testing confirmed the bloodline necessary for it to be her. So while it’s not 100%, what a strange way to “prove” the lineage of the body, no? After all, the odds of a tooth, that of a Pharaoh or otherwise, finding its way back to a body after 3400 years is pretty amazing.

I get all giddy about this stuff. Maybe I’m still a bit of a geek, though. Is it wrong to surf to the History Channel to see if they’ve blown out their schedule to cover something of this scale?

Tiger and Elin Woods just had a baby, if you hadn’t heard. And they decided to have the first released pictures taken by a complete unknown from Oregon. Kind of a neat story.

There was a discussion about the Evoluent VerticalMouse on Slashdot today — it’s an upright mouse to help people who suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. I’m not convinced it wouldn’t be a pain to use (it’s huge, for one thing), but there was a post with another link to the Perific mouse. That one looks pretty neat. Just the number of positions it can be used in is great.

The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive has issued great instructions (PDF) for how you can help combat the “insider threat.” This comes up because the FBI is urging all universities to examine its students carefully for such indicators as keeping strange hours, interacting with foreign nationals, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, fluctuating monetary worth, and so on.

My God, I think I’m a spy.

I didn’t go away to college, but I hung around a lot with a buddy of mine who did at his dorm. And honestly, I never really managed to interact with any foreign nationals. I would have, though, given half the chance. Many college students I’ve known have shared plenty of microwave popcorn and casual sex with people from all over the world, thanks to the higher education model.

Read the PDF — it’s seriously tweaked. It basically suggests that almost everyone around you could be a spy. It reads like a guide to bipedal profiling.

Turns out the document was originally designed for internal use within governmental agencies, and the FBI is now asking educational institutions to apply it to their students. Unreported foreign travel? If you’re a student of Indian descent, who do you report to when you go home for the summer?

Anyhow, check these guys out. I didn’t know they even existed until now. Their website gets a little creepy — take a peek at their propoganda spigot … er … Booklets and Brochures page for a taste.