Dept. of Unexpected Birthday Wishes

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So, I’m sitting here minding my own, and my phone rings.

It’s someone I was dear friends with (a vanishingly small number of you will care, but: Paul McMullan) in like elementary and middle school, and still friendly with in high school (different circles by then), but I haven’t seen in 20 years. He was driving to work this morning, and when the radio DJ said something about it being “Friday, March 13,” it clicked in his head that it was my birthday. So he called his mother, who called my mother, and in an hour or two he had my cell number, and twenty minutes ago he called me to say “hey, happy birthday, and by the way how’d the last 20 years go for you?”

That’s kind of cool.

Dept. of Good News/Bad News

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The shockingly good hotel just keeps getting, at least theoretically, better. This time around it’s a panel of connectors for the TV that allow guests to plug their own equipment into it, drastically increasing its utility. A simple switchbox includes buses with component video + audio; VGI, HDMI, and mini-plug audio; or RCA/composite video with mini audio or RCA audio.

Since I travel with a mini-to-mini cable (to plug my iPod into the rental car), all I lacked was a monitor cable to run the TV shows on my laptop through the big nice plasma, so I went around the corner to Best Buy.

Unfortunately, neither I nor the (admittedly nontechie) hotel guy could make it work. Something’s askew; it’s possible my new cable is bad, but we lack access to other equipment (and motivation) to chase this down. Oh well. The thought counts for a lot; I’ve never seen another hotel even make gestures in the direction of this kind of technical accommodation, so they definitely get an A for effort even if it won’t quite work this time.

Dept. of Cautious Optimism

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I’m in a brand-new hotel chain this time: a Hyatt Place, which I take it is their foray into the “low-frills business traveller” market.

Holy Crap. It’s amazing. Pix to follow, but even the checkin process is off the hook. There’s a quick bar in the lobby — pick up wrapped sandwiches, salads, bottled drinks, whatever — plus 24×7 food service (with a limited menu, but still).

The rooms themselves are the real prize, though. Lots of these chains work towards a “suite” feel, designed to cater to an extended stay, but this is the first time I’ve seen it really work. There’s a nice and comfortable couch with an ottoman, a real desk, and a wet-bar in the “living room”, and then a 42″ plasma tv on a pivot that can entertain either that area or the bedroom area.

I’m completely stunned. Even the house Chardonnay is nice. Kansas City just got a whole lot nicer.

Dept. of Customer Service

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Today, my ten-month-old Eagle Creek bag broke today, while packing. The topside strap broke completely loose, which drastically reduces the utility of the bag. Seriously, 10 months; WTF?

So I called them. Immediately. As in, from the airport while waiting to board. Their solution was, of course, “ship it to us and we’ll fix it for free.” My problem with this? I’m traveling pretty much constantly right now, and can’t do without the bag for the foreseeable future.

Shockingly, after only two escalations — once into the warranty department, and again to the manager thereof — they simply agreed. They’re sending me another bag (different color, but who cares?) that will be waiting for me at home when I get back on Friday; I’ll be sending them my bag once I get the new one.

I’m shocked — shocked — that this was so easy. I was momentarily really annoyed at the failure so quickly, but then again so were they; their willingness to work with me to create a solution that worked for me is definitely deserving of praise.

(Of course, proof is in the pudding; we’ll see if goes off this easily, but as of now I’m pretty confident.)

Reading

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My last two:

Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. More or less “meh.” It’s a sprawling mess of a novel with some nice parts, but virtually none of the charm of his earlier work I’ve read (As She Crawled Across The Table, Gun, with Occasional Music, and the beautiful Motherless Brooklyn). Unlike Lethem’s previous efforts, this one’s a coming-of-age story about a thinly disguised Lethem proxy growing up in Brooklyn in the 60s and 70s, and then facing adulthood (there is, of course, a long German word for the form: Bildungsroman). Our hero, Dylan Ebdus, is one of the only white kids in his school (“Not his grade; his whole school,” his mother brags) in the years well before Park Slope became a fashionable neighborhood. Dylan’s best friend is the improbably named Mingus Rude, son of a once-famous R&B singer, whose life takes a very different turn from Dylan’s (obviously).

My personal literary Mendoza line is whether or not I wish I’d used the time reading a book to read something else, and Fortress passes that test, but just barely. Lethem is writing a combo love letter to the Brooklyn of his childhood, to the Manhattan of the 70s, to music (punk and CBGB figure into it, briefly, and there’s a long arc about Rude’s father and early R&B), and most obviously to comic books (though, amusingly, young Dylan is far more into Marvel than DC). His proximity to the material perhaps made him less able to tell what was working and what wasn’t (and this is a man who made SF blended with noir work in the aforementioned Gun, which featured a gun-toting kangaroo as a mob enforcer), and so his focus wavers by halfway through the book. The earlier chapters are much more well-crafted than the novel’s final segments, and the somewhat halfassed magical realism elements fall kind of flat and never enjoy the verve of his prior genre-bending experiments.

