I know you've been wondering

I was flipping through the TV channels, and I flipped to some action show on CBS just when a car's headlights turned on and it started to drive toward the camera, so that you couldn't really see the driver. And I thought, for a second, 'Man, I wish that car were driving itself, that would automatically make this interesting.'

And that, just to be clear, is what was so great about Knight Rider.

The number of times I have recently seen New Yorkers biking while smoking

is two. So I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I have seen at least two New Yorkers recently who may not realize how ironically crazy they seem. But it's probably a higher number.

Also, on wet pavement my bicycle tires sound like a record left spinning with the needle on.

Incidentally, though seemingly crazy, both smoking cyclists seemed to be very good, experienced cyclists, so in a way it is actually quite impressive.

Finally, the thought has not escaped me that biking in New York, especially during rush hour and on certain streets, is for everyone like biking while smoking, but that just means that those two people were basically biking while smoking two cigarettes at once.



(P.S. This random rant is brought to you by the fact that biking to work is fun.)

On In Rainbows (and Lucy in the Sky with Cubic Zirconia)

Do not wake up early on the morning the download of the new Radiohead album becomes available, hoping to burn it to a CD while you shower so that you can hear it at the first possible moment. Do not skip bike-riding to work, partly for other reasons but partly so that you can listen to the new Radiohead album on the train. Radiohead does not deserve that kind of pressure.

I have come to terms with the idea that Radiohead (new frontiers of marketing notwithstanding) will no longer change my life (as much to do with my life already having changed as with Radiohead), but they can put out a pretty solid album of pretty solid music.


Julie Taymor should have been able to put out a pretty solid movie capturing whatever it is that is so amazing about the Beatles, but instead she produced a sometimes-beautiful but often schizophrenic, overly-nostalgic, and myopic view of a decade that, in the way it is portrayed, probably never really existed. The Vietnam, war, for example, is too glossy, as are the roles of those most effected by it too easily oversimplified or dismissed when the time is right; much the same can be said of the whole plot of the film. The Beatles' songs are shoehorned in (as well as awkward in-joke references to other songs, such as when Saydee asks how Prudence got in, and Jude says 'She came in through the bathroom window.', and strange references to the 60's in general, as when a 'Hendrix' and a 'Joplin' break into the music scene via Beatles songs and then inexplicably reenact some version of the Lennon/McCartney feud), and the songs themselves are often sung (or, in the case of a well-meaning, funny-but-in-the-wrong-context Eddie Izzard, spoken) by the wrong people at the wrong time.

The most effective part of the movie, pretty much the only part which moved me, was that music, and I was quick to rush home and listen to the original, incomparably superior versions.

But maybe that's a little harsh. But maybe not.