I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for a while now (long enough to have noticed and be relieved at the eventual removal of the questionable tagline, “Gay for Macs”), and I’ve enjoyed John Gruber’s pithy insights and diligent distillation of the daily deluge of Mac (and other stuff he’s, apparently, “gay for”) related news into a single useful stream of relevant information.

I’ve also been reading it long enough to know that its primary source of revenue is via a single weekly sponsorship, which culminates in a post touting the greatness of whatever it is you’re promoting via the sponsorship, and a link in his sponsorship archive. And for this he charges $1750 a week. That works out to $91,000 a year. Just for hawking someone else’s wares once a week. Not bad work if you can get it. But how can you get it? Well certainly not by describing your own writing as “blather” and then justifying that description by indiscriminately posting whatever prose crawled out of the dank, cobwebbed recesses of your brain. Trust me, I know.

I get it though. His insights are often brilliant. Case in point, today’s dismantling of my dreams of Flash for the iPhone. OK, I haven’t really dreamed of it. It would be nice, I suppose, but it’s been clear for a while that Apple had reasons beyond their spurious claims of poor performance for keeping Flash off the iPhone.

If you doubt that assessment, please do yourself a favor. Read Daring Fireball and then shut the hell up. I will now heed my own advice.

Shady high-stakes gamblers using other people’s money Investment bankers getting their comeuppance is one thing. Global economic collapse is something else. This is only a Panic if we make it one. Fear begets fear, which leads to the populace en masse taking drastic steps we normally would not. Hyperbolic news reports become self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just say no. Kill the collapse by refusing to give in. And whatever you do, don’t give the swindlers another $700 billion to play with.

I’ve just started working on a new track for the Bee LP entitled “Drones.” Appropriately enough, it is (mostly) in an ambient style, with droning synthesizers.

A rough version is posted now on the album page for your interim enjoyment.

OK, I guess I’m spoiling the surprise with both the title and the accompanying screenshot, but that’s only to get you to take the time to wait for slow-loading Flash on what is apparently a Dutch e-commerce site. It’s worth the wait, if you’re into this sort of thing.

Geniet van het!

This is the kind of stuff I have been hoping for from the media for the past 8 years. Better late than never, I guess. Then again, imagine what sorts of disasters might have been avoided if more people with the ears of the nation would actually call out the incompetence of our leadership.

Of course, we also have Wolf Blitzer’s wishy-washy response here. But I was heartened by a comment he made last night after interviewing Joe Biden post-debate. He said (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here) “It would be nice if we could also get Sarah Palin but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Yet again, I’m spending a good portion of the day stewing over the selection of someone who’s grossly unprepared to serve as our nation’s vice president and the terrifying reality that, by one means or another, there’s a real chance that she’ll win that title.

My latest source of frustration and anxiety (in the event that she actually, by some act of God or Karl Rove, manages to get elected) is her disastrous interview with Katie Couric.

I read part of a transcript of the interview yesterday and my immediate thought was, “My God, she sounds like a beauty pageant contestant.” (Which, of course, she was in the 1980s.) And that was just reading the transcript. I could only imagine the visceral discomfort I would have felt actually watching the interview.

I guess I was not alone in my assessment of her performance. And here you can not only watch it, but also a painful comparison with a more recent pageant contestant as well. (Luckily, Sarah Palin sounds better than Miss South Carolina, but not by as much as I would like in a vice presidential candidate.)

Right now I am really wishing Obama had picked Hillary Clinton to be his running mate.

My latest full-length album project is going to be entitled simply Room 34 but, honoring some of my favorite bands that have released self-titled (or untitled) albums, such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and Weezer (and probably others I’m just not thinking of at this second), it has an unofficial title, based on the cover: The Bee LP.

For the first time since I began recording music in 1990, I’ll be putting out a release with cover art not designed by me. The cover art was drawn by my five-year-old son, Fletcher. It also serves as inspiration for the music on the album… or at least for the titles of the songs, each of which will be bee-themed.

Learn more at the album’s official page!