Why Hot Topic is Awesome

I'm easily offended. So when I see some Gen-Y-tard writing about punk rock when the department store cosmetics clerk and the indie record store manager's humping that was to conceive him was probably still coming five years after the Sex Pistols went down the crapper, I can't imagine he has any idea what he's talking about.

Shawn says, "Punk was born on the street but is now bred in major label board rooms with clothing manufacturer tie-ins." But every history of punk acknowledges that Malcolm McLaren only "created" the Sex Pistols to sell bondage and fetish clothing from his shop.

So English punk was always about selling something. New York punk was different. Maybe he's got his geography mixed up.

So now that we've established that no one should glorify punk rock as some mystical surge of DIY grassroots music that somehow has become corrupted by corporate greed, let me just say that punk and rap (hip hop) are the last great musical genres since they existed before the dawn of MTV and Ticketmaster. (But I use "great" loosely with rap music because I am not a fan.)

And Hot Topic is such an easy target. It's goth in a box. It's soccer mom nipple rings. It's safe rebellion. It doesn't take a hatful of clever to make fun.

So why do I love Hot Topic? Because they have the coolest crap. Futurama and super hero toys, tee-shirts, and Hot Topic is the only store I've ever seen to carry Battle Royale on DVD. Battle Freaking Royale! Which I had to buy on VCD from Korea when I first heard about it.

And since they are everywhere, I can find cool crap on clearance in practically every mall in America.

Like last week, I stocked up on Twilight buttons @ 50 cents each in preparation for our library's New Moon nerdfest next month. And I've bought Watchmen and South Park and Flogging Molly tee-shirts and Converse sneakers at huge markdowns.

And there's nothing like having the massively pierced goth and emo kids behind the counter get all riled up when ancient me walks into their store. Why is every kid in Hot Topic covered in tattoos and punctured with piercings? Hey, kid, You will never get a good job if they can see your tats poking out of a business suit!

So don't knock Hot Topic. They didn't kill punk. If anything, they've helped to keep it on life support for old dudes like me.

DISCLAIMER: Due to recent Federal Trade Commission decisions, the.effing.librarian discloses that HOT TOPIC did NOT supply one complimentary stainless steel barbell post for my uvula piercing in exchange for this review. So I shoplifted one when the pale, emaciated vampire chick passed out from malnutrition onto a stack of neatly folded Paramore tee-shirts.

RIAA awarded enough to keep members bathing in champagne and caviar through the year.

So the Recording Industry Association of America used its giant metal boot to squash another tiny bug when it sued and won an enormous judgement against a woman accused of distributing song files.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset was fined (approx.) $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of sharing on the Kazaa file-sharing network back in 2005. The RIAA says she had 1,700 music files in her public folder, which is more like $1,129 a song, but really, math is hard enough.

Now, I never understood the music file-sharing thing. I don't understand how the RIAA claims ownership of these files.

I thought that "fair use" was allowed for copyrighted works, and that fair use was understood to allow up to 10% of something to be copied. This could be wrong, but this is the way I understand it.

So if I rip a song from a CD into an mp3 file, I am using software to compress the original data into a much smaller file. Here's an example:

A song is 50,529 KB uncompressed. And when I convert it at a 96 Kbps bitrate (a poor quality bitrate, but still listenable), it comes out as a 3,439 KB mp3 file.

The software says it was compressed at a ratio of 14 to 1 to equal a file that is 7% of the original file.

So if my understanding of fair use is correct, how can distributing 7% of something be a violation?

I know that these are different file formats, blah, blah, blah, but still, how does the RIAA argue that a file that is only 7% of the original is a "copy"?

Maybe their position is that no one should be able to enjoy something without paying for it. For example, here is 7% of the Mona Lisa:





Some people might say that's a pretty significant copy. But I still don't understand it.

Anyway, here is the list of the 24 songs Thomas-Rasset was fined $1.9 million for sharing. I wonder how much of that money the performers will ever see.

