music

As I picked up the six CDs I'd picked out this morning to listen to at work (two I had running through my head, four I need to decide whether to keep) from the pavement where they'd spilled, I thought: I should give in, encode all my CDs as MP3s, and stop carrying these things back and forth.

glenn mcdonald's (don't ask) column today, coincidentally, is about iPods and the physical future of media" and his recent decision to do roughly that.

If you're unusually curious about him, here's an email interview.

I was also led to Mike Doughty's flame of the "Pazz and Jop" poll, and some of the responses.

in the news

Caught up on some of Sunday's paper over lunch.

George Ryan's speech on his blanket clemency for Illinois death row inmates is worth reading.

Another variant on the statistics you've heard before, from a New York Times piece on the changing definition of "the rich":

"In the 80's, it was not so much the top moving way ahead," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group in Washington. "It was the bottom getting smashed."

In the 1990's, by contrast, inequality kept growing because the wealthy did fabulously well. Despite the decade's prosperity and the raises given to most workers, the top 20 percent of earners were the only group to increase its share of the nation's income.

Speaking of money, this morning I heard a few minutes of the Rush Limbaugh show. The topic, I gathered, was why we need to attack Iraq (which might have nuclear weapons) and not North Korea (which does).

Limbaugh explained that there are three things a nation will use nuclear weapons for: As a deterrent (in which case, they'll tell you they have them), for leverage (ditto), or to attack (in which case they'll keep them a secret until the big surprise). North Korea has proclaimed its possession of nuclear weapons, which means that they're not planning to use them, so they're not the threat we need to focus on.

I'm trying to remember--it's been a couple of months, so things are hazy--but wasn't North Korea trying to hide its weapons program until the U.S. called them on it?

stupid brain

I've had the Jayhawks song "Bottomless Cup" running through my head all day. Like, the moment whatever CD I'm listening to ends, I'm back to "Bottomless Cup". I even found myself humming "Bottomless Cup" while listening to something else.

Help.