- 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:

I’m on vacation in Florida and will return shortly. Here I am outside of the nauseating Star Tours ride in MGM:

About to hurl

- Thrillist sends you a daily email and tells you how to be cool, regardless of what city you live.

- New Death Cab video for “Cath…” One of four songs on the new album that are absolutely outstanding (the other three being Grapevine Fires, Bixby and No Sunlight).

- Blackberry etiquette reaches all time low for Boston rental agent:

Hi we can definetly set up a time for Saturday I just have a couple questions to see if I have any other listings that might work for you what is the maximum you guys can spend on rent what parts of town would you like to be in anything you can tell me about what your looking for would be very helpful thanks and I hope to hear back from you soon

- Sub Pop, the best record label around, turns 20 years old! I wish they would do another free iTunes sampler. Last year’s was superb, and Brooklyn Vegan linked us to their Single’s Club, but it’s $75, and my AT&T bill is too much to afford that. Damn.

- 25 well designed book covers. Cool. [EW via Kottke]

- Oobject is “…like a Billboard chart for gadgets”

- Google’s treading on Second Life’s territory with Lively, a new avatar based virtual world app due out later this year. [WSJ]

- Wind power guy T. Boone Pickens (who happens to have the best name I’ve ever seen) is using Facebook to drum up support for his interesting campaign.

- Mad Atoms wonders what will happen when the record store clerk – an iconic fixture in society – finally dies. Some potential replacements include sushi chefs or the “long haired asshole” at Cinefile.

- My Morning Jacket is going Ryan Adams on us (har har funny prolific musician joke har) by working on a follow up to Evil Urges a month or two after it came out. Nice.

Coming soon – these daily links are getting a little too disorganized for my OCD tastes, so all 5 of you that read this are going to start seeing a breakout of links between miscellany and music stuff. Don’t be alarmed.  

- 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 went on a brief hiatus to do things like earn my salary. I’m back now 

- What!? Ticketmaster is $750 million in debt! Serves you right you greedy bastards. But how does that happen? And why did you double my Bon Savants ticket price? Argh. [via Paste]

- Yum! A $30 TV dinner, available in New York. [NYTimes via Consumerist]

- In today’s glass half-full moment, a useless survey finds that 91% of Japan won’t be buying the new iPhone 3G when it hits their market later this summer. Sounds bad for Apple, except when you consider that 9% will, and that’s about 11 million people. [via Macrumors]

- Root beer is the new beer! [NYTimes]

- Interesting marketing campaign for laundry detergent. Send samples wrapped in a t-shirt, then instruct the recipient to wash the shirt to demonstrate stain removing power. Hope it actually works. [Frederik Samuel via Kottke]

- Devo is pissed at McDonald’s. And they are suing. [Pitchfork]

- Gawker surveys New York bloggers and media gurus to figure out how exactly to break into the media industry. This is New York specific but I think it applies to all “cool” jobs anymore:

“-Claim you’re an expert in “New Media.” No one knows what the fuck it is anyway.
-Don’t say “Web 2.0″
-Do say “I subscribe to [X] feeds…”

Sad that you have to BS about all these changing web platforms in order to seem “skilled.” Other good pointers and full text here.

- Download some free tracks from stellar Cambridge indies Passion Pit. The live show is great, as you can imagine.

I never thought I would have a Red Sox-related photo on this blog, but thankfully my first trip to Fenway was at least exciting. [Thanks, Boston Herald]

- Sure ordering food online in order to eat locally sounds counterintuitive, but as the New York Times reports, its a phenomenon that is actually twice as green as going to the grocery stand and buying locally.

- Quickly! Get your free Obama sticker from MoveOn.org now that he’s finally the presumptive nominee. (Yeck, look at that conflicting adverb-adjective combo).

- I made the Yelp Elite this morning. Hooray! More snobby reviews coming soon.

- Kottke has an interesting breakdown of the various per-hour costs of the habits of New Yorkers

- For all you pleated-pants wearing types, Sears will give you $75 if you buy $100 worth of Dockers. File under things that will bankrupt a national retail chain near you. [Consumerist]

- Berkeley institution Amoeba Music has some really excellent live performances archived on their site. My picks include: Beirut(Mount Wroclai – yes!), Tegan and Sara (check out The Con), and Tunng.

