NP: Travis, The Invisible Band (CD)

I don't know about you, but when I think of Hooters, I think of Gary, Indiana. In the long run, associating the smell of the industrial city with Hooters', um, assets (great wings?) could help stop the objectification of women by way or aversion therapy. Maybe.

The Washington Post has once again helped explain what I do for a living nowadays.

And I said a week or so ago that you know it's getting serious when New York Times' liberal harpy Maureen Dowd is making reasonable arguments. Well, not only is that still happening, but now Tom Friedman seems to have shed his soft demeanor of the past two and half years as well. Thanks to Hank for the heads-up, as I've been tuning Friedman out for the last year and half or so.

The fact that the NYT News Tracker auto-generated "pornography and obscenity" on an op-ed page speaks volumes about the predicament we're in.

Maybe that mention will bring the comment spammers back. It's odd, but I actually miss the comment spammers.

Back to the predicament, though. It's a bit scary to contemplate, but I have to wonder out loud whether or not the sensationalism of the TV coverage of Abu Ghraib and Nicholas Berg would have been different had we not just entered a sweeps month.

In meta-blogging news, I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems the point of the blogosphere is to have everyone talking about the same thing, which, in turn, seems entirely redundant on some level.

Yesterday, I felt like I accidentally slept on one of the cats the night before. My back was killing me. Halfway through another marathon BLT set (don't these young kids ever take breaks?!), the pain mostly went away, and now I'm nominally back to normal, sleep deprivation notwithstanding.