- Guns N Roses "Welcome to the Jungle"; "November Rain"
- Vanessa Williams "Save the Best for Last"
- Janet Jackson "Let's Wait Awhile"
- Gloria Estefan "Here We Are"; "Coming Out of the Dark"; "Rhythm is Gonna
Get You"
- Goo Goo Dolls "Iris"
- Journey "Faithfully"; "Don't Stop Believing"
- Sara McLachlan "Possession"; "Building a Mystery"
- Aerosmith "Cryin'"- Linkin Park "One Step Closer"
- Def Leppard "Pour Some Sugar on Me"
- Reba McEntire "One Honest Heart"
- Bryan Adams "Somebody"
- No Doubt "Bathwater"; "Hella Good"; "Different People"
- Sheryl Crow "Run Baby Run"
- Richard Marx "Now and Forever"
- Destiny's Child "Bills, Bills, Bills"
- Green Day "Basket Case"

Now that she's lost her battle, I wonder if someone could post a few of these songs online in the form of political protest.

Like, for example, these titles could represent Thomas-Rasset's story of persecution by the RIAA:
- Sara McLachlan "Possession"
- Sheryl Crow "Run Baby Run"
- Destiny's Child "Bills, Bills, Bills"

And these could represent the pain and humiliation she feels by the accusations of music piracy:
- Guns N Roses "Welcome to the Jungle"
- Aerosmith "Cryin'"
- Green Day "Basket Case"

And of course, Gloria Estefan's hit could be altered into the "Recording Industry is Gonna Get You."

Would the "political protest" argument work: "No, your honor, I am not a music pirate. I am making a public statement of outrage against the Nazi tactics of the RIAA. What, your honor? What do you mean, 'I hope you brought your checkbook?'"

Probably not. And I don't have $560,000 to pay the RIAA when I lose the case.

Book crooks.

I've done a lot of bad stuff in my life. I probably had 2,000 baseball cards when I was a kid that I never paid for. I got in fights and hurt some people. I threw rocks and firecrackers at other kids. I started fires. I kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.

But I never stole anything from the library. Libraries were like a sanctuary, a refuge, where everyone was equal because everything was available to anyone for free. I never vandalized a library or broke or stole anything. I never tore pages from books or magazines. I never even cut out pictures of topless actresses printed in the French movie magazine, Seins dans L'obscurité (which I just made up). And it still angers me today when I read stories about libraries losing materials to thieves.

I remember when I found out that a friend had taken a book from the library, I said, "Man, you took that from the library... you're an asshole." And I stole the book back from him and left it on the floor inside the library entrance (because I was afraid an alarm would go off if I tried to bring the book back inside). And I felt good about returning it, until that asshole shot me in the arm with his BB gun.

Even now, when I know many ways to steal whatever I want, I don't take library books or DVDs or CDs.

Yes, of course, I make copies of whatever I want. Because, you know, copying isn't stealing. :)

On a related topic, listening to "TWiL 20: Ethically Cleansed," which discusses the ripping of CDs.

Questions: If you rip a CD at 10 to 1, which is basically copying ten percent of the data on the CD, is that legal under "fair use"? How much of a written work can you copy and still be within fair use? What about copying a DVD at fifty-five percent compression?

That's why ripping confuses me since the ripped tracks are never 1:1 copies. They are almost always compressed and stripped of 80% of the (music) data. Do you define that as a copy? I guess it is, but it's a very bad copy.

Didn't analog recording (vinyl sound recordings copied to tape) produce closer copies of the source than today's digital copies? I think they did, but people were copying The Carpenters, so no one really cared.

Why the Internet sucks more.

So I'm an old dude. And old dudes have lots of old crap. I was looking through some old cassettes and found one for a band named Amboog-a-Lard. Wow, I thought, I should convert this cassette to mp3 and put it on the Internet to help archive this long lost obscure band.
So then I type Amboog-a-Lard into the googly and lo and behold, there's already a Wikipedia entry for them (???). Who'da thunk?

It seems that one of the band members went on and joined Marilyn Manson (who was called "Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids" when I was going to FIU and they used to put their flyers up around campus and we would laugh at them and speculate on the "Kids" complete and total suckage).

Here, I thought this was some completely disappeared band that I could help to salvage from the nothing, but no, it's already been done.

Ditto for the band, Gay Cowboys in Bondage which I saw a few times on Miami Beach when I used to go out and get drunk and dance like a fool. Before I became a librarian. Okay, fine, I still do all that. But I'm making professional blogging here; there could be children in the room. Why did you make me say it?

The Internet has made the world a whole lot smaller. When I can fit the whole world in my 19" monitor, everything loses significance. I need to go outside and catch a lizard or pet a frog or lick a toad.

