I saw an interesting post in Reason’s blog Hit and Run that discusses a problem that I know several of you have experienced first-hand: The Grocery Gap. A real grocery store can be difficult to find in bigger cities, and is basically impossible to find in the city-center. This has always been a bit of a mystery to me since there would be huge demand at stores in densely populated areas. The post (and presumably the article to which it refers) explains that the gap has more to do with the red tape involved than the profit to be had.

Here’s the money quote: “You can do two or three stores in the suburbs in the time it takes to do one in the inner city.”

As my title will have you believe, this has to be the hippiest-ass idea I’ve ever seen.

And yet, stylistically (musically), I’m getting some serious “long night in Rio” vibes.

Still, who can argue that this is a pretty sweetastic idea. Who’s in?

I can’t remember if I’ve ever been shopping on a Black Friday. But if it’s anything like the moment captured in this Washington Post picture, I’m sorely missing out.

“Until you experience one,” said Cindy Wojnar, a Best Buy training manager, “people never grasp what’s about to occur.”

But it now seems that everyone in the world except the current administration now wants the U.S. out of Iraq

I was listening to NPR on the way home today and I was struck by this beautiful little song by Tom Waits. His voice is so remininiscent of Louis Armstrong’s that it’s downright scary.

From Pitchfork (I have outsourced my thinking about this song to them. I just enjoy.):

The anthem of Winter 2006 has surfaced early. A year early, if you note that it, Tom Waits’ “You Can Never Hold Back Spring”, was originally written for Roberto Benigni’s 2005 French film La Tigre e la Neve (The Tiger and the Snow).

Those planning on spending the cold months ahead bathrobed, drinking hard cider next to the fire, and dreaming of seasons to come will have a hard time digging up a track more appropriate than this one.

I think I’m like most males (please let me know if I’m wrong) - the last thing on my mind right after sex is sex… and it takes me a good full day, sometimes two or three, before I’m raring to go again. It seems that if a man did not need recovery time (like women) then he would have a serious evolutionary advantage over slowpokes like me, since he could spread his genes significantly faster.

Are we evolving towards Mr. No-recovery? If women made it why are we so far behind?

The biology teacher at my school thought that maybe we were like women not too long ago but something about our modern situation (perhaps stress) has us needing recovery time (but aren’t women also stressed?).

Am I not seeing something important about needing recovery time? Maybe this - after sex I’ve got about 24-48 to think clearly about non-sex things, and then my thoughts get increasingly clogged with images I couldn’t see on the big screen until I was 17. I can imagine that this pattern is better for survival than Mr. No-Recovery’s monotone horny-vision.

What do you think?

Go see it. Scorsese’s best movie in the last ten years, maybe rivaling Goodfellas.

Stylized violence and an amazing story with a sickening twist.

The acting couldn’t have been better, by anyone. Mark Wahlberg stole the show for me. Damon turned in a great performance, as did DiCaprio, Sheen and Baldwin.

The soundtrack is perfect, as expected f/m Scorsese.

Go see the movie.

Google Maps just rolled out a new feature that, when you click on it somehow connects your phone to a business’s phone # when you’ve found it through a google maps search.

This is just another of those things I never realized I needed, but Google new I needed it, and they have answered that need.

Anybody going to be in F-town for Thanksgiving?

I’ll be in the Arklahoma region f/m 11/22-11/25. I might be moving there permanently…more on that in a blog post much later.

I was checking one of my favorite blogs Lifehacker, when I saw a post about podlinez, a service that lets you listen to podcasts from your phone. I personally am not big on the idea of podcasting. I’m not good enough at multi-tasking to listen to them while I work. Maybe if I had a long commute, and more than 4 gigs on my mp3 player I would subscribe to a few, but I doubt it. The last thing I want when I am rockin’ out to a randomized play list is to have somebody come on there and start talking, and the second to the last thing I want to have to do is jump through any hoops to sync them onto the device and separate out the content so they don’t creep into my music listening.