Currently Reading: The Looming Tower, about the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and the rise of Al Qaeda. It’s actually very, very compelling, and reads more like a long-form piece of journalism than a book, if that makes any sense. The author, Lawrence Wright, won a Pulitzer for it; I recommend it without reservation if you’re at all curious how we got here. (Hint: It kinda starts with a dickhead named Qutb.)

Told you.

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NYT:

The secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants.

[…]

The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

Some of the positions had previously become known from statements of Bush administration officials in response to court challenges and Congressional inquiries. But taken together, the opinions disclosed Monday were the clearest illustration to date of the broad definition of presidential power approved by government lawyers in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In other words, preparation for a police state. The author of many of the memoranda was, of course, John Yoo, who also opined that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully” and that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

Dept. of People Being Stupid

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The Right side of the Net is all hot-and-bothered about the idea of raising income tax on incomes over $250K, and it’s brought out the wingnut John Galt contingent. Sadly, none of them seem to actually understand how income taxes work in this country, given how many seem to be cypherin’ out ways to make exactly $249,999 in 2009. MediaMatters, as always, is spot on:

ABC News reports on “upper-income taxpayers” who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.

According to ABC, one attorney “plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.” According to the attorney: “We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00.” ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.

This is stunningly wrong.

The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate. If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.

But that isn’t actually how income tax works.

In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.

It’s like nobody is even capable of research anymore.

Update: Link fixed.

Dept. of My Friends Rocking Hard

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Catastrophic Theater is featured in the Chronicle today in a story wherein they make a few truly excellent announcements about the season and year ahead, the biggest of which Heathen Central has been extremely excited about for a few months now:

  • Bluefinger, a world-premiere rock-opera to be created in collaboration with Charles Thompson — aka Black Francis, best known as front man for the influential alternative-rock group Pixies — to begin workshops in December for a premiere here in early 2010.

But that’s not all; in addition, new work with Tony Barilla’s coming, also a production of another Lisa D’Amour play this fall, and of course another Tamarie show before terribly long.

Congrats to Jason, Tam, and the whole Catastrophic family.

Dept of Sony F*cking Me

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So, the Heathen Central DVD deck has been misbehaving, mostly by not being able to play some less-than-pristine disks that play fine in other places.

We’ve not been convinced that Bluray is going to take off, so we went shopping for an upconverting DVD deck; the good news is that those are cheap. For $80, we picked up a Sony (dvp-ns77h) at Fry’s not long ago, but, foolishly, I didn’t test it thoroughly once we got it home.

Anyway, the primary appeal of this minor upgrade was “will play more disks,” but we were also pleased about the possibility of cable reduction; the deck we were using had 3-wire component video cables plus a coaxial digital audio cable, but the new one would, theoretically, run all that goodness over HDMI.

Well, stereo works fine. But for some reason the Sony and Yamaha won’t play nice with surround data over HDMI. Lovely. So, how about if I enable the digital out and use HDMI for video only (and therefore enjoy the best part of the video upconversion)?

Uh, no. With HDMI plugged in, I can’t get the Sony to spit out Dolby Digital signals. Unplug it, and we’re fine. So, back to 4 cables for the DVD, dammit.

Grrrr. Grrrr. Grrrr.

How We Know We’re In The Future

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This afternoon, I’m doing a little work on my laptop (a MacBook Pro), catching up on email and taking care of some software testing. Since we do Microsoft software, the testing is taking place inside a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine that’s running, among other things IIS and SQL Server 2005.

At the same time, the laptop is also ripping a CD (the Oxford American’s annual music issue just showed up) and downloading a couple TV shows via BitTorrent that I’ll watch on my trip this week — something I wouldn’t have to do if I could just copy the damn things from my Tivo, but whatever. Also, because it’s the sort of thing that happens from time to time, my TimeMachine backup is running.

How is the futurey? I was just re-installing a database tool on the Windows VM side and got annoyed that the computer wasn’t responding instantly.

Dept. of GAAAAAH

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Whoa.

Actually, it’s a sculpture. However, I’ve seen her work before — a collector in Houston has one of her pieces — and it’s actually more creepy in person.

Scenes from the Cookoff, 2009 Edition

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After several years off, Your Favorite Heathen are once again doing the Cookoff. We realized with no