- 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]

Here’s the latest video from The Odd Couple.  Gnarls and Danger Mouse continue to put together some of the most progressive tunes from whatever-genre-you-might-consider-them.

I hope you’re as captivated by this video as I was.

If you want to kill an hour AND hone your lit snobbery, check out 3M’s list of the 1001 works of fiction you must read.

Naturally my “want to read” list outpaces my “have read” list (at least in intellectual value), and I did give up once I reached the 1700s (because really, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion does not sound like bedside reading), but here are my results:

Have Read (thanks due largely to Murphy’s 20th century fiction course):

Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

Atonement – Ian McEwan

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Pastoralia – George Saunders

Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee

Whatever – Michel Houellebecq

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

White Noise – Don DeLillo

The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor  

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford (ugh!) 

The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

A Room With a View – E.M. Forster

Want to read (thanks largely to name recognition, bookshelf envy and the Brookline Booksmith’s Bmail):

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

Youth – J.M. Coetzee

Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow

Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Trial – Franz Kafka (fro?)

V. – Thomas Pynchon

Rabbit, Run – John Updike

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (bought, not yet read)

The End of the Affair – Graham Greene (bought, not yet read)

[image of the best wire ever (sent at 6 a.m.!) from Brookline Booksmith's used book cellar find-of-the-week archive]

A lot of YouTube videos are available in HD format (better if your computer supports it), but it will render a pseudo-HD look if you click the ‘view in high quality’ link. Here a few of my picks:

Read more about it here.

More interestingly he said he’s going to “ad lib” his speech, saying:

“Never read a prepared speech unless you’re really good at it; for a genuine perspective on corporate life, read Dilbert; and brevity is the soul of wit.”

I think if you’re able to set up a web server that receives more than 9 billion page views per month (56th in the world) with 24 employees…you’re allowed to just throw together any old speech off the top of your head.

Update: If your world headquarters looks like this even though you serve > 450 cities in 50 countries you’re allowed to ad lib the speech.

- Collective beer snob gasp: Obama drinks PBR

- In scientific studies relevant to my life, Scientific American asks, “Can you catch up on lost sleep?” But it sounds like I’m screwed, seeing as my Dad is a robot and requires two hours of sleep and a bran muffin to operate:

Sleep researchers believe that genes—although the precise ones have yet to be discovered—determine our individual sleeping patterns.

- Myanmar’s junta resisted large-scale aid efforts at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Ridiculous.

- Susan Edgerley, Assistant Managing Editor of the New York Times, has been answering questions about the evolution of journalism. Interesting:

Journalists who used to worry about one deadline a day now have a deadline every minute. They are telling stories not only through words and pictures but also through audio and video and interactive maps and graphics.

- Zeer is the Yelp of food products. From a review of Bird’s Eye Baby Peas:

I will never go “adult” peas again.

- 3G iPhone: looks like June 15 - July 12.

- Facebook is up for redesign. Expect another “please love me” apology letter from Marky Mark when it reports what color your underwear is.

I’ll let the video speak for itself - its from Radiohead’s first US show this tour Monday night.

[photo of Ryan Adams at home by Neal Casal via dradamsfilms.com]

- Former President Carter to be tried for peace crimes [The Onion]

- The new Apple store on Boylston Street in Boston may (or may not) be the biggest yet. [Lifehacker]

- Tomorrow, John McCain will likely be so old “that his skin won’t work anymore.” This after a reference to the League of Nations. Thanks to my junior year of high school, I didn’t even need Wonkette’s explanation.

- The pope will start texting people! Gizmodo reports:

[The Pope] saw on the local news that people use “cellular phones” to send “text messages,” so he decided to get on board with this hip and confusing new fad. Now young people can expect to receive texts such as “hey how r u its d pope believe in jesus plz.”

Digging this song from Tegan and Sara. I love the bald guy on keys just feeling it at 1:03 in. 

Download: Tegan and Sara - My Number

Also, this:

And, finally, exhibit A why a trip to trusty old Supercuts is necessary:

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.