Podlinez is different, though. Instead of helping you subscribe to or download the ‘casts, they provide a regular old phone number for lots of popular ones, and you just call it to listen in. You can use the # and * keys to skip back and forth. I have the number for This American Life and The Economist in my contacts, and I listened to the former on speaker phone while I was cooking and eating lunch the other day. not because I had planed to, or set anything up, or downloaded anything. just because my phone was in my pocket and I was bored while I waited for my water to boil.

I still don’t think I’ll ever really get into podcasts, but this is the first distribution method for them that has real appeal to me.

Here’s your quote for the day, ya hippies –

My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move
people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to
the library. -Peter Golkin, museum spokesman (1966- )

Our 9-1 Razorbacks are ranked 5th by the AP this week and 7th in the BCS. If they take down Mississippi, LSU, and then a one-loss Florida team in the SEC championship game, then we might just play for the national championship. If you haven’t been following the hogs it’s time that you get acquainted with Darren McFadden, who is a legitimate Heisman candidate.

Joey Scarborough is dropping F-bombs– on national national television! Well, at least on MSNBC.

If you’ve stopped by the New York Times Politics page lately, you’ve seen the many new interactive election results maps they have linked along the right-hand side.

These results maps are similar to the maps NY Times had up before the election (especially cool are the morphs from a geography-based map to a cartogram based on population).

A new interactive map uses choropleth maps to show results state-by-state. These small multiples maps allow you to compare 2006 senate results with either 2004 results, 2000 senate results, median income, or some other demographic variable.

The real show stopper, though, is this map (screenshot above) that shows how House results shifted between 2004 and 2006. You can mouse over both the map and the graphic at the top, and you can view the results using a number of different categories (”Switched to the Democrats”, “Urban”, “Hispanic”, etc.).

All were programmed in Flash and are really sweet examples of interactive cartography.

This morning I had what is for me a rare experience: I still had vivid memories of the dream I had just been having. The memories, and the thoughts they’ve sparked, almost make me wish that I was woken up early more often.

In the dream, I was in Mendoza, Argentina with some people from home. Most of the mountains didn’t have nearly as much snow as they used to, and I remember thinking about global warming. Later, I told someone about something I’d read on Slate, and he had never heard of it. Then he got excited and wanted to tell me about a website I’d never heard of. I asked what it was about, and he took a long time drawing out the answer. At the time I took his pause to be for effect, but later I realized that I also had a sense of trying to think of something, because, presumably, I was having to think up something I’d never heard of before. Finally the guy said … “Rainy Denali.”

At first, I couldn’t think of what that might mean. then I started thinking about Denali and I realized that as far north and high up as it is, it should never get rain, only snow. “Rainy Denali” I thought in the dream, is symbolic of global warming. The crazy part is I don’t know if I knew that on some level when I made the guy say that, or if I lucked out and made something up for which there happened to be unintended meaning. Dreams, it occurred to me, must be some of the hardest work our brains do: always having to think up things you think you’ve never thought.

Dallas is 0-4, the Suns are 1-4, Denver is 0-3, Detroit 2-3, … New Orleans 4-0, Atlanta 3-1,Portland 3-2, Utah 4-1, and the almost-Kobe-less Lakers are 4-1. Did the NBA change the format of win-loss records to loss-wins record? NO! For the first time ever the NBA needs to discuss what will happen if every team in the NBA finishes the season at 41-41. I like it.

This one is a two parter:

Did you vote with an electronic device, and if so how was it?

Did you then proceed to smash up the e-voting machine like this guy did?

MySpace is soooo over (according to Blogging Stocks)

From his location in Waco Texas Bush said the following on hearing Saddam had been sentenced to death…

President Bush says Saddam Hussein’s trial was “a major achievement for Iraq’s young democracy.”

Bush called the verdict “a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.”

The president noted that Saddam has a right to appeal his sentence — and “will continue to receive the due process and legal rights that he denied to the Iraqi people.”

Does anyone find it weird to praise someone being killed as an achievement for a democracy? Oh compassionate conservatism, how little I understand you…