I’m not sure what’s come over me, but I have been listening to The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats with a surprising frequency of late.

It’s surprising because this kind of music is the sort of thing I usually hate: prolific, precocious singer-songwriter churning out one “intensely personal” song after another. From Conor Oberst to Sufjan Stevens, it’s a festering pox upon indie rock.

This Mountain Goats album, though, is damn good—the songs are interesting and the music ventures far beyond the cloying guitar strumming that runs rampant in the genre. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Following up on my post last week about Google Documents & Spreadsheets, I’ve been experimenting with a few other Google services lately.

Google Notebook is exactly what it sounds like: a browser-based note-taking tool. Do a Google serach while logged in with a Google account, and you’ll see “note this” under each result. Clicking it opens up a small Ajaxified window with a link to the search result and a text field for entering notes. Expanding the window takes you to your Google Notebook, where you can manage and search your notes, create additional notebooks, and share your notebook with other users on the web.

I have also been trying out Google Reader, which seems to have undergone some major development since the last time I looked at it.

Of the two, Notebook seems to be the more intersting. Reader is just an RSS feed aggregator, and frankly, I’m not sure it’s really even that great an aggregator. The interface seems rather cluttered and non-intuitive—every time I go to the reader itself, I get annoyed. Fortunately, there’s a Reader gadget/widget/thingie that I can add to my Google homepage. Cranked up to 10 entries, it seems to do a pretty good job of getting everything into one place.

Notebook, meanwhile, is simple, straightforward, and very useful. Up to this point, my system for dealing with sites that I *think* I might want to remember, but which don’t seem like they merit a place among my normal bookmarks is to stick them in a “temp” bookmark folder in Firefox. As a result, this folder quickly becomes cluttered with crap, and I have to go through it every few weeks to clean it out. Half the time, I can’t even remember why I saved the stuff I find there.

Thanks to Google Notebook’s handy Firefox extension, though, this problem seems to be solved. Instead of having a mess of unorganized bookmarks in a folder, I can now add them to my notebook along with an excerpt from the site by right-clicking, as well as leave myself a handy note. Better yet, the notes are searchable.

Unsurprisingly, there is also the option to share notebooks with other users and/or publish them to the web. While I don’t have much use for this functionality at the present time, it would seem to put Google in the same market as social bookmarking sites like del.iciou.us.

All of which leaves me reconsidering my original object to this sort of thing, which is, what the hell do I do when I don’t have a network connection and all my mail, documents, notes, and news are unavailable. It’s still an issue, but since bookmarks and RSS feeds point to stuff that’s online anyway, not having them available when there’s no Intarwebs doesn’t really seem like that big a deal.

Of course, there’s still the issue of just how dedicated Google remains to their “Don’t be evil” credo. I have to wonder why I’m so much more willing to trust all this data to them as opposed to some other giant, heartless corporation.

While perusing Sensory Overload earlier today, I noticed an “I support woxy.com” link in their sidebar. Odd, I thought—woxy.com stopped streaming earlier this year after several months of trying to make a go of asking for subscriptions/donations to pay for bandwidth.

Clicking on the link, I was surprised and happy to find that not only is the site still there, but they are proudly announcing “We’re back!” and streaming in mp3, aacPlus, and wma format for free. So far, it seems like they’re maintaining the same DJ-programmed alternative/independent rock format, which is good news. While my heart still belongs to KEXP when it comes to online radio, woxy.com makes for a good back-up.

In other music news, I have been listening to the new Yo La Tengo album I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass on a somewhat regular basis over the course of the last week.

The last few albums the group has released, while not bad, have not really done much for me. This one, though, is quite good, probably their best work since 1997′s I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. As usual, they cover a wide range of styles, but the band displays an energy here that has been missing from the last few outings, notably the slumberific Summer Sun. Given the diversity of the offerings on this new album, it would not be surprising for things to fall apart over the course of fifteen tracks. However, they manage to keep the sound tight, and even after repeated listens, I’m still finding new stuff to enjoy about this record.

