RIP – Leroi Moore

#34 – Dave Matthews Band

Things for Wednesday

- Roy Peter Clark teaches you about the serial comma. Read it and learn, friends and scribes.

- It annoys me that I have missed the Newport Folk Festival four years in a row. I’m going next year, damnit! Stereogum has pictures.

- Best iPhone app: I am rich. It costs $999.99, and doesn’t do anything but display a glowing red ruby. Genius.

- Today’s horrifyingly stupid product: Eyelid jewelery! Yes folks, now you too can dangle miscellaneous things from your contact lenses.

- Hey hipsters: How about this for vintage? A pair of Levi’s from the 1890s.

- Skip business school and earn the “personal MBA” by reading the books on Josh Kaufman’s 77 best list. Sweet. Seems I’m already on that track. Oh wait, Pitchfork’s News and Iris Murdoch aren’t on Kaufman’s list?

- Horrifying chart showing how much Americans have changed the daily diet since 1970. [NYT via kottke]

- Cool music video from Bat for Lashes [thanks, mikefro]

- Perfect performance of Blue Ridge Mountains by Fleet Foxes, if you can stand Letterman’s terrible introduction:

Considering the inconsiderate

Yesterday I had a bizarre altercation on Boston’s Green Line. Given that they have no real standard for boarding people since introducing the CharlieCard two years ago, I walked in through one of the doors and selected a nice, sunsoaked seat in the rear of the train.

Of course, two minutes after all the doors closed the siren from Revere operating the train demanded that I come forward and tap my card to prove I’m an upstanding citizen, yada yada.

So I do this, leaving my leather messenger bag on the seat. I beam a tellingly apologetic smile at the conductor, who responds with a cough that sounds like motor oil mixed with Carlton 100s, and mosey on back to my warm spot in the sun.

Upon returning, I watch a girl my age throw my messenger back to the floor and plop down right where I was sitting. She gave me a look that said nothing and everything all at once: “What?,” simultaneously installing her headphones as I stood next to her, suited and lightly perspiring.

So the lesson here is: one idle messenger bag does not a person’s seat make, at least if you live along Beacon Street.