That's the solution. Go outside, you idiots! No, don't take time to get dressed. Go out now! Yes, I know I can see your ass: why the hell do you think I'm shouting!!!??? Get you naked ass outside!

The RIAA: still complete bastards

And the beast creeps closer.
[By Steven Musil, CNET Tue Aug 26, 10:20 PM ET]

The RIAA continues to sue people, not to stop them from downloading music or making music available for download, but just because they are bastards.

"RIAA experts found that Howell uninstalled Kazaa and reformatted his hard drive,..." and concluded that "'The deliberate destruction... by itself, compels the conclusion that such evidence supported Plaintiffs' case.'"

A husband and wife were sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for something or other, I think just breathing too loudly, but after the couple received notice of the suit, they deleted the offending material from their computer. But the RIAA believes that not doing something makes you just as guilty as doing it.

Judge: "And what is the RIAA position?"
RIAA: "Well, your honor, they fixed the problem."
Judge:"So you withdraw the suit?"
RIAA:"No, your honor, they fixed the problem!"
Judge:"Isn't that the basis for your complaint? That they were making music available on their computer? And so they stopped do it. Didn't that satisfy the complaint?"
RIAA: "Absolutely not."
Judge: "Why not?"
RIAA: "Because we are total bastards!"

In the real world, if your mango tree is dropping mangoes on my property that rot and attract insects, I might sue you to get you to cut back your tree. I want your mangoes off my property. But in the RIAA world, when they sue, they want you to continue whatever violation was brought in the complaint. Because if you continue, obviously, you're ignoring the complaint, but if you stop doing whatever is in the complaint, you violate the spirit of the complaint, which is that the RIAA needs you to give them more evidence to create a stronger case. Their argument is that everyone is guilty of something.

I still think we are witnessing the slow inexorable march toward libraries.

The RIAA can't possibly approve of what libraries do, since we allow so many people access to a single copy of something. There's got to be some law against that, right? And libraries don't charge for all this use! That's one Bette Midler CD borrowed one time... okay, strike that. That's one Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana CD borrowed 214 times multiplied by $16 in lost sales = how should I know. No one said there'd be math.

"The deliberate destruction... by itself, compels the conclusion that such evidence supported Plaintiffs' case."

So watch out librarians, for when you discharge that Bel Biv DeVoe CD, you are destroying evidence! And you will go to jail. Or more likely, be ordered to pay some billionaire executives about $3,000 as damages for all their lost revenue. Did I mention they're bastards?

When did Barry Manilow become cool?

First, there was that Family Guy episode, and now there's Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
Does our tolerance wear down as we age? When I was in high school I listened to the Pretenders, The Boomtown Rats, The Ramones and Elvis Costello.

If I was drunk at a party, I might dance to The Commodores ("Brick House") and Lipps Inc ("Funkytown"). But I never listened to Barry Manilow.

I never listened to Boston when I was young, and I never listened to Steely Dan, but I did listen to Styx and Queen. And then many years later, I bought a Boston album and liked it. And I got a Steely Dan album and tolerated it, temporarily, until I hated it again.

But Barry Manilow never seemed cool. In 2006, city officials in Australia used Manilow music to deter kids from hanging around town at night. "But have they thought that these hoodlums might like my music?" countered Manilow. "What if some of them began to sing along to 'Can't Smile Without You'?" Coincidentally, this is the exact problem the CIA has had with trying to drive Osama bin Laden from his caves; the guy just loves "Copacabana."

So Hellboy sings Manilow in the latest movie, it's not like Bruce Wayne will sing "Mandy" in the next Batman movie... he won't, will he?

Muxtape updates

I have a thing for female singers. PJ Harvey, Beth Orton, Gemma Hayes, Ginny Owens, Ani DiFranco, Tori Amos, although I don't listen to Jewel or Alanis Morissette or Beyoncé or Christina Aguilera. Maybe it started back in the 1980's with listening to Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, The Blake Babies, 10,000 Maniacs... who knows. But anyway, my update is four songs sung by women.

