1. Notorious BIG – Juicy
2. Squarepusher – Fat Controller
3. Patty Griffin – Nobody’s Crying
4. Phish – Train Song (8.17.1996)
5. The Thorns – I Told You
6. Valery Gergiev – Lever du jour
7. David Bowie – Oh! You Pretty Things
8. Sublime – Caress Me Down
9. Mike Gordon – Exit Wound
10. White Stripes – Well It’s True We Love One Another

Favorite Song: Tie between Oh! You Pretty Things (just about my favorite Bowie song) and the all-time classic Juicy – “birthdays was the worst days, now we sip champagne when we’re thirsty…”

Least Favorite Song: Well It’s True We Love One Another. I don’t get it.

Need some amusement? Check out Cute Overload.

I wish this was surprising. I wish this still made me angry. I wish things were different, but this is George Bush’s America we live in and there’s only one thing the Republican leadership cares about: fealty to their corporate overlords.

The AP says:

The House voted to encourage U.S. oil companies to build new refineries Friday in a raucous roll call that Republican leaders extended 40 minutes while they buttonholed their own members to avoid an embarrassing defeat.

Democrats crying ”shame, shame” — and some GOP moderates — called the bill a sop to rich oil companies that would do nothing to ease energy costs including expected soaring heating bills this winter.

ThinkProgress has the video. I’m not a big Pelosi fan, but she’s been handling things well recently.

I know some of you are probably tired of the recent trend of all politics all the time here. So here are some links that I check out when I’m trying to get away from the pain of reality.

• Phil Sheridan’s Q&A Forum
• del.icio.us/popular
• Gizmodo
• memepool.com

One of my favorite sources to find these new web phenomena is Delicious and it’s offshoots like Populicious. Wondering what’s new and interesting? Check it out.

Last week Google released an API for their mapping system. An API is an Application Programming Interface and essentially it allows software developers to tap into all the tools and inner workings of a piece of software or software library. Already it is starting to bear much interesting fruit.

• Kokogiak.com has Google Maps Transparencies which allows you to see the standard map superimposed over the satellite imagery. You can control the level of transparency and see how closely the map lines up with the actual geography.
• Suramya Tomar created gWifi, an interface to allow you find free WiFi hotspots on top of a gmap.
• SueAndPaul.com has the Gmaps Pedometer. Pick your starting point, begin recording, and then double click all the nodes of your travels. It’ll draw your route on the map and even calculate your mileage.

Neat.

• Kos found a great flash applet, courtesy of Arlington, VA’s Newseum, an interactive news museum dedicated to helping the public and media interact and study the ever-valuable and under attack First Amendment. They’ve got a map of the United States with dots representing each major city and its newspapers. Click the dot and see the cover of today’s issue. A great way to see what’s going on in the popular mind of the media today.
• Findory.com is an interesting site that purports to learn your taste in news and automatically customize itself to show what you want to see. It also integrates blog indexing and searching as well as keeps track of what you’ve read and searched for. I haven’t used it that much yet but it does seem like it could be a valuable tool.
• For your inner nerd (or if you’re just a fan of design and UI techniques), script.aculo.us offers some fantastic and free javascript libraries to add visual effects to your “web 2.0″ applications. Check out the visual effects and cross platform and standards compliant drag-and-drop.
• Finally, for Amanda, I’ve got my current Rhapsody playlist. This morning to cover up the incessant beeping of a failing RAID drive in my Dell server, I’m listening to the fantastic live Gov’t Mule album, The Deepest End (ooh, and I just noticed that the Mule website plays a really nice cover of David Gray’s My Oh My). Featuring guests galore (Jack Casady, Les Claypool, Karl Denson, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Bela Fleck, Victor Wooten, Roger Glover, Mike Gordon, David Hildago, Paul Jackson, Sonny Landreth, Conrad Lazano, Will Lee, Jason Newsted) and recorded at JazzFest 2003 it’s a pretty incredible live recording. If you’re a fan of guitar-driven jam rock and roll, you should check it out.

In tech news, it’s official, Apple is moving to Intel based processors. A few choice highlights from AppleInsider:

• INTEL RUMORS TRUE: Jobs says there have been two major transitions for Mac: 68K to PowerPC and then Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. Now it’s time for third transition to Intel-based Macs. Developers will begin to make the transition now. While users can begin to switch next year. Apple is making the move “because we want to make the best computers for our customers.”
• Mac OS X has been leading secret double life, Jobs proclaims. Every release of Mac OS X has been built for both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs over the last 5 years. Mac OS X is cross-platform by design. Jobs shows all Mac OS X Tiger running on Intel. All features are already compatible with Intel-based processors. It’s not done yet, but will be put into the developer hands for finishing.
• Jobs shows Rosetta: a dymanic binary translator. It runs PowerPC code on Intel-baesd Macs, transparently to the users. It’s pretty fast. Jobs demos Rosetta used to run PowerPC macs on Intel-based Macs –shows Microsoft Excel/Word running on Intel-based Mac (without any porting and/or recompiling). Jobs also shows Photoshop CS2 with all plugins that are translated and run on Intel-based Mac without significant speed decrease.
• Jobs introduces Wolfram’s CEO, who said they ported Mathematica 5 to Intel-based Macs in 2 hours. Only about 20 lines of code changed.

Pretty cool stuff. No word yet on whether these chips are definitely x86 based or PowerPC based as Daring Fireball hypothesized or whether or not OS X will run on non-Apple Intel hardware. Either way I’ll be very interested to see what direction Apple moves now with hardware prices, marketing, and potentially spreading the best consumer OS available to other platforms.

If you’re looking for something interest or amusing, check out the links to the right.

When I first met my study abroad roommate, I tried to make conversation by talking about Bastard Out of Carolina (which I’d read on the plane). She responded, “Yeah, I don’t really like books.” I love books – reading them, talking about them, planning to read more (and that comment should have been my first clue that the roommate was psycho, but I digress).

I took a brief reading time-out right after I graduated (I’d effectively OD’ed on lit from some mandatory English major classes senior year). It was tough to get back on track, if only because for the first time in 22 years, I didn’t have anyone telling me what to read. Eventually, I settled on a pattern of ‘real’ books (tough novels, nonfiction) alternated with ‘fluff’ (chick lit, diy… ok, mostly chick lit). And when I started listening to The Namesake on my iPod, I was faced with where, exactly, it fell on my booklist. The Namesake is thought-provoking and complex; like other Lahiri writing, it deals with merging South Asian traditions and American daily life. At the same time, I couldn’t justify listing it as a ‘real’ book when I’d listened to it for days on the walk to work. This Times article addresses listening vs. reading and the growing popularity of audiobooks.

In other book news, I’ve been inspired by Jake’s project and Jason’s 52 books in 52 weeks project (he loves can’t stop won’t stop, which has been on my to-read list for a while). The Times also reviews Sean Wilsey’s memoirs – the New Yorker printed an excerpt recently and it was enthralling.

G. Love once said “Caught a chill vibe/Orange juice in my ride/Wawa’s to the right/They got a beverage inside.” Well much like G. I love my Wawa. You might just call me a Wawa Enthusiast.