Good show tonight. Good, good show.

Drivers are being strongly urged to avoid the 1900-2300 blocks of West End Avenue during the president’s visit.

This is a great idea. Let's close THE BUSIEST STREET IN NASHVILLE so the President can drop by to say a few words on behalf of a guy named Bob Corker.

Holy free downloading, Batman!

The revolution is here. The only thorny issue I see is with artist royalties. I hope Vivendi Universal is smart enough to treat the ad revenue like music sales for mechanical purposes. But that probably won't happen, meaning the idea might be doomed before it starts.

Katherine Harris is crazy

It's like she's trying to lose by the widest possible margin.

parkour

Fascinating. Never heard of it before, although it seems to have had a good amount of exposure in the media.

The article on speedrunning (perhaps the digital equivalent of parkour) is good as well.

old and busted

new hotness

Unexpected discovery of the day: Jeff Buckley sucks.

Sorry, man.

Uh-oh

There goes the neighborhood.

I am listening to this song (which is somewhat inferior to the Clash version) on repeat as I wonder how much music I will be able to write before the hammer falls on Wednesday and I have to report in for a lesson. I had a great timetable to have all my recital music written before school started, but I didn't really stick to it. At all. I did accomplish a lot of other goals for the summer, including playing shows and doing some recording. It's not much consolation with time running out ...

I changed the doorknob to my room. IT TOOK ALL DAY. 3 trips to 3 different stores (Target, Home Depot, Wal-Mart). Original purchase: Replacement doorknob. $9.99. Good deal, right?

Get home. Realize I will need to do some drilling. Get out the old drill and find both batteries dead. Also find out that I need to drill some BIG holes, and we don't have any bits for that.

Home Depot. Find a nice set of spade bits. $9.99. Good deal, right? The cheapest corded drill I could find: $39.99.

This job is getting expensive.

Ok, now I'm good to go. I drill the hole in the side of the door a little bigger and it works perfectly. Now, time to install the knobs ... uh-oh. The tiny hole my previous knobs used is not sufficient. The new knobs require something like a 2 1/2 inch hole, and the biggest spade bit I have is 1 1/4. Great.

I try to improvise, using smaller spade bits to try and make a nice big round hole. It doesn't work very well because spade bits are designed to drill straight into something, and you can't really get any side-to-side motion to smooth things out.

In the meantime, the whole reason I'm replacing my doorknob is because the previous one didn't latch well, which was fine until I got cats. They like to push the door open and get in my room and eat things they are not supposed to. They have been throwing up various things today but I think it's all out of their system now. Gross.

So now I'm stuck, until Caleb finds some cat barf on his bed and doesn't have a spare sheet set - giving me an excuse to go to Wal-Mart. I get there, check the hardware section, and bingo - found some drum sander bits. I get those and a set of the big round toothy-looking hole cutters, just in case.

I stripped two out of three sander bits, but 45 minutes and a whole lot of sawdust later, I have a new doorknob.

Ok

(brilliance)

The Internet has become meaningful again.

P.S. - this

SNAKES ON A PLANE

If you haven't seen it, go. This weekend. As soon as possible. You MUST see this with an opening-weekend crowd for it to be any good. Do yourself a favor and buy some rubber snakes to bring along.

And get ready to do a LOT of yelling.

This struck me as odd. Eh?

Woohoo!

Is this permissible under the journalist's creed? I guess it probably happens all the time with freelance writers.

There is nothing finer than turning on the TV on a Saturday afternoon, not expecting to see anything special - only to be greeted with beach volleyball featuring Misty May and Kerri Walsh. Yowza!

BookCrossing

This is pretty much the coolest idea ever. The kind of good stuff the internet ought to be used for.

Hahahahaha

Jodie Sweetin. Ahaahahah.

Man, I wish we had good cable.

We learn from everything. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. And - most definitely - sometimes you just have to do it wrong before you can do it right. I think I prefer to learn that way.

