Completely blind, I had Derek throw me a list of winners for my giveaway. I had 28 comments, four of which were ineligible from my reading, so I had Derek pick ten numbers from 1-24 inclusive. I then shifted past the ineligible comment numbers so he couldn’t be accused of cherry-picking [and besides, he had no idea what this was for ... right now, he's sending me his wife's new record in the background, heh].

So, they are:

1 Jason Windsor
3 brandi
7 kieren
10 Jill
23 Hunter
24 ella
19 mikaela
6 Maria Arteaga
13 muruch
18 stephen cavness

All in all, I think that’s fairly well-distributed: four folks I know, six I don’t. I’ll email everyone tomorrow…

Blind Faith’s eponymous album.

Lenny Kravitz’s It Is Time for a Love Revolution.

Matthew Perryman Jones’s Swallow the Sea, which I’ve been waiting for since … oh, about a half-hour after I first spun Throwing Punches in the Dark.

20 Jul 1995 [Nashville, TN, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. 1995-07-20: Dancing in the District, Nashville, TN, USA

20 Apr 2004 [Minneapolis, MN, USA] concert bootleg of M. Ward, Jim James, and Conor Oberst. 2004-04-20: Pantages Theatre, Minneapolis, MN, USA (disc 1) and 2004-04-20: Pantages Theatre, Minneapolis, MN, USA (disc 2).

18 Nov 2006 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. 2006-11-18: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 1) and 2006-11-18: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 2).

1 Aug 2008 [Sugar Land, TX, USA] concert bootleg of Andy Gullahorn. 2008-08-01: Andrews Home, Sugar Land, TX, USA (disc 1) and 2008-08-01: Andrews Home, Sugar Land, TX, USA (disc 2).

Last week was very good to my ears:

• Nirvana’s Nevermind. Is there an album with a better opening than Nevermind? I mean, it’s a Led Zeppelin-esque tour de force to kick things off. Just fantastic. Four-and-a-half stars.
  
• The Cardigans’ Life. Still definitely in a pop vein, but it’s got a lot more groove behind Nina’s voice musically. Three stars.
  
• Over the Rhine’s Live From Nowhere, Volume Three. Worth the wait, as usual. Four-and-a-half stars. People, this is how you do it: put out a live album every year. Put a couple covers on it. Sell to your hardcore fans directly, and you’ll keep them happy.
  
• 16 Jul 2006 [Florence, MA, USA] concert bootleg of The Autumn Defense. I own Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, their half-and-half EP with Hem [because of the latter], but this is the first time I’ve given them a serious listen. I thought BBF was uninspiring for bringing people to Hem, and I think the same can be said for The Autumn Defense—I’ll be checking more out now. Three stars.
  
• 17 May 2008 [St. Louis, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. Nothing special. Three stars.
  
• 23 Jun 2008 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Death Cab for Cutie. A solid recording. Three-and-a-half stars.
  
• 22 Jul 2008 [San Diego, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Feist. A fantastic recording. Four stars.
  

So Eli’s first soccer games was yesterday, so I decided to go and take photos. Because, well, two things: 1) I love the kid and 2) it’s soccer! I played for four years, but not at his age. When I started playing in third grade, you actually had to, you know, work at scoring a goal, because the kids had figured out defense.

So when he was self-upset about not getting to score in the first seven seconds, I told him, “Dude, do you know how long it was before I scored in a game? Four years!” I could see the wheels grinding, “Four years? That’s how old I am!” Exactly, kid. Did I tell him that I played 90% of the time as a goalie or a fullback? No, because at that age, they don’t get the concept of positions. Or, well, defense. [Okay, so there was the one kid on Eli's team that got defense. I wanted to run over to him and pat him on the back, then encourage him and teach him how to knock guys off-stride without getting carded. AHEM.]

There was the most comical moment of the morning when Eli suddenly stood on the goal line and waved his arms around, making himself look big and trying to distract the kid with the ball. This technique reminded me of, well, most every penalty kick I’ve ever defended, including the one I stopped because I was too scared to move and the kid, taught by his coach that I would be moving at the kick, went right for my feet. Heh.

1. What time do you usually leave for lunch?

I try to go as close to 1100 as I can. There are a couple places close by that are packed by 1115, so I learned to go early if I wanted a table without a wait. Every Tuesday, I meet with friends for Thai at 1115, but then on Thursdays, I have a telecon at 1100, so … it varies.