"Lucky Night" by The Sugarcubes. It's an absurd song about doing 2 things at a time. But the things are just insane, like driving a car and listening to music: in America, these are the same thing! Add make a call, text a message, put on make-up, sneak a beer, have a smoke, shoot some pictures, eat a burger; and Bjork would have to sing about doing nine things at a time. Really, the lyrics are nonsense, probably because they hadn't learned English yet and didn't understand what they were singing. But what I love about this song is how she starts to shriek at about the 2:13 mark until 2:27. I love the sound of her voice. I listen to that part of the song over and over like I'm convinced it can cure some illness I suffer or some evils I've committed. Too bad Muxtape doesn't let you just FF to that part.

"This Regret" by Caterwaul. Not a whole lot to this song, but I love that voice.

"Bombshell" by Mary's Danish. I really liked them. Can't remember if I ever saw them perform; the 1980's are a huge blur for me. Picked this song because she has "a tattoo of a bombshell." Now, I don't know if she means a woman like Jayne Mansfield or literally, an exploding bomb, but since I have a tattoo of a missile, I picked it for you to hear. (It's a tattoo of a missile, where do you think it is?)

The last song is actually the first on the page, "Human" by The Pretenders. This is the song that I think the women I've known would dedicate to me. I don't want to get into too much detail, but I will share this story: a very long time ago, a friend was giving out presents to all her male friends at a Christmas party. Each guy opened his package to find a bottle of cologne: Halston, Grey Flannel, etc. I opened mine to find a bottle of Brut cologne. I was confused because I'd never worn that fragrance before and asked her why she gave me Brut: "Because you are one," she said.

Muxtape goodness

Saw a tweet from Jessamyn yesterday, "So you can load a bunch of muxtapes into different tabs and play them at the same time. Cacophonously nifty!" And that reminded me that I wanted to find a way to search Muxtape for favorite songs. And it looks like I found a place: Muxtape list.

But looks were deceiving. The custom googly-search doesn't work. Neither does a google with site:muxtape.com.

But at least, this person has a huge list of songs sorted by Artist or Song Title or Muxer. And it looks like it was created recently. So if I want to hear a song, even "Maps" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which seems to be a really popular Muxtrack, I can find it. Wow, and many people posted Andrew Bird (I don't know who that is), and Animal Collective (again, dunno), and Jamie Lidell (I know who that is), Lykke Li (??), and The White Stripes (I know them).

It's really cool to see what people like. Or what they want other people to experience. I know that (most of) the songs on my list have special meaning for me, so maybe other people feel the same about their selections.

If I can just find someone to upload "Ask the Angels" by Patti Smith.

Music

So R.E.M. has a new record. And it's getting good reviews. I just clicked on their site and gave a quick listen to the tracks, and it sounds good, like early 1980's filtered through the debris of a natural disaster, a little rough, but glad to be alive.

I have good memories of R.E.M. After yesterday's post about the old photo, I found another from 1984 when we went to see them play at Daytona Beach (I should post it because it shows the.effing.librarian shirtless, woo-hoo!). It was cool because they were performing on the second stage, not on the beach, so the crowd was much smaller. The main stage had The Fixx, I think. I wish I could find a list of tour dates for 1983-1985 because I know we saw them at University of Miami and Florida Atlantic University around the same time, but I can't remember exactly when.

Another reason to like them was that they recorded in the area and you could sometimes see them around town like the times I saw Peter Buck in the North Miami Borders store. Wait, is that what made me want to be a librarian? That I wanted to be prepared for the next time I saw a celebrity or musician in a book store? So I could step up and help them find what they needed? All this time I thought it was because a witch foretold that I would become a librarian (okay, maybe not a witch, but a really, really, really, really, really old woman). Damn you Peter Buck! I wanted to be a male model. I just never had the cheekbones for it. You stole my dreams!

Or maybe I have this renewed interest in R.E.M. because I saw a recent photo of Michael Stipe and I'm starting to look just like him. Yeah, that's sad. Especially since I'm only ten years old.

Oh, and thanks for nothing, Wikipedia, for this link:
R.E.M. tours, The following is a comprehensive listing of R.E.M. tours and itineraries.

1995
Monster Tour
* May 15 - Mountain View, CA - Shoreline Amphitheater
* October 10 - Richmond, VA - Richmond Coliseum

Someone want to beef that up a little? You could add one concert date and increase Wikipedia's usefulness by 33 per cent! How could you create a page called a "comprehensive" list and give up after two items? That's not even a half-ass list. Is two items even enough to be called a list? If you go to the store for two items and you need to write them down so you don't forget, shouldn't you also put down, "make appointment with doctor about memory loss"? Can you have just two items on your "bucket list"?