I’m screwing around with the skins right now, so the site may occasionally look different/weird. Hopefully shouldn’t last too long, though.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: Okay, all done. No big changes—there was an update to the theme that I use, but no significant changes on the front-end. It just took me a few minutes to change the header image, get the sidebar in order, etc.

Apparently, someone managed to find my site using the search term “boobtv”. I think that’s pretty hilarious.

Whoever you are, if you’re still reading, I’m sorry if it’s a disappointment.

Speaking of the Bush administration’s incompetence when it comes to any measures that might actually help protect the nation against terrorist attacks, CBS News has a rather amusing/depressing (depending on how you look at it) investigative report on the much-vaunted “no-fly” list.

Supposedly representing the combined wisdom of the entire U.S. intelligence community, this list is distributed to airlines, who then check all incoming passengers against it. The idea is that no one with suspected terrorist ties will end up boarding a plane.

According to CBS, the list is 450 pages long and contains 44,000 names. Among other, it includes:

• Saddam Hussein
• Zacarias Moussaoui
• Francois Genoud (died 1996)
• Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia
• John Williams
• Robert Johnson
• 14 of the 9/11 hijackers (yes, they’re all dead)

As the article goes on to point out, making matters worse is the fact that intelligence agencies like the CIA won’t provide names of any actual terror suspects for inclusion on the list because those name are too secret.

Yes, thank goodness the party that really takes national security seriously has been running the show for the last six years. I know I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that if Zacarias Moussaoui somehow escapes from maximum security prison in Colorado and attempts to purchase a plane ticket using his real name and ID, he’ll be stopped and searched beforehand.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall posts the obvious question from one of his readers:

At some point, in the vast TPM Media empire, you need to start taking bets on when the OBL video will be released.

As Josh goes on to point out, it is rather suspicious that bin Laden has managed to get out a video right before every single national election in the U.S. since 2000. It is pretty clearly in his interest to have the Republicans in office, and I am certainly not the first person to point out that George W. Bush and bin Laden need one another.

One has to wonder, though, how much difference the release of an OBL video before the elections would make this time around.

Until this year, these videos have always worked to the President’s and the Republicans’ advantage. Typically, the scenario has run something like this: the Democrats spend a huge amount of time, money, and energy trying to focus the debate on the economy, or Medicare, or gas prices, desperate to talk about anything besides war and terrorism; then, at almost the last minute, bin Laden pops up like some animatronic haunted house monster to send voters running for the chest-thumping Republicans, who are all busy shouting about scary terrorists.

This year, however, voters are fairly well focused on Iraq, terrorism, and national security in general. Moreover, Democrats are, for once, apparently not afraid to pound away at Republicans’ failures on these issues.

If bin Laden shows up in the middle of this scene, he functions as yet another example of yet another claim on which the President and his party haven’t followed through. It’s a pretty tricky tightrope the Bush administration has been trying to walk—keep the electorate deathly afraid of terrorism but make enough of a show of doing something about the threat to convince them they’re the ones to vote for. So far, the White House has done quite a lot of the former, but very little of the latter.

Instead, they have relied upon the conventional wisdom that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats when it comes to national security.

As a result, five years later, with nothing to show for their efforts aside from a string of bogus terror alerts and a war in Iraq that is deeply unpopular with the public, the Republican tactic of drumming up the terror threat before elections is losing its effectiveness. At this point, I have to wonder if even an actual terrorist attack would work in their favor.

While I dislike the idea of using this space to write about blogs because of the ridiculous meta-ness of it, I feel the need to indulge for just a moment…

I am taking this opportunity to get ahead of the pack of year-end “Best-of/Worst-of” lists and declare that embedding YouTube content in posts is the Worst Blogging Trend of 2006. While part of my annoyance might be the fact that the general crappiness of Flash on Linux means the sound in Flash video gets out of sync after about 3 seconds, it’s only a small part.

Seeing site after site filled with music videos and Daily Show/Colbert Report clips is getting GODDAMN TIRESOME.

I’m just sayin’s, all.

Despite my better judgement, I’m still watching Jericho. It’s entirely silly, but something about it is holding my attention—perhaps the aforementioned morbid fascination with anything involving a mushroom cloud.