2. How long do you usually take for lunch?

It varies depending how busy I am at the office. If I’m covered up, I take a shorter break. The inverse of that is that, if I’m really stressed out, I’ll go a little longer. I’ve taken up to two hours, but that’s very rare. Usually an hour if I leave the office for lunch, a half-hour if I eat at my desk.

3. Ever eat lunch at home?

Yeah, I’ve done it. Not as often now that I live in Madison, though.

4. What are your favorite places to eat out for Work Lunch?

I personally am craving Thai Garden since we didn’t go on Tuesday. Like … I want Thai, and it’s before 0700 on a Saturday.

5. How often do you bring food in from home?

When I was a broke college kid, all the time. Now, not so much. Lazy. Plus, when I bring lunch, I tend to not leave the office, and I’ve found that leaving the office is good for my stress level.

6. Are you a lone ranger or a community eater?

I eat with co-workers or friends 2-3 times a week. Some weeks, it’s every day. Some weeks, it’s not at all.

7. How often does your company pay for your lunch?

Once a quarter or so, if a meeting runs into lunch.

8. What is your favorite lunch meal of all time?

Mmm … three-star chicken Pad Thai.

I’ve seen stuff like FriendFeed do this as well: conversations about content done by third parties. And while this is, at some level, no different in you writing a response on your site to something I wrote and the discussion happening over there [which can and does happen; my favorite recurring one of these is when Mark T links to something Karyn wrote, and his entry gets 10x the comments his does], but then you’re making me work to keep in touch with the conversation.

Chris pointed out that the new Disqus model isn’t that at all.

Whenever I find myself reacting in such a knee-jerk manner, I try to remember that, hey, maybe I need to re-think these things. [Not all the time, mind you. I'm forever in danger of blowing out an ACL with all the knee-jerk responses I have in my life.] This re-thinking brought me to a point I’d like to note and amplify for a wider audience:

Hm. I should not criticize that which I haven’t test-run, I guess.

And as long as comments reference back to the URI, I guess that’s fine, right? I mean, all comments are remarks about a URI, whether or not they’re appended inline or left elsewhere.

Dammit, now I’m re-thinking this.

I’ve been thinking about this at idle times. What is a comment? A comment is a reflection—positive, negative, or otherwise—about something. If Chris writes a reflection or a rebuttal on his blog in the morning when he reads this, it’s a comment, but just one not posted on my site. What’s the difference in a comment that Chris posts on his blog versus a comment that he leaves here? It’s merely the control I have over that comment’s publication. I can leave his comment be, edit it [possibly reversing his point, if I'm feeling nefarious], or delete it altogether. These are all understandable responsibilities for me to have as the person providing the place for the commentary. After all, when you’re posting your comment on my place, I become responsible for it as the owner of this domain. This is why I use Alex King’s Comment License plugin.

Extrapolating from this: pingbacks and trackbacks are merely automated systems for notification of externally-hosted comments, prone as they are to spamming. But if we went to a world where we leveraged the power of GOOG and others to find all URLs that reference our source URI as commentary, well, that list is gonna get spammed. Highly-influential articles are going to get smacked and linked to in the hopes that people see the incoming links and think that there’s commentary there [and the GoogleJuice that comes from that], and low-traffic articles become ghettos for comments. In other words, nothing changes.

But what’s the result of this different thinking on my part? Merely that it doesn’t really matter where the conversation happens—just that it happens somewhere. So any third parties that seek to intermediate this, you have two responsibilities to producers:

1. Limit the spam. [Good luck.]
2. Make it dead easy for me to find the commentary.

That’s it. No other responsibilities are really necessary.

Nirvana’s Nevermind. Nope, never actually owned my own copy.

The Cardigans’ Life.

Over the Rhine’s Live From Nowhere, Volume Three.

16 Jul 2006 [Florence, MA, USA] concert bootleg of The Autumn Defense. 2006-07-16: Pines Theater, Florence, MA, USA

17 May 2008 [St. Louis, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. 2008-05-17: The Pageant, St. Louis, MO, USA (disc 1) and 2008-05-17: The Pageant, St. Louis, MO, USA (disc 2).

23 Jun 2008 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Death Cab for Cutie. 2008-06-23: Morning Becomes Eclectic, KCRW-FM, Santa Monica, CA, USA

22 Jul 2008 [San Diego, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Feist. 2008-07-22: Humphrey's, San Diego, CA, USA (disc 1) and 2008-07-22: Humphrey's, San Diego, CA, USA (disc 2).

