JOINING THE CYBORG BRIGADE

Starting tomorrow it'll be illegal to talk on a cellphone while driving unless you're using a hands-free unit. Which means I'm going to have to go get one of those Bluetooth things. I hope

- that Verizon hasn't decided to gouge people for them (that sound you hear is the eternal but faint voice of optimism)
- that I can find one that doesn't make me look like a complete douchebag

Sure, I'm only ever going to wear this thing while I'm driving, but that doesn't mean I need to let shit slide. My only real goal is to find one without an LED on it; why would I need status lights on a Bluetooth headset? It's not like I can see the fucking thing while I'm wearing it.

Fingers crossed, people.

AROUND THE WORLD AROUND THE WORLD

If this doesn't autoplay, I don't know what to tell you. It should autoplay. Volume and pause control's on the left-hand side of the page. Just let it wash over you. It's only two and a half minutes. You should have two and a half minutes to spare in your life.

REALLY? INTERESTING

I just received the strangest compliment. A coworker told me she loves watching me eat, because I basically appreciate whatever food I'm chomping on with my whole being. This is indisputably true; I just thought it was a strange thing for someone else to have noticed. This coworker, btw, was not flirting with me; she just notices things about people. She says I should do commercials.

I don't know if it's strange or not that every time someone compliments me on something new, my first fleeting instinct is to wonder whether that person is fucking with me.

HELLO OUT THERE IN RADIO LAND

This one's shorter notice because nobody needs to physically go anywhere. That's right! The Definite Articles will be dominating the airwaves on "Live in Studio A" on KDVS 90.3 out of Davis, CA, tomorrow (Thursday) night at 11pm Pacific Standard. Don't bother with hauling your meat carcass to some venue or burning gas looking for parking and all that Web 1.0 bullshit -- you can listen over the internet with the power of extreme digital transcode flux streaming. New material may be aired. The future begins tomorrow night.

DOES THIS SERIOUSLY NOT EXIST

I need a website that tracks the following information on rap beefs:

- Who's feuding with who
-- Personal beefs
-- Crew vs crew
-- Coast vs coast
-- Etc

- Current status of feud
-- Settled/Ongoing
-- Victor/Mutual peace
-- Highlights
--- Relevant track titles, lyrics, Youtube videos

- Past feuds
-- Victor/Mutual peace
-- Highlights
--- Relevant track titles, lyrics, Youtube videos

I'm sort of astonished this doesn't exist somewhere already, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right spot.

I AM A SOLUTION GENERATOR

It looks like this thing I complained about has been fixed. Since I'm the only person I know who bitched about it, the only possible conclusion I can come to is the one reached by a friend and me sometime last week or the week prior: the internet is now a vast machine god that pays close attention to my personal blog and attends to my needs as its whims allow.

DOUBLEPOST FOR ROCK ANNOUNCEMENT

Two blog posts in one day. Hold onto your butts.

The Definite Articles will be at the Rickshaw Stop on Thursday, July 17th. Consider this your month's warning. If you like good music played well by men and women, or us specifically, or if you missed us last time, you should do yourself a favor and mark your calendar, be it Google, iCal, or whatever it is those Blackberry things use. Or paper.

Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell St
Thursday 7/17
8pm
All Ages
$12

We'll be there with Mucca Pazza and the Brass Liberation Orchestra. A splendid time is virtually guaranteed for all.

APPLIED REASONING POWER

1. Want English muffin
2. English muffins are better toasted
3. Want butter on English muffin
4. Butter must be spread upon toasted English muffin
5. Butter exists in fridge, in individually-wrapped pats
6. Cold butter is hard and resists spreading
6a. Even upon hot English muffin, this occurs.
6b. Put another way: Time needed for butter to soften > Time required for English muffin to cool
6c. Butter will be unsatisfactorily spread
7. UNLESS
8. Grip pat of butter in hand while waiting for English muffin to toast
9. Body heat renders butter optimally spreadable by the time English muffin has completed toasting
10. BASK IN ULTRAVIOLET GLOW OF PERSONAL GENIUS

NO, STUPID EMAIL, NO

Like most of us, I maintain a couple of different email accounts for different purposes. I tend to use my Yahoo one for when I need to register for websites or buy plane tickets or something. They recently made a change that fucked something up, which I am going to complain about on my blog.

AND SO

You used to be able to select View > Unread Messages and it would just work. It would show you all the unread messages in your inbox, so you could mass-select them with one checkbox and delete them if they were bullshit.

Now it's broken. View > Unread Messages only shows you some of the fucking things now, such that you have to select and delete them, and only then does the next batch show up for you to deal with. I thought it was a pagination issue, but it doesn't seem to be: Let's say for instance that I'm viewing the last 200 emails in my inbox, 40 of which are unread. I select View > Unread Messages. You and I, being reasonable humans, would expect to see 40 unread messages, wouldn't you?

