Tonight’s fortune.

Folks, I implore you to treat yourself and buy the new Andrew Bird album. I’ve never posted an mp3 here before, but I can’t not share this song because it makes me very happy.

If it’s not your bag, no harm done. But I can’t get over how much it’s exactly what I want to hear right now. I’m not sure how he’s reading my mind.

I picked it up in Portland last weekend, along with John Coltrane & Duke Ellington and Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi (yes, Bull Moose music was having a sale on jazz on the Impulse! label). Thembi is my new favorite Pharoah Sanders album. Formerly, it was Karma, but 1) let’s face it, he should have just called it “The Creator Is a Master Plan” and not bothered to fill up the rest of the vinyl– it already clocks in at 35 minutes with that track alone. 2) it’s not something you can just casually listen to. You really have to block out a weekend and get yourself geared up for it. Thembi is in a similar vein, but it’s more digestible. “Morning Prayer” is about nine minutes long, and so it’s a perfect song to listen to on my walk to the T: it starts when I leave the house, it’s appropriately consciousness-altering/wake-up stuff, and it wraps up just as I get to the door of the Someday.

The Ellington/Coltrane, well, it’s just not hitting the spot right now. It’s too urbane & sophistocated. Someday I’ll want to listen to it, just not right now.

But check out Andrew Bird. He picks up actual motifs from Weather Systems in clever ways (like building a longer vocal track around one of the untitled instrumentals that originally appeared on it, or using the actual phrase “weather systems” in a lyric, or picking up a glockenspiel part from the track “Weather Systems” after a line about changing atmospheric pressure). The violin playing is fantastic. The songs are clever but it’s not a junk food, witty, Magnetic Fields-y embalmed-in-its-own-irony clever. Despite the fact that he seems to tour a lot, it sounds very much like he’s been spending a lot of time alone on his farm, thinking.

I still haven’t quite gotten over the fact that we ended up seeing Interpol in Providence instead of Andrew Bird at Johnny D’s.

(alternate title: how to know when it’s time to step away from the keyboard and leave work)

I just caught myself trying to figure out what Googlebot’s Myers-Briggs personality type would be if Googlebot had a personality. I decided it’s ESTP: extroverted (it always looks outward), sensing (not intuitive), thinking (not feeling), perceiving (not judging– that happens later, when PageRank is calculated…).

What it really means is that it’s time to head home.

As a concerned citizen points out in The Guardian, “With some simple insulation and double glazing, the Queen could easily halve her heating bill.”

What I think is bullshit is that the NYT won’t print the word “bullshit” even when the story’s about an essay called “On Bullshit“.

The essay’s worth a read, too. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” He’s off to a good start…

But… “For one thing, the expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely — simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning.” So you’re saying people say “bullshit” and they don’t mean cow manure? Another scatological idiom involving “Sherlock” comes to mind…

Yesterday, I noticed a photo come through my “somerville” Flickr tag RSS feed of the Firefly press’s linotype machine, which I mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago. Cool, I thought. And then I sort of recognized the name… and it turns out that it is a long lost friend of mine, whom I worked with at CTY ten years ago. How odd. He’s been hiding in plain sight in Central Square. And he’s having his wedding invitations letterpressed by Firefly. And he keeps a great blog. Goodness!

Had a good day in Portland yesterday. Did a lot of walking around the Old Port, at great risk to our personal safety as large chunks of ice and snow kept rocketing off the steep roofs onto the sidewalk. There was a ton of deep, slushy snow, but the upside was that it was warmer than it is on some of our winter excursions. We realized it’s been a long time since we were up. Now that John’s moving back, we’ll have to make it a point to make it up more often.

This is the photo of the sunrise I mentioned yesterday. There are more.

As I was drifting into consciousness this morning, I was wondering about a plot hole in The Graduate. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and maybe I am forgetting something important. But aren’t Benjamin’s family supposed to be good friends of the Robinsons? Wasn’t his dad Mr. Robinson’s partner? How did they explain that they weren’t inviting them to Elaine’s wedding?

It was 6:30 or so, and I was happy to be awake, for whatever reason, so I went upstairs (Dubs and I are spending a couple of days in Portland, Maine) into the cupola of the place we’re staying and watched the sun rise over the port. Lots of cranes and brick houses and chimneys. I could upload pictures if I had remembered my camera cord. Now I’m waiting for Terri to get ready so that we can go to breakfast, and thought I’d check to see if there’s wireless. There is.

I snooze, you lose. I meant to post this days ago, but now it looks like supermanisadick.com’s server is hosed, so you don’t get to see comics covers with Superman acting like a jerk, primarily engaging in schadenfreude at either Lois’s or Jimmy’s misfortunes. Or, in some cases, causing their misfortunes.

For all you bleeding hearts who were thinking of jumping ship to Canada, here’s a bit of news:

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Canada wants all governments to accept the testing and commercialisation of “terminator” crop varieties. These are genetically engineered to produce only infertile seeds which farmers cannot replant.

I’m not categorically opposed to genetic modification itself, or many applications of it. It’s just a refinement of techniques which humans have been using for thousands of years. I know it’s not without risk, and that it’s definitely tweaking nature to human ends. But in most cases there are at least tangible benefits, like being able to grow frost-resistant or disease-resistant crops. But how exactly does humanity benefit from Monsanto being able to force farmers (or agribusinesses) to buy new seeds every year? That’s pretty perverse, and indefensible. And Canada’s leading the charge to overturn the international moratorium on the “technology”.