Last week:

• R.E.M.’s Murmur. Admittedly, I haven’t given this enough of a listen [just getting to it on Saturday], but I’m just not feeling it yet. I’ll keep trying, but right now, it’s just a three-star record on my radar.
  
• George Strait’s Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind. I don’t like a whole lot of country music, but there’s just … something about George Strait’s voice. I figure between George and Lyle Lovett, I can get all the country I ever need in my life. [And I still blame my junior-year-at-MSMS roommate, Thomas, for listening to country music in the first place. I had two choices: listen to country or kill him. I chose the former. But working in country radio right out of high school pretty well fixed me on listening to too much country.] So yeah, I’m going through Strait’s catalog some. Three stars, if you like country.
  
• The Cardigans’ Emmerdale. For a band with this much rock and roll chops—Peter Svensson and Magnus Sveningsson had been in heavy metal bands prior to The Cardigans—it’s weird to hear a pop record from them, but it’s still solid, because Nina Persson’s voice is stellar. Two-and-a-half stars.
  
• 25 Apr 2008 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. The mix is just off, but I’m afraid that there’s not much to be done about it by the taper, given that it seems like everything was done that was possible with the AUD part of the mix. Three-and-a-half stars.
  
• 28 Apr 2008 [Los Angeles, CA, USA] concert bootleg of She & Him. Persic is one of the best tapers I know, so I lay all the fault here on the vocalists—not only Zooey [who just needs to get more stage presence, which should shock no one who's read about her on the Internet at this point], but whoever was doing the bgv’s, too. But the musicianship of the band is great … three-and-a-half stars.
  
• 16 May 2008 [St. Louis, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. The musicianship is great. The recording is solid. It just … doesn’t really feel like I’m there, which is pretty much my standard for bootleg recordings. I guess I’m faulting Steve’s mix here, which rightly focuses on the music, but feels like it weighs a bit too heavy on the SBD patch. I’m not saying that it’s not good; I’m just saying that I guess I think it could be better. Three-and-a-half stars.
  
• 25 Jul 2008 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Gnarls Barkley. It’s obvious that they still haven’t gotten comfortable with being interviewed, but man … a fun listen nonetheless. Four stars.
  

But even those who once said “I would go raving nuts trying to use the iPhone as my mobile device” are now consuming on their iPhone:

I credit Brent and the excellent NetNewsWire for iPhone for my newfound ability to (almost) keep up with my feeds again.

Mind you, I don’t expect that Alex wrote the post on his iPhone … or his Crackberry. And this is not an argument that Alex should make the switch. He can’t get the hang of the iPhone keyboard, and he’s used to the Blackberry. Arguing that he should switch would be like me arguing that he should drive a manual transmission—just because I love it and think that it’s awesome doesn’t mean that it’s for him. I’d just argue that, well, he should know how in an emergency—and I’m sure that he does.

[Okay, I've only ridden with Alex a handful of times, and I can't remember whether or not his car is an automatic. I'm fairly sure his wife's is, but I won't hold that against him.]

[[And Alex, yes, I wrote this so I could tweak you and go all "iPhone FTW!!!" You know you're laughing.]]

And to the idea of having two Twitter accounts, presented by Mike Dolan: it is, indeed, something I’ve considered. But not enough to do it. Because, really … it’s not that vital. [But I do get the idea. Really, I do.]

• R.E.M.’s Murmur.
  
• George Strait’s Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind.
  
• The Cardigans’ Emmerdale.
  
• 25 Apr 2008 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. 2008-04-25: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 1) and 2008-04-25: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 2).
  
• 28 Apr 2008 [Los Angeles, CA, USA] concert bootleg of She & Him. 2008-04-28: Vista Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
  
• 16 May 2008 [St. Louis, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. 2008-05-16: The Pageant, St. Louis, MO, USA (disc 1) and 2008-05-16: The Pageant, St. Louis, MO, USA (disc 2).
  
• 25 Jul 2008 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Gnarls Barkley. 2008-07-25: Morning Becomes Eclectic, KCRW-FM, Santa Monica, CA, USA.
  

Last week:

• Iron and Wine’s The Shepherd’s Dog. I hadn’t really, really loved any of Sam Beam’s previous work; this, however, sparkles. Four-and-a-half stars.
  
• Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple. Fan-damn-tastic. Four stars.
  
• Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Three stars. [I blame listening to Girl Talk on getting this.]
  
• 8 Nov 1992 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Uncle Tupelo. A surprisingly good recording, given the age. Three-and-a-half stars.
  
• 16 Mar 2007 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. Your standard kick-ass OtR@CST show. Four stars.
  
• 15 May 2008 [St. Louis, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. Three stars. Solid but unspectacular.
  
• 3 Jun 2008 [Paris, France] concert bootleg of Feist. It’s a bit treble-y and feels weak, but it has good crowd capture, which to me is something that you want [because, otherwise, it's a one-off rendition of songs you've heard before; this is why I'm not the biggest fan of soundboards]. Two-and-a-half stars.
  

So if you need to email me, well, hit me at work or GMail. And if you don’t have either, well, tough for you—not putting those here on the site.

Update, 0747: And we’re back.

Update, 2032: Indeed, now they’re going to work on redundant uplinks, as that was the issue. This is why I spend my money with them.

Barack Obama was accused of pandering to the space set in Cape Canaveral on Saturday.

During a town-hall-style event on Florida’s so-called space coast, the Democrat said he no longer favors slashing NASA’s budget, declaring that the U.S. “cannot cede our leadership in space.”

Obama had previously supported delaying NASA’s manned missions in order to pay for early childhood education programs. Aides say he has now found other means to pay for his education plans.

As you would expect, McCain’s campaign is calling Obama’s switch from a platform plank that cut Constellation funding, which I wrote about in March, a flip-flop. I’m not so stringent about it, mainly because I was asking for the change in platform.

The Obama campaign’s explanation is that the platform changed when different funding priorities were assessed. That’s a far smaller change to me than, say, McCain’s voting against Bush’s income tax cuts in the Senate but supporting them now that he’s the nominee. [Note: this is not an indictment of the tax cut per se, although I have come to the opinion that supply-side economics is fundamentally flawed. If this minor point becomes a bone of contention in the comments, I'll follow up so that discussion can have a better forum.]

Disclaimers: I work in manned spaceflight, and I have donated to Obama’s political campaign despite originally thinking that I could not do so. Also, for anyone coming in on this, I voted for McCain in Alabama’s Republican primary, the first time I’ve voted in a party primary.

Here’s how it works:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Mark in red the books you LOVE. [Ed.: I'll cheat and boldly italicize the ones I love.
4. Reprint this list in your blog.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -- and before you ask, Jeff, no ... I don't like Wuthering Heights either.
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - I haven’t read all of it, I admit.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Meh.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams --- oh, I do believe I just lost all my geek cred.
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -- I've started but not finished it.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis --- I just lost all my hipster Christian cred.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -- or at least I'm fairly sure that I have. If I did, I read it at MSMS, and I'm surprised I remember my own name after that.
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville --- started it once.
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett --- but so, so long ago that I might as well not have.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - I'll skip on advice of my psychiatrist.
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt --- I failed to read this when Kari did a virtual book club about it. I am ashamed.
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens --- dammit, I've read more Dickens than I thought. Must be a Mississippi thing?
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White --- quite some time ago. Age in the single digits.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom --- Seriously? I love the big-eared dude, but ... really?
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl --- again, forever and a day ago.
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Do you have suggestions for what I should read on this list that I haven't indicated that I would? [Yes, Kari, I hear you yelling for Pride and Prejudice. All the way over here. And my window's closed. ]

• Iron and Wine’s The Shepherd’s Dog.
  
• Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple.
  
• Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Yeah, I know.
  
• 8 Nov 1992 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Uncle Tupelo. 1992-11-08: Lounge Ax, Chicago, IL, USA
  
• 16 Mar 2007 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. 2007-03-16: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 1) and 2007-03-16: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 2).
  
• 15 May 2008 [St. Louis, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. 2008-05-15: The Pageant, St. Louis, MO, USA (disc 1) and 2008-05-15: The Pageant, St. Louis, MO, USA (disc 2).
  
• 3 Jun 2008 [Paris, France] concert bootleg of Feist. 2008-06-03: Le Grand Rex, Paris, France (disc 1) and 2008-06-03: Le Grand Rex, Paris, France (disc 2).
  

Last week was about average:

• Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism. I should be too old to like Death Cab, but I like it anyway. Four stars.
  
• Paper Route’s Are We All Forgotten. Electronica-based stuff really isn’t in my wheelhouse, but I liked this anyway. Three stars.
  
• Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere. I am now mad at myself for taking this long to give them a try. Holy crap. Four stars.
  
• 16 Aug 2001 [Jersey City, NJ, USA] concert bootleg of Radiohead. Pretty meh. Thom’s singing leaves a bit to be desired here. Two-and-a-half stars.
  
• 17 Nov 2006 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. Admittedly, I’m cherry-picking the CST shows because 1) they’re usually well-recorded and 2) that’s where I first saw them live, but man, this one is worth it. Four stars.
  
• 13 Oct 2007 [Kansas City, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. There’s little things I don’t like about the house mix, I guess … too much Jeff, too much treble, etc. Also, it’s definitely not Jeff’s best singing night. Three stars, and that’s no fault of the taper, who typically produces fantastic stuff.
  
• 12 Apr 2008 [Norfolk, VA, USA] concert bootleg of Spoon. It’s … solid but unspectacular. I’m not as familiar with Spoon’s discography as I should be [stow it, Gessaman!], and the recording is competent but not overwhelming. Three stars.
  

With this in mind, there are many proposals afoot to enable drilling for crude oil in areas currently under legal protection from doing so: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, continental shelf areas in the Gulf of Mexico, etc. Is drilling for oil at these times most like:

1. Printing your own money during a currency crunch.
2. Teaching an alcoholic how to build a still when alcohol taxes go through the roof.
3. Hammering your thumb to take your mind off of your leg being cut off.
4. Fiddling while Rome burns.

Answer and discuss.

While the whole of the idea is to take the reader through the narrative of what it’s like to be a waiter—the lifestyle, the business environment, and how waiting tables seems to attract all sorts of misanthropes and social deviants—The Waiter also takes the reader through his own narrative: how he became a waiter, how he rose to the top, how he was beloved, and how he ended up becoming a minor tyrant at The Bistro. The whole book has a nice arc and speaks well of The Waiter’s newly-chosen career. The advice often given to writers is to write what they know, and The Waiter knows the restaurant biz well enough to tell the front-of-house story engagingly.

I’ve never worked in the restaurant business, but I’ve lived with folks who have. Understanding the economics of that back when I was co-oping and making ends meet most of the time helped me to recognize that, if I was going out to eat, I could afford to tip well. [And if I couldn't afford it, I'd keep my happy ass at home.] I like to think that The Waiter would find me to be a nice customer. I certainly try to be.

If you like a good narrative, are interested in the food business, or just like supporting bloggers-turned-dead-tree-product pushers, Waiter Rant is an excellent choice. I’ll admit: when I first saw the URL, I thought it was “Wait Errant”, like a knight errant. That mental image has always colored how I read The Waiter, but I also think that it fits.

I haven’t done diddly crap today, other than canceling my reservations for the chalet. I figured it was 50-50 that I’d still feel like dogmeat, and I didn’t want to be spending $200+ to feel like dogmeat in Guntersville when I could feel like dogmeat in Madison.

At some point, I still have to do some work. Oh, and my count for work phone calls this week is already at five. I have probably three or four hours’ worth of work to do, and then I can forget about work [yeah, right] for the rest of the week.

So what am I doing? Finalizing plans for the long-overdue desk-building in the loft [ready to be doing layout later this week ... am probably putting the chalet money towards prototyping], sleeping, and generally not saying a word. This probably surprises some people who know the gregarious, outgoing, extroverted me, but when I’m alone, I go into complete hermit mode. [This surprises exactly none of the people that have ever lived with me, however.] Also, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about random things, and that’s good. This is, functionally, a week-long passive soak. Intuitively, companies understand this, and that’s why I’m getting paid to sit on my ass right now.

I should’ve known better than to make any damn plans for my vacation. My plans never survive contact with the enemy. :casts an eye towards the motto of this Weblog’s jokey name:

• Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism.
  
• Paper Route’s Are We All Forgotten, on the suggestion of Jeff.
  
• Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere. Yes, I am slow to the GB party, but Stephen got me there.
  
• 16 Aug 2001 [Jersey City, NJ, USA] concert bootleg of Radiohead. 2001-08-16: Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, USA (disc 1) and 2001-08-16: Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, USA (disc 2).
  
• 17 Nov 2006 [Dayton, OH, USA] concert bootleg of Over the Rhine. 2006-11-17: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 1) and 2006-11-17: Canal Street Tavern, Dayton, OH, USA (disc 2).