By the way, this isn't some kind of serious post or anything. I'm just ruminating on our show tonight and how the more work I put into this band thing, the more that ends up being required of me. It's fun, but it's much more challenging and complicated than I thought. It's nice to know there's still a lot to learn.

Funny

Lots of Daily Show clips for those of us who don't have cable.

***warning: here there be spoilers***

Pirates 2 was a strange movie experience for me. I hated the first 2/3 of it, but by the end I felt it was decent. Here goes:

• The discussion of how to pronounce "kraken" was very appropriate. I myself always pronounced it with a long "a", having seen the word in print (most notably, as a villain in the original Final Fantasy) long before I ever heard it spoken. When I did finally hear it - in a commercial for the Kraken roller coaster at Busch Gardens - it sounded so terribly wrong that I refused to accept it. I now assert, based on popular usage as well as the "rules" of the English language, that both pronunciations are correct.
• I'm pretty sure that Davy Jones, the immortal devil of the sea, doesn't sleep. The setup with the liar's dice game was good (especially because they played exactly by the rules), but the method of stealing the key was incredibly lame.
• I thought the execution of the plot was terrible. Having characters explain their motivations and actions through dialogue is the worst type of cinema.
• The subplot with the natives should have been cut. It had nothing to do with anything. How would the sailors know the tribe intended to eat their elected leader? Furthermore, why did Jack Sparrow talk in fake jargon, then suddenly use words the natives were able to understand? It was a waste of screen time.
• Why can Davy Jones only set foot on land every 10 years? Just because the writers say so? On a similar note, the use of a magical compass that can lead you to the thing you want the most is a bit of a cheap gimmick, even though it's a convenient way to develop the characters involved.
• Davy Jones, the immortal devil of the sea, ought to know when someone is hiding aboard his ship.
• From the discovery of the chest onwards, the movie becomes much better, although there are still significant holes. Why can Davy Jones's ship only sail against the wind?
• The subplot of Jack's morals vs. Elizabeth's is very good, especially given the choices that both characters make.
• Davy Jones, the immortal devil of the sea, ought to know the condition and whereabouts of his heart, not only because it is physically a part of him, but because it just happens to be his one weakness. When the chest was found with the key in the lock, I imagine his first reaction would have been to open it and look inside, which would have triggered an immediate search and probably prevented Norrington from escaping.
• Speaking of Norrington, his reappearance was an interesting twist. In fact, several characters who played lesser parts in the first movie and could have easily been written out of the script were brought back. This, at least, was a good move. I don't quite understand how Barbossa could have come back from such a certain death in the first film, but it was good to see him. I hope they don't use some stupid explanation for his return.
• I absolutely hate the idea of making a film simply to be the bridge between two other films. To be fair, I accept this in literature and TV, but I just think that movies - even ones with sequels in mind - should be self-contained. I don't think this ending was fair to the viewer in the sense that the characters' situtations barely changed in the course of the movie. There was some character development, but just enough to keep it from being awful. It was entirely too long (cutting the native scene would fix this), and overall I got the sense that everyone involved was just way too excited about the success of the original and wanted to make the sequel according to the same formula. The only problem is, no one ever expected the first movie to be successful, and it wasn't made according to a specific box-office "formula". It succeeded on its own merits, and the second one ought to be held to those same standards.

I suppose it was good enough. The ending felt good but it was so obviously setting up the third movie that I wonder how much longer viewers will tolerate this new shift in moviemaking. A good set of sequels has always been the exception rather than the rule, and in the meantime we have plenty to remind us (Matrix 2 and 3; X-Men 3) that it's still possible for the third Pirates movie to crash and burn.

Send your questions to Secretary Rice regarding the Israel-Hezbollah war, to be read on Larry King Live tonight at 9 PM EST.

Take that, Katherine Harris. Ha!

Man, she is evil-looking.