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All via Feministing:

Congratulations to Kuwait, which just granted women the right to vote and run for public office.

And to New York, which now has its own Rock Camp for Girls.

Less happily... not sure how to summarize this one... a Bush-appointed FDA official... who was instrumental in opposing the emergency contraceptive Plan B... well, sounds like a real horror.

I don't buy books anymore.

I used to spend a lot of time in bookstores. Vacations and day trips were opportunities to explore new booksellers, and if I liked the a place I'd always search until I found something I wanted, as a souvenir. For a few years around the turn of the century I bought books faster than I could read them. Instead of a list of books to read, I had a shelf of them, which expanded to a whole bookcase, which then grew around the corner to a second wall of my bedroom. Then I quit my job and started going to the library. Then I realized I still had all these books I'd bought, and I stopped going to the library. And lately I just don't read much.

But when I bought books, I bought a lot of them from Kepler's, so today I had to drop in on their fiftieth birthday party. The cake was delicious, I successfully didn't win anything I didn't want in the raffle, and in the end I had to buy some books, even though I have all these other ones waiting to be read. I left with Kate Walbert's Our Kind and Alex Garland's The Coma, which I'm now almost halfway through.

Across the street, Wessex Books is closing its doors. It's the only place I know where you could expect to find not just one used book by, say, Gilbert Adair or Georges Perec, but a wide selection. No longer--now there's one of each, and not their best. Wessex didn't fail; the owner just decided to "explore something new", and at the beginning of this year announced his search for a new owner. He never found one, and the remaining stock is going for 60% off. I bought Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.

Then Applewood Pizza (has it been years?), the Enron movie at the Guild (it's been almost that long), inescapably a frosted mocha from Cafe Borrone, and listening to Chelsey Fasano on a slow, half-seen drive home.

Tin Cat has two shows this week. Wednesday from 6:30 to 7:30 (PDT) we're doing a live webcast. We've been working hard with drummer Mike Brilliot, and among other things this will be the full-band debut of "Over Ilsa," a new song I started writing one night at the movies. It may be a while before we get another chance to be heard outside the bay area, so if you'd like to see the webcast, you can tune into the low- or high-bandwidth streams.

Friday from 8 to 10 we're playing a terrestrial show at Barefoot Coffee, with Cameron DePalma opening. Then next Friday, Altamont Pass is there, with Colin Carthen and Philip Rodriguez, who have been performing as a duo, to marvelous effect. I'm really looking forward to hearing a full set from them.

Further off, I've just volunteered to book a weekly acoustic music series for the summer. Weekly! More details on that soon.

I heard on that radio that George W. Bush is the first U.S. president ever to visit Georgia. Is there a joke in there somewhere? Maybe not.

Scott pointed out a USA Today column on the Chinese music industry. Apparently piracy is so widespread that artists don't make any money from CDs--you know, sort of like record labels in the US--and instead have to survive on ticket sales, endorsements, etc.

Chinese rock stars aren't getting as wealthy as, say, Michael Jackson, but Quek raises an interesting question: Why should they? Only a relatively few American rockers ever sell enough CDs to get fabulously rich. Should society care if rockers can't afford to build their own backyard amusement parks?

Amen.

Speaking of not making any money in the music business, Tin Cat has a myspace page now. Those bootleggish live tracks from Dana Street are on it. Add us if you're nice. Oh! And! We're doing a live webcast next Wednesday, 6:30 PM in Emeryville, CA, at a venue where they know how to make a webcast sound good. They've got room for a small live audience, too, so let me know if you'd like to see it in person.

"The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers."

Today at Borders I bought the latest issue of Bitch. Some of you know me well enough to be amused by the image of me walking up to the counter with that title in my hand. The sales clerk said, "... new bitch!" I nodded and smiled.

Motivated, in case you're wondering, by Amanda Marcotte's post about Juliana Tringali's article about "how rock music came to be dominated by men, and female musicians who subvert that". Looks good, haven't read it yet.

The monarch butterfly population in their winter home is down 75 percent.

Seventy. Five. Percent.

Something I forgot to post about last week: Two teenage girls from New York are in custody because they present "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers". I suppose they could be (although, per here: "Teenage girls talking suicide. Hm."). But it's more likely in this country's great tradition of using the immigration system to sidestep pesky concepts like civil rights and due process.

All of Nina Bernstein's reporting on this is good: here, here (free copy), here (copy), and here. And the NYT editorial. And here's a blog about it.

Scott wrote a thought-provoking post (although I guess it hasn't provoked any specific thoughts that I'm ready to share) about how many fans you need to make a living:

5000 Fans Theory was first floated by Brian Austin Whitney, founder of Just Plain Folks, in one of his monthly newsletters. Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year — be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever — stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.

Scott continues doing the math from there. The most interesting figure, I think, is:

In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans. As Hobbit sez, there are a lot of people working for minimum wage doing stuff they hate.

700 is still a lot of people to get $20 from, but it is, to use Scott's word, "attainable."

This "linguistic profile" meme is fascinating (although it turns out we're all pretty generic), but the malformed HTML is wreaking havoc on my friends page.