I'm in the midst of getting ready to go record a new EP with a band, and it's my first time recording with this group, despite having been playing with them for close to a year now. (I joined the group just after they had recorded their last LP, you see.)

The production schedule has been much, much faster than any album on which I've previously worked. We will likely have been rehearsing the songs for only about a month, which is a fraction of the time I had rehearsed with other bands prior to hitting the official we're-paying-for-studio-time Record button.

I really enjoy the pace. It makes me lock down the songs in a basic way, which I'll probably add to later for live performance, but that's okay. That makes the live show a bit different.

I don't know what my previous bands were thinking about, dragging our feet so long to record.

Rookie, you know, the "website for teenage girls", apparently has a feature called "Ask a Grown Man". Here we see Paul Rudd, Grown Man, answering questions. I find this charming! Why?

1. The name of the feature amuses.
2. Rudd, at least, appears to be treating the questions seriously (and attempting to give good advice).
3. The utter typicality of the questions themselves

Although I am not a grown man, and although Flippanter has not asked me anything directly, I will give him the following good advice: read all of these, then don't do any of them.

I don't remember the good explanation, but there is one.

Chris Y. passes along the top five regrets of people who are dying. They spout glib self-help bullshit and then die of embarrassment. But seriously, choose to be happy. Now. Go.

Let's play Skymall! Here are the rules:

1. You have to pick an item you would actually want to own, and link to it.
2. You have to play, because it's my birthday.

I'll go first.

This litter box:

Has the Komen/Planned Parenthood dustup come up here yet? I went looking for a good summary of exactly what happened, and this Q&A from NPR seems good. Is there anything else to add?

My ongoing reaction to the story is bafflement at why the Komen Foundation would take an action that's likely to lead to worse health-care outcomes, piled on top of frustration that continued ignorance about the work done at Planned Parenthood allows demagogues to thrive and mislead.

While I'd never heard of Lana Del Rey before she came up in comments recently regarding her performance on SNL and the subsequent thingamablah regarding her authenticity, I found this article to be an interesting take on the subject.

For instance:

They were mad that she was maybe a rich girl, and she was maybe faking being a struggling singer-songwriter: "The class thing--you don't hear this in the States that much," says rock critic Chuck Eddy, author of the recently released book Rock and Roll Always Forgets, who also writes for Spin and Rolling Stone. "But at this time, the United States is probably losing its delusion about us being a classless society. I don't know if this has anything to do with that or not." Besides, he doesn't understand why people object to her supposedly rich roots: "It seems like there's always been trust-fund babies in indie rock. What else would they do? It's not like there are trust-fund babies making heavy metal or country."

And:

And the indie-rock and hipster community bristled at the thought that it was being callously marketed to.

"If somebody thought her music was great, and then they found out, 'Oh, she's being marketed'--like other indie acts are not marketed--they suddenly find out that she's marketed or she had a different image or that people are complaining about her rich dad, and that they don't like her music, that's utter bullshit," Eddy says. "If her music is good, it's good." (For the record, he doesn't like it much either.)

"What happens is that people hate feeling like idiots," says Johnston.

And:

"Stupid people do judge musical acts if they write their own songs," he says. "Incredibly low-life idiots do judge music that way. Smart people judge music by the music. You know, pop acts for decades and lots of rock acts haven't written their own songs, so are they good or not? It doesn't mean anything. It just doesn't. It just seems so dumb, I'm amazed that people are still arguing about it."

I will say it's rather ungentlemanly to refer to "stupid people" when you're trying to make a point that's otherwise valid.

This morning at 6am I was graced with the following realization: The name of the baseball team, the Bad News Bears, is a pun. The bears…ers of bad news. See? How droll.

I have yet to have an epiphany concerning why I was thinking about the Bad News Bears at 6am.

Question: The health care mandate is a mandate to have health care, not to buy health care, right? Because there are plenty of situations where the person doesn't have to buy health insurance to be covered. But what various cases are contesting is that you can't force people to buy something, right? Because we compel people to follow all sorts of laws.

Therefore, if the buying is struck down, would the government be compelled to offer a free option, without ever having to pass a public option through congress?

Obviously this is coasting on the power of wishful thinking, and obviously I could go google the damn thing.