Just in case those of you who typically read this site in your RSS feed care, I’ve added a couple of sidebar widgets to the blog-proper. On the right, there’s now a sidebar of quick-hits links to articles or blog posts that looked interesting, but about which I either have nothing especially valuable to add […]

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We’ve got another month before Spoon’s new album hits stores, but you can stream tracks at the Merge Records jukebox now.

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Via Boing Boing, I find this howler in an article on a joint MPAA/RIAA effort to get Congress and the executive branch more serious about cracking down on the scourge of piracy: “Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property […]

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I’ve just noticed that my quondam neighbor, libertarian comic book artist extraordinaire Paul Pope, has started a blog. He’ll have a compilation book of his art out later this month.

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Jim Henley links to an interesting roundup in The Guardian of various rock musicians picking the classic or critically-acclaimed album they think is overrated. A few are cop outs—is it really all that ballsy to slag Neon Bible?—and you probably will disagree with a fair number, but they’re mostly interesting. Though I’ll exempt Franz Ferdinand […]

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An excellent post at Obsidian Wings explains why the structure of upcoming spectrum auctions will importantly influence the development of wireless services in coming years. Follow-up here.

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Andrew Sullivan links this clip from Britain’s equivalent of American Idol (with Simon Cowell and everything!) of a cell phone salesman belting out (bits of) “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. On the one hand, I’m delighted to see someone can get a standing ovation singing opera on a show like this, and never in a million […]

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Those of you who, like me, haven’t cracked the spine of The Canterbury Tales since the tenth grade were probably as puzzled as I was when, in the wake of Jerry Falwell’s death last month, Christopher Hitchens repeatedly described him as a “Chaucerian fraud.” Well, I finally looked it up, so as a public service […]

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John Podhoretz thinks the makers of the insanely costly Evan Almighty have erred seriously in making (as his headline has it “A $200 Million Comedy About Evil Republicans,” which “basically writes off and insults the political views of one-third of the United States.” And how does the movie do this? Well, here’s the plot summary […]

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Cory Doctorow reports that SciFi.com will be pulling their extensive science fiction archive, comprising both classic stories like Norman Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels” and original contributions from the likes of Bruce Sterling, Greg Benford, and Ursula Le Guin. Fortunately, this is the Internet, so omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

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