The show is competently produced, and the acting is fairly decent. What bothers me, though, is that the good townsfolk of Jericho just don’t seem to be taking the news of nuclear attack all that seriously.

Sure, there was the sort-of riot at the gas station in the first episode, and they’ve had their fair share of “Whatever will we do now?” moments. There was even the fall-out scare from the second episode. However, none of these mini-crises seemed particularly challenging or out of the ordinary—the mayor easily averted the riot with an inspiring “Let’s all work together” speech, and the fall-out emergency was eclipsed by the mine cave-in and the escaped convicts at the farmhouse.

Moments of high drama, to be sure, but we’re talking about nuclear war here, people. Multiple warheads have apparently struck cities across the country, and yet the town of Jericho has time for the community barbeque, the plot still focuses on the intrigues of the local teenagers, and no one seems to think that driving around 6 mpg SUVs and pickup trucks might not be the best idea when gas is running low.

Two other aspects of the story strike me as problematic. First, where are the other people? Kansas is not exactly densely populated, but if they could see the mushroom cloud from Denver just over the horizon, there have got to be other towns nearby. Second, why is the only black guy in town being played up as the shady, suspicious character?

I’m willing to let these questions slide for the time being in hopes that the writers have some answers in the wings.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I recently watched Threads (Wikipedia link). Produced by the BBC in 1984, the movie tells the story of two families in Sheffield, England during the run-up to and aftermath of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It may come as no surprise that Threads provides an entirely depiction of nuclear war than Jericho. Part of the reason is a practical one—in Threads, a bomb strikes an RAF base near Sheffield, and an airburst goes off overhead, so the characters start off in a much worse situation than their counterparts in Kansas. However, even that storytelling decision is illustrative of the difference in tone between the two productions.

Jericho uses the nuclear attack as a device to get the story rolling. It is present in the background, but could just as well be swapped out for any other kind of disaster, natural or otherwise. One gets the impression that everything will be okay if the good townsfolk come together, and if Skeet Ulrich is left to do his heroic best. Threads, on the other hand, is all about the nuclear war, and from the start, there seems to be little doubt that it will end badly for everyone involved. Furthermore, there is little hope that any of the characters can pull it together—panic, squabbling, and selfishness doom any attempts to survive in the bleak aftermath of the attack.

Therein lies the main problem with Jericho: it doesn’t take its subject matter seriously. While understandable, given that more than ten years stand between us and a time when the Soviets had thousands of missiles pointed at us and could fire them at any moment, this frivilousness is disappointing, and rather scary.

…And that’s a good thing.

Upon reading the news that Air America was declaring bankruptcy and shutting down operations, my initial reaction was “Air America was still operating?”

After thinking about it for a while, my response was “Good riddance.”

I had a post all typed up detailing how terrible the shows were, but that wasn’t the real problem with the network. Talk radio has been a perfect vehicle for the Right over the last fifteen year, so it’s not hard to see why some liberals thought they needed the same thing. However, there’s a reason that this media has worked well for conservatives—it is a one-way forum for an authority figure to tell people how to think.

While Rush Limbaugh’s show and most of its clones feature call-in segments, the only questions ever asked are along the lines of “How did you get to be so great?” and serve as further opportunities for lauding the host and reinforcing whatever the message of the day is (“The GAYS are coming to wreck your marriage and STEAL YOUR CHILDREN!” or “Speaker Pelosi! SPEAKER PELOSI!!”). There is no debate, there is no question that someone else might have a different idea that’s worth hearing, and the listeners treat the words they hear as absolute.

Trying to mirror this same format on the Left was doomed to failure. There are two ways of wording the reason why: the nice way, which is that liberals have too many different ideas, opinions, and points of view for such a centralized, homogenous formula; and the not-so-nice way, which is that unlike conservatives, liberals don’t need some established authority figure on the radio telling them how to think.

Present the right-wing conservative with a point of view or opinions different from her/his own, and the response is likely to be “You’re wrong, you’re stupid and bad for thinking that, and here’s why.” Present a liberal with the same thing, and you’ll probably get, “Well, I’m not sure about what you’re saying, so let me think about that.”

The former makes for entertaining radio; the latter, not so much.