- My favorite new blog is Copyranter, a running critique of the foibles of advertisers. Potentially NSFW.

- Is it bad that all I took away from this article on being young and poor in New York was that I wanted rice and beans for dinner?

But there are smaller measures, no less ingenious, that round out the lifestyle. These young people sneak flasks of vodka into bars, flirt their way into clubs, sublet their walk-in closets, finagle their way into open-bar parties and put off haircuts until they visit their hometowns, even if those hometowns are thousands of miles away.

- GM will launch a “strategic review” of the Hummer brand. Hopefully they just issue an apology to all of America for offending all five senses with the H2. [UK's Telegraph]

[image of the beautiful and badass Ms. Jenny Lewis courtesy of Brooklynvegan. Check out the whole set.]

It’s telling that my happiness index is proportionately related to my consumption of iced coffee and whether or not the office is closing early today. Fortunately, both are positive.

- Awesome New Republic is back! I didn’t even know they broke up, but Stereogum has the scoop:

…around the time we broke up, we were starting to get into a lot of physical fights, beating and cutting each other up, throwing drums at heads, running over feet with trucks, forcibly vomiting on pedal boards…it got pretty ugly.

Sounds disturbing. Glad things are better. Check out Stereogum for a leaked track and some more details on the cleverly-named forthcoming album, Rational Geographic.

- Joe Biden shoots from the hip. That’s why I wish he hadn’t had to bow out of the race for the nomination:

… [Biden] chastised Republican nominee-to-be John McCain for his recent attempt to paint Barack Obama as a patsy by saying that Hamas and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega favored the Democrat.

“What the hell is that?” he says now, in obvious disgust.

[via a mediocre Boston Globe article]

 - Joan Acocella has a great essay in this week’s New Yorker on a physical sickness as close to being cured as the common cold: the hangover.

Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described … the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.

- Sorry, Apple TV. The Roku gets my blessing.

- Mike Fro wonders, why does Hulu advertise for big box stores, cruises and other shit that is irrelevant to their target demographic? Kmart was the recent misappropriator of ad dollars:

Again, they don’t understand their audience, do they really think that people with families (it was about buying outdoor play equipment for kids and family activities) are watching rated R movies on hulu??  I bet they won’t catch on for another year or so, until the lower people in the advertising departments of these  companies to get promotions.

Hopefully one day I’m one of the lower folks in Hulu’s advertising department

- Mental Floss has a neat running column, “The First Time News Was Fit To Print,” searching the NYT’s archives for major events in history. 

- Only Pitchfork would review a compilation CD for a charity and have something bad to say about it. I hope one of my mixes never makes its way to their hands: “Ye gads, man. It appears you’ve put a live Wilco track next to the downtempo dub of Dzihan and Kamien! Surely you don’t know how to make a mix CD!”

- Seen over the weekend: “Here lies burned James Otis.”

- A marital rating scale from 1939. I like the demerit: “Is a backseat driver.”

- Cool pictures from Sunday’s Obama rally in Portland, hosted by The Decemberists. [Pitchfork - okay, I'll critique them yet link to them twice in the same post]

- Wii Fit. Cool. [kottke]

- Maker’s Mark Bus Not Actually Pouring Whisky Shots [Bostonist]

- Coldplay’s video for Violet Hill:

- When I saw Colin Meloy play solo at the Paradise in 2006, he asked the audience to talk about their favorite item at Trader Joe’s while he tuned his beastly 12-string guitar. I think the consensus was Pirate’s Booty. Yelp is currently asking the same question.

 - I dug Malcom Gladwell’s article on innovation in last week’s New Yorker. So will you.

- Did you know that Decemberist John Moen was once the drummer for Elliott Smith and Stephen Malkmus and the Jinks? I didn’t. Did you know that he released a solo record on Tuesday? I didn’t. He’s recording under the name Perhapst.

- My photo doesn’t do justice to the ridiculousness that was the Apple Store opening on Boylston Street in Boston yesterday. For  better, click here to read about the opening and a dude who stayed up all night to be the first person in the store. [Boston Herald]