The Apple Store singles scene: “And if you talk to a guy in the Apple Store, you already know he’s going to be modern and up-to-date and sober. It’s healthier than picking up someone in a bar.”

Speaking of every shade of wrong… I Am Curious (Black) is a Lois Lane comic from the early 70’s in which our heroine becomes black to get a scoop. Courtesy of the excellent Accordion Guy. (In case you’re not up on your Swedish erotica, the title is a reference to I Am Curious (Yellow)).

This Amazon Listmania List: “So you’re going to jail” is very shade of wrong. It’s also #1 in their Top 100.

One of the things I like about iTunes is the ability to create “smart playlists”, which are basically just filters on any piece of metadata that iTunes keeps for a song, but they show up in your playlist. Apple gives you “60’s Music” and “My Top Rated” and a few others as starters. I created one for “recently added” so that I can easily listen to things that I’ve just put into my library within the past few days.

My smart playlist of the day is the “Track 7″ playlist, which just plays songs which are the 7th track on their original album. Back in the days of the Doug, Marco, and Ezra morning radio show, we used to do that when we were being too lazy (or half-awake) to decide what to play on the show. It was our “Lucky 7″ feature: we’d play 7 track 7s. I’m sure at least one of the Crawfordsville High kids that listened to us thought it was clever. Then again, maybe not.

Harvard study: “‘In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it’s not there.’… Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable. Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme – with tightly controlled autocratic governments – also experienced low levels of terrorism. “

I do wish that Christopher Hitchens would be a bit rougher on Bush. Maybe if you’re a contrarian intelligent militant secularist heaping scorn on the stupid and the religious, Bush is too easy of a target. But his criticism of the blank check the “left” has been giving religious nuts farther from home is well worth taking to heart. “But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?” Bingo.

This Washington Post bit debunks the myth of the moral values exit poll thing: it’s largely based on a How to Lie With Statistics-style mis-interpretation. Like most myths, it resonates and spreads for a reason, but it’s still nice to know that it’s not true.

I’ve been so preoccupied with the election (and before that, the Red Sox) that I totally missed this whole thing about the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by radical Muslims in Amsterdam.

It’s a big relief to see Terry McAuliffe stepping down as chair of the DNC. Here’s a roundup of the process to find his replacement. Of those, the ABC News one is probably the best.

From this opinion piece: “These one-dimensional religious voters completely ignored dozens of morally-revealing issues where the candidates differed… Forget that out of a hundred issues raised during the campaign Kerry was ‘correct’ on far more than Bush; the only two that our myopic ‘moral values testers’ ever talked about were abortion and gay marriage.”