Pithy Title Here

There are a ton of good bands that we never hear of here in the United States. If you're Canadian and love the sounds of Matthew Good and Sam Roberts, you have to learn that those two artists never happened here. I know. Sad. We Yanks have missed the boat on so many of them them. What do I mean? How about: Oasis - They were only NME's band of the year recently. Only we haven't heard much of them here lately. Buried on the radio, Oasis has quietly retooled itself into just a fantastic rock band. Their last two albums are as solid as anything that came before 1997 and some of the songs you missed in between (go check out "Magic Pie" and "The Hindu Times") should have been gigantic here. Alas. Matthew Good - Mentioned above. In 1994-5, with a full band, he was making songs as good as anything that was hitting radio here. But with a political bend, American record companies stayed far away. Now, seven albums in, Good is still making fantastic...

Who'd've thunk it? North Carolina, a state that produces more tobacco then any other, where city names adorn cigarette packs (looking at you, here, Winston-Salem)... has banned smoking in bars and restaurants in bars effective Jan. 2, 2010 . The state senate and house have agreed on a bill and the governor will sign it into law. Me? I'm going to celebrate by wearing a wool sweater into a bar on Jan. 2, knowing I will not have to Febreeze it afterward. The truth is, though, I'll likely celebrate it by going to the bar more. I cannot tell you how many times Sarah and I have gone out someplace, thought about getting a drink, and then saying "eh, don't want to deal with the smoke." Smoking in bars, for me, has always made it so I have to be in a very specific mood to go to the bar. Because after an hour, my eyes are burning and I reek all night. And, yes, I hear all the people saying "Oh this is going to mean people won't go to bars any more....

Last year, I read this fantastic book, Traffic . If you drive anywhere every day, you need to read this. It has, actually, made me a better driver, I think. Certainly, if we all adhered to the rules of traffic science it explains, we'd get everywhere faster (and it's not about driving the speed limit... in fact, many of the things we should be doing are counter-intuitive). Anyhow, one of the points the book makes is "slower is faster." Essentially, what this means is, in most situations, speed does nothing to get you any place faster if you are on roads with any manner of congestion. One of a few things happens when you speed: -You speed to the next stoplight, nullifying any advantage of speed -You end up in congestion behind someone not going as fast. This causes you to hit your brake and then the people behind you overreact and slam on theirs. This creates those aggravating backups where you wait and wait and... nothing. No gory accident or anything. -You ina...

There's a lot of music to come out yet this year. And the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs' disc It's Blitz! looks like one that might hang with the best. "Zero," the first single off this album, though, is a lock to be among the top singles of the year if you ask me. I've been listening to it for the better part of a month... and I like it better every time. Zero - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I guess my real question is why Manny Ramirez couldn't have been caught doping immediately following game four of the 2004 American League Championship Series. Then, perhaps, the Yankees would have won game five, there never would have been any of the ridiculousness with A-Rod interfering with play as he ran down the first base line... ...of course, then, we'd have had to have dealt with A-Rod's on steroid use at the same time. Apparently, Lily Allen is correct (per the first track of her awesome new- ish CD) and everyone is at it. We're all medicating one way or another. It just seems athletes are doing do to bulk up. The sad irony here is that baseball is the one sport that steroid use almost doesn't matter. Steroids don't put the ball on the corners of the strike zone. Steroids don't put the bat on the ball. Steroids certainly haven't made A-Rod get hits in the playoffs. They didn't help Barry Bonds and the Giants in the World Series severa...

You would think - and hope - that with more access to information that ever before, we (as in residents of the whole flipping world) would be able to sort out what's what faster than ever. In fact, I remember in college (not long ago) a discussion of a specific media criticism that posited that mass media - the FEW choices we had - made us, as a population, susceptible to manipulation. In other words, if the major TV networks all decide something is an issue, it makes all of us think about the issue more, for better or for worse. This criticism suggested that having more options would allow us to be able to parse out the "reality" of a situation and have more access to information... ending in a better understanding of a given situation or issue. After the swine flu debacle in the past week, I think we can all say that either that media criticism is wrong, or we are likely to be the most overreactive population in history. If you followed the swine flu news, we went fr...