It is unso. The number of unread messages I can see seems to depend on some unseen, magic variable (the position of the moon, the number of cats coughing in Bangkok), but it is never, ever the total number of unread messages. I need to call bullshit on somebody with a large mallet, but I don't know who. Maybe it's the same person who years ago fucked up their previously-sensible plain HTML TV listings so badly (they became this hideous, bloated, Ajaxy thing that was a horror to view and to use) that I jumped ship to MSN for my schedule information.

GRIP MYSTERY

My right hand hurts when I clench it on something. What has occurred. I did play a show last night in Sacramento, and my right hand was involved for bow-holding reasons, but I don't think that's it.* Was it all the Boom Blox I've been playing? That's probably why my elbow's a little gimpy, but not my hand. I'm going to blame 9/11.

* I experimented by holding a pen in the manner of a bow and playing a ghost violin; nothing disastrous happened.

--+~+~*((XHARDXCOREX))*~+~+--

Something I discovered over the weekend (and inevitably twittered)* is that 99.99% of the guitar straps you will see at the store are ridiculous pieces of shit that you would be ashamed to attach to your personal instrument. The vast majority either have ridiculous padding, embarrassing logos/patterns, excruciating colors, untenably complicated adjustment mechanisms, or all of these things combined.

I eventually settled on one that sports a simple graphic of a skull with a dagger going through the top of it. I'm serious. My hope is that it goes all the way through stupid and ironic and back around to just plain funny.

* I still refuse to verb this as "tweeting"

GOOGLESMARTS

When you put something in your Google Calendar to remind you to do that thing later, such as for example "Put A Massive Swelling in your damn bag," the Where field will auto-populate with "your damn bag". A server cluster somewhere in or near Google will quicken into a swarming emergent intelligence within the next year or so. I predict this.

IT'S THE SOUND THAT DOES IT

In the bathroom stall I've come to think of as my favorite, there's a kind of shelf created by the box that holds the toilet seat covers and two rolls of TP. On top of this shelf, for the past several months, someone's been putting at least one open roll of TP (today there were two). I think I know why this is: the spindles on the rolls of TP in the actual holder make a reedy shrieking sound whenever they turn. My guess is that someone really, really hates this noise and gives himself (and others) the option to bypass it altogether. I actually find this to be slightly more convenient, so that's what I've been doing; I just wanted to acknowledge this person's efforts to save our ears from one more annoying, unnecessary noise in the world. [This is the space where a joke about politicians and annoying, unnecessary noise would have gone were I a less astute man; feel free to include your own in the comments]

CARTOON THOUGHT

The last time we had animated Star Trek was thirty years ago. I think it's time to bring that shit back in style. By 2009, there will have been approximately eight hundred fifty thousand things made about the Clone Wars. Can't we have just one cartoon series about the Dominion War? How fucking awesome would that be? You don't have to answer; I already know.

AUGH BLAH EUGH

The entire interior of my house smells like a skunk party gone wrong. I mean this literally. Like a bunch of skunks had a party in here, and they all got drunk and angry at each other or the world, and some shit went down.

I'm guessing a skunk did the Spray Dance outside at some point this evening, and my housemates shut the windows to avoid further contamination. But now the air outside is fresh and clean, and inside is, well, an olfactory apocalypse.

I've opened some windows downstairs, and I guess I'm sleeping with mine open tonight and the fan on. I'm glad it's windy outside.

REVERSE TIME MACHINE

I have entered the year 2006 by finally purchasing a copy of Gears of War. I won't bother saying why it's good -- everybody knows it's good by now -- but the one beef I've got is that I haven't quite gotten the hang of diving away or entering cover at the precise time I want to, which has led to some embarrassing situations. I waited this long because I watched two friends of mine literally play through at least half the game in one go when it first came out, and felt like I'd seen what I needed to. It should be noted that since then, I've had a few dreams that take place in this world or something much like it, which probably says something about the setting.

LIFEDUMP

Many things have occurred.

- Congratulations to Dr. and Mrs. Aris & Blythe Winger, and a truly hearty "damn good to see you" to them and everyone else I had the pleasure of spending the weekend with.

- It turns out that there's something in the air in Virginia to which I am insanely allergic, but I'm comforted by the fact that I wasn't the only one.

- Just this morning I switched to a new aftershave that's a liquid instead of the balm I've been using for basically forever. Something I'm noticing is that I can smell it on me even now, which is something the old aftershave didn't do. Is this a thing of all liquid aftershaves, or did I put too much on? I don't want to be that guy who exists within a nebular cloud of noxious chemical miasma that everyone hates on the bus, or on BART, or within any reasonably-enclosed public space. I am just a man who shaved some of his face this morning. If you see me, please tell me whether or not I put too much on; I'm not an expert with this kind of aftershave yet.