I must admit, I lied. I told you I wasn’t going to get an iPhone 3G. I kicked and screamed and cried about AT&T’s price gouging on the device, and bemoaned the lack of “new” features just because I have a blog and therefore am entitled to a little whining. 

But thanks to the miracle of eBay and a little common-sense concept disguised in fancy economist jargon called profit margins, I am the proud owner of the aerodynamically organ-like 3G. 

Like brothers on a hotel bed, except one of them is going to live with some lady in Canada.

If you are a current owner (“early adopter”), you might want to think about selling yours on eBay. The bubbly concierge at the Boylston Street store told me that prices are only going to increase on used original iPhones, but that was before anyone figured out how to unlock the 3G. 

Do you need an iPhone 3G? No way. The 2.0 software update should’ve made your old iPhone kick some serious ass. How cool is Remote, or Urbanspoon, or the program that turns your eye into a myriad of shapes when you hold it up to the camera? In fact, the 3G really doesn’t improve anything — except voice clarity. The people I call can actually understand what I’m saying, I get reception in essential places like my apartment in Boston, and I needn’t worry about the occasional gust of wind on Beacon Hill killing the mood. Still – if you can sell an original iPhone, get twice the amount of cash required to by a new one, and can stomach AT&T’s ridiculous plans for data devices, then I say divide and conquer. 

As of this writing, 8gb unlocked iPhones from the first generation are selling for nearly $500 on eBay. $500 for a year old product! I have one of these in my basement in Delaware. Think it’s worth anything?

- AT&T’s latest ad shows that they think warrantless wiretapping is funny. From Consumerist:

According to AT&T, Ms. Suspicious “has nothing to hide,” so she certainly won’t mind when AT&T and their traitorous telecom buddies trash the Constitution and violate her right to privacy!

- Jay-Z opens up his headlining set at Glastonbury with Oasis’s Wonderwall following comments from Noel Gallagher that hip hop “doesn’t belong” at the festival. Buuuuuuuurn.

- Starbucks is closing 600 stores; laying off 12,000. Hopefully my former location isn’t one of them (tear). [NYT]

- Where the hell is Matt? is not my latest Where’s Waldo attempt, but something better:

Matthew Harding spent 14 months visiting 42 countries in order to produce “Where the Hell is Matt?”, a four-and-a-half minute video featuring Harding (and anyone else he could rope into it) doing an incredibly silly, high-energy dance in some of the most breathtaking scenery around the world. This may be the best four minutes and twenty-eight seconds of your week.

Video and more on Boing Boing.

- LeRoi Moore, saxophonist from the Dave Matthews Band, was injured in an ATV accident on his farm in Virginia on Monday. He was initially listed as in serious condition at a Virginia hospital, but has since been upgraded to fair. Jeff Coffin, the double-sax playing troubadour from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones will fill in indefinitely while LeRoi recoops. This marks the first time since 1993 that the band has performed a tour without one of the five founding members. Looking forward to seeing you back, Roi! Send eCards via the band’s site.

- Best of Craigslist: I have a dead moose (earlier: I am RICH and I want to spend it on you tonight)

- Geek out with these cool screenshots of iPhone 2.0 and iTunes 7.7.

I’ve probably spent close to a year’s wages on coffee and pastries in my short life. And I’ve had my share of shitty coffee and dried out, day-old pastries. Dunkin’ Donuts sells lawnmower swill mistaken by a majority of New Englanders as “coffee,” but the pastries do well in a pinch. So nothing is more confounding to me than the fact that Dunkin’ Donuts’ otherwise fresh, moist and (in general) satisfying muffins are unbelieveably difficult to eat.

Exhibit A, muffin before attempted consumption:

Now, imagine my frustration when, after removing just the wrapper and taking one quadrant of the top of the muffin in my hands, the muffin vomitted its insides out in a violent flinging of cranberry and orange undercooked dough:

This disaster after one bite. Just one! The remaining five or six “bites” consisted mainly of me assembling a food bolus in my hand out of the moist crumbs, chewing through the doughy ball, and angrily wiping my greasy hands on my desk chair.

I never thought the word ‘bolus’ and ‘muffin’ would be uttered in reference to a transaction happening outside of the body, but you gotta do what you gotta do if you want to enjoy more than 35% of your $1.73 muffin.

Am I the only one who must suffer this fate? Does the muffin intentionally implode because I despise the creator’s coffee? If you know how to eat these things in peace, please, for the love of god, let me know.

Friday Mashup, or This rain is messing with my karma

 - In this week’s Tears in Heaven moment, Boston’s The Paradise Lounge, little brother to the beloved Paradise Rock Club, has closed and will be turned into an “irishoid” bar. This is regrettable. I hate shipping over to Cambridge to see small, small acts, and The Paradise Lounge had the right ratio of grime-to-charm for me. Check out my videos of Howie Day performing there about a month ago.

- Willpower is like a tank of gas: once you use it to go one place, you can’t go another. This according to a pseudo-op ed in this week’s New York Times. This is really interesting and perhaps a good thing to remember as we all face uphill battles, “…people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task. ” New York Times via kottke.

 - Yikes. Cell phones might be worse than cigarettes.

- Yikes. Diet Coke might be worse than cell phones.

- All hail. Apple is the #1 music retailer. Take that, FYE. Not that they were ever in the running. Speaking of, does anyone remember The Wall and their CD return guarantee? Pretty sure that’s why that place collapsed. Update: apparently not. The agency who conducted the study has recinded the results, and Ars Technica, a fantastic technology blog, was asked to remove their leaked internal Apple documents regarding the study. File under: shady.

- Apparently, a 3G iPhone is coming sooner than I thought, or else I wouldn’t have bought one, oh, about a month ago. Thanks, Apple! I will be upgrading.

- Ape-ricot or app-ricot? This was a debate I had with my friends Will and Pete during sophomore year of college. Back then, we didn’t have Forvo, which has the goal of one day offering correct pronunciations for every word in the world. An ambitious quest. Of course, they don’t have apricot. Yes – I win! I’m going to add it as ape-ricot. [thanks, Lifehacker]

- The folks over at uber-Boston blog/community b0st0n.livejournal.com have abbreviated the Globe’s new Food & Arts section “Farts.” Okay, its funny because I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old.

- The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog wondered, “Why was Rachel Ray at SXSW?” and questions her “indie rocker” status.

[image thanks to despair.com]

A tie:

and….

Yeah!

Researchers at CIT and Stanford have found that people enjoy the same wine more if they believe it’s more expensive. So does that mean that if Trader Joe’s three-buck-chuck was actually $15, I’d like it more? Because three-buck-chuck is pretty damn good as-is.

 We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks.

Further proof that all you need is a good $6 bottle of cab.  

Original post on the venerable Consumerist