1. kiss Valerie Bertinelli on the lips
2. release a red balloon from the top of the Eiffel Tower
   

Is that a list? How many things did Morgan Freeman have on his list? I'm disappointed in you, Wikipedia. Now, where the hell can I go to meet Valerie Bertinelli? Yeah, I know she's almost 50; it's an old list. Are you arguing with the list? No, I didn't think so.

Memories

Every so often I look for old friends on the Internet, you know, friends from ten or twenty years ago (except for you kids who aren't old enough to have friends from twenty years ago; you don't know yet), to see what they're doing, if they have a Web presence or footprint.

And yesterday I found someone, and the page had her email, so I wrote to say, hi. And when I got home, I found an old photo with her standing next to the car I had when I was in library school. On the back bumper was a sticker for the band 7 Seconds. And that got me to thinking about my terrible memory.

I put that bumper sticker on the car to remember the concert. Because for that whole show, as I stood up by the front of the stage, just outside the mosh pit, some girl I'd never seen before, held on to my waist for 45 minutes. I think she wanted to be close to the stage, but didn't want to get sucked into the whirlpool of moshers, so she hung on to whatever she could find. And that was me. I watched that whole show with a strange girl clinging to me and never bothered to ask who she was or her name or anything.

That got me to pondering lots of other stuff about my life that isn't worth mentioning right now, but it's just funny how small things can trigger big memories. That's why I have tattoos. But that too, is for another time.

My Muxtape, annotated

Other than things I find funny or annoying, there isn't much truth on this blog. Any "facts" I claim about me are probably made-up. But I posted some songs to that Muxtape site, and I will tell a little about myself through them:

Big Dipper/ Another Life. This is one of my favorite songs. As with most of my favorite songs, I don't have any idea what it's about and probably couldn't sing it or recite more than a few words of lyrics. But I love it. I don't try to analyze what I love. I had a painting class in college and I made one painting of a woman growing out of a tree. It wasn't very good since I'm not good with anatomy and I didn't own any paints that could be mixed into a decent flesh color. But still I'm proud of it. And I titled it, Another Life, after this song. If I ever did something that made me famous, when it was finished, like if I wrote something that got made into a movie, I would dance at the end to this song. From the bouncy beat to the jangly guitar to words like, "left her body," I love it. Even if you reported that it was written by Heinrich Himmler for Eva Braun's 30th birthday, I would have difficulty giving it up. So if you have that information, please keep it to yourself and don't try to ruin my day.

Four Tops/ Are You Man Enough? (theme from Shaft in Africa). By the time they hit the first "are you man enough, big and bad enough" you should be pumping your fist in the air. This songs makes me think I have the balls to be there for you when you need me. No, not to help you paint the living room. But to help you kick ass. But most likely to help you kick-turn-kick-spin in synchronized Motown dance steps.

Too Much Joy/ Susquehanna Hat Company. This is a song that spans generations. Search for video on the Abbott and Costello routine of the same name to see what I mean. That's why I love it, you need to know the history to get the joke. And so much American culture is lost. In case you don't find it, in the comedy routine, whenever someone hears the words, Susquehanna Hat, they go nuts for and destroy the hat that Lou is holding. For each person, the Susquehanna Hat holds a bad memory. So in the song, a girl named Susquehanna Hat Company makes everyone go batshit. At the end of "the novel of which we dare not speak," I congratulate the reader for finishing the book and announce that it's time to dance, and to cue up this song.

Meco/ Disco Starwars. No reason. Just seemed funny.

Switchblade Kittens/ Ode to Harry Potter. No reason. Just for book nerds.

Boa/ Duvet. The opening credit song for the anime (Serial Experiments)- Lain. It's just a lush, haunting song that makes the show even better. I love how the song just starts like we're already in the middle of the story: "and you don't seem to understand..." Very cool.

Yatsura/ Slain by elf. Not sure why I like this, but it has something to do with when Homer Simpson goes to college and while playing Dungeons and Dragons is slain by an elf. It's just sounds funny.

Dragon Ash/ Battle Royale closing credits. I don't know what this is because it's in Japanese. But Battle Royale is one of the awesomest movies ever. High school students are drugged and taken to an island where they are forced to kill each other so that one will survive and be welcomed back into society. Japanese teenage girls in school uniforms carrying Uzis: nuff said. I imagine the lyrics are something like: "I've loved you secretly and now I have to kill you. Our days of carefree youth have been stolen away. Run with me because I have a plan." If you don't have a renewed love of life after watching these kids shoot the crap out of each other for 90 minutes, then you're already dead.

Oingo Boingo/ Better Luck Next Time. From the soundtrack to The Last American Virgin. What a movie. Kid falls in love with pretty girl. Pretty girl falls for bad boy best friend. Bad boy knocks up girl. Kid spends money and time on girl and gets her an abortion. Kid thinks girl will love him for this. But he is so wrong. I decided long ago that Oingo Boingo is my favorite band because they happened to be there at the right time.

Diane Izzo/ Ground. I love the earthy predatory prowl of this song. I always get the lyrics wrong when I imagine that she sings, "I wanted love to be blind." I'm not sure what this song is about, but it makes me sorry for all the times I told a girl I didn't like her because she was ugly. For the record, I think I only did it once, but that was one too many. And the look on her face has haunted me ever since. But she got me back when she called and left a message that she was Rita, a hot cheerleader, and she wanted to talk to me. In my defense, my mom made me call because it was rude to ignore phone messages, but I got Rita's number from the phone book and called her only to have her ask, "Effing, who?" Don't piss off ugly girls; they have boxes full of revenge to get you back with.

Spookey Ruben/ Wendy McDonald. Just fun.

So. Let's hang out. Okay?

all right, fine, I'll post something

I write stuff that I never post:

Warren Buffet is worth 30 Oprahs;
The Earl of Sandwich has a library;
We are gods;
How do I find that?;
Warning: I am going to piss you off.

I rethink it and can't find anything interesting about what I wrote, so it waits for me to get sloppy and publish without thinking (or while drinking).

Anyway, I don't buy much music, but last week I got Float by Flogging Molly, and I really like it. The only other record I had by them was Drunken Lullabies, which was okay, but I like this new one much more. I think I'll keep it in the cd player for the rest of the week. Or maybe til St. Pat's Day.

One of the greatest punk rock songs ever.

I don't play it often, but every time I hear Back from Samoa by the Angry Samoans, it makes me feel like an angry, greasy, dirty, sexually frustrated, pimple-faced kid.

Yes, that's a good thing. Since the old effing librarian is on that slippery slope to the great beyond (or as you atheists believe, to nothing), any youthful memories are good, regardless of any embarrassment. "Hey, man, remember that time you were so wasted, you like, went number two in your pants?" Ah, yes. For the days when I could go number two, unaided.

Punk rock. Those were the good old days when misery fueled a minor musical renaissance. Frustration with the leadership of Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan helped to produce a new wave of style, much of it vulgar and bloody. What change in music could we expect from today's feelings of hopelessness and rage?

Here is a link to You Stupid Jerk; 25 seconds a absolute genius. Turn it up. But use headphones; you're in a library, for pete's sake.

Happy Happy Joy Joy.

Just a huge "thank you" to Wolfgang's Vault, my (current) favorite place on the Net. Sign up, and you can listen to streaming audio of live concerts from the 1960's, 70's, and 80's. They have shows from The Who, The Ramones, The Boomtown Rats and all the stuff I missed from high school because I was out at the clubs doing "the hustle." Totally awesome.

Oh, and they sell stuff, too.

what's on now

I see that lots of people use their blogs to list what they are reading. For me, this is what I'm reading, this stuff on my monitor. Someone asks me a question and I search for it and read about it in order to tell them what I found. Then if I have a few minutes, I'll read some news.

But since I don't read actual books so much, here is what I have on my desk that I should look at:
Best American Comics 2006
Star Wars Dark Empire graphic novel
Library 2.0 A Guide to Participatory Library Service
Photoshop Classroom in a Book
Batman Year 100
(forgot this since it's at home) On the Wealth of Nations, O'Rourke, P. J.

and here's a CD I need to hear:
Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet

and these are the DVDs I just saw or am in the middle of watching:
Zigfield Follies
We Are Marshall
Slither
Monster Squad
Smallville, season 5