Alex Ross links to a set of trumpet bloopers. They're not so much funny but awkward in a way you have to empathize. I'm sure any musician can relate to the desperate attempt to nail some wild fingering, lip-burning extreme note, or in my case, some geometrically/ anatomically impossible mallet pattern on the marimba. Sometimes you just bomb.

Leah Peterson has a great set of interviews with bloggers.Rebecca Blood has a great set of interviews with bloggers. Leah Peterson recently interviewed Rebecca Blood.

New York Times Magazine has a great article on the intelligence community and the need to introduce more open technology--things like wikis and blogs, things that millions of people use every day for more mundane pursuits. Chris Anderson offers some commentary, awesome links, and takes it a step further: "What if, rather than just starting blogs and wikis behind military firewalls where the rules are most strict, the intelligence agencies encouraged them out in the open, catalyzing conversations between people who aren't constrained by the same laws?"

OMG: chicken fried bacon. Must have now.

In praise of chain stores. "They increase local variety, even as they reduce the differences from place to place. People who mostly stay put get to have experiences once available only to frequent travelers, and this loss of exclusivity is one reason why frequent travelers are the ones who complain."

Yikes. So there's really going to be a 6th Rocky movie. I've got mixed feelings about this. The first one, 30 years ago, was spectacular. Let's hope this last one can buck the (declining) quality trend of the four sequels. Maybe in a couple years we'll get a Lucas-style sextet of prequels!

This is so very me: "I start each night futilely trying to clear a workspace and end it when I can’t think of another website to visit." Actually, my workspace is pretty tidy, but I can relate to the web-as-gravitational-vortex theory of non-productivity. That's one of the reasons I love my nice, quiet WriteRoom for distraction-free progress. And a bit more brilliance over at Crushing Krisis:

"When my work-time ended I promptly sat on the floor and fell asleep, face pressed against the crack beneath my door to catch a cool draft from the hallway."

I've been playing around with Rita, a cool little paint program. My first drawing was an orange.

Best Buy is de-structuring its corporate work policies. The spin:

The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours... There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do.

Pretty cool. The long-term goal is to take this flexibility all the way down to the retail storefronts. Best Buy has even spun off a little consulting company, CultureRx, to help other companies make the same changes. I hope it works out for them. I suspect a good bit of this shift is generational. Younger workers want more breathing room. And its better to take a little risk to stay ahead of the curve when they've got Wal-Mart and Target hot on their heels.

A catalog of Batman's gadgets. I really need to get a utility belt.

I was really surprised to find a Ray Bradbury book that I didn't like. His latest book, Farewell Summer, is the 50-years-later follow-up to Dandelion Wine, set (somewhat autobiographically) in an idyllic summer in the American midwest. It's a meditation on life, maturation, and death told through a war between the neighborhood boys and a local elder. The book is really short. The publisher even cheated a bit: with generous margins and extra-wide line-spacing it just barely makes it over the 200-page mark. One of the things that bothered me was that the book was so dialogue-driven, when his narration is what I really appreciate. And perhaps I'm just too young to relate to all this deep reflection. Maybe if you like the Mitch Albom "life lessons" thing, you'll dig it. So the story didn't really catch my interest too much, but the writing is as sharp as ever. It's not every day you can find a sentences like this:

The cake stood like a magnificent Alp upon the kitchen table.

There are many other fine phrases that I wish I could write and/or would love to steal. If you're looking for yummy Bradbury narrative goodness, I'd turn to something like The Illustrated Man or Something Wicked This Way Comes.

A month-long photo project, with each self-portrait taken at 2:45am.

Oh, I love you, Raisin Nut Bran. Why must you be so expensive?

Wikipedia has an article about the math and methods for shuffling playing cards.

Stephen Levy's very readable story of the obscenely popular iPod came just after I bought my new computer, and served a welcome distraction as I imported all my music. As an interesting publishing twist on the 'shuffle' idea, various editions of this book have the self-contained chapters (with titles like "Cool" and "Apple" and "Personal") re-arranged in different orders, sandwiched between the intro and the coda. Kind of cool. Luckily, this book is more biography than love letter. There's a lot of industry history, delving into early portable music hits like Sony's Walkman, a bit of the sordid history of the music publishing industry in the midst of the mp3 revolution, insider perspectives on Apple's development process, whether or not shuffle mode is really random, and so on.

And of course, there's a lot about infatuation with the iPod itself. Levy cites Virginia Postrel's book on industrial design:

Having spent a century or more focused primarily on other goals--solving manufacturing problems, lowering costs, making goods and services widely available, saving energy--we are increasingly engaged in making our world special. More people in more aspects of life are drawing pleasure and meaning from he way their persons, places, and things look and feel.

Thank you, Capitalism. Of course, recognizing that progress is one of the reasons the iPod is so successful amid products with better specs. "More" isn't always more. It's just a beautifully designed object that's a joy to use, in the way we choose. As Levy says:

shuffle turns out to be the techna franca of the digital era--not just a feature on a gadget but an entire way of viewing the world, representing the power that comes from aggregating content from a variety of sources and playing it back in an order that render irrelevant the intended ordering by those who produced or first distributed the content.

Yes, we like control. More, please.

A map of where the planet's happiest people are. Denmark takes the top spot; United States comes in at #23.

Why music critics need to (re)read the work of Lester Bangs... and Pope John Paull II. "Despite the beauty and power of much popular music, the critics have become a cross between Holden Caulfield and a taxidermist."

An video/ illustration of a woman, drawn from bones out to wardrobe. [via designobserver]

A sweet gallery of snowflakes at high magnification. [via blankenship]

Here's an interview about the beginnings of Flickr with its leaders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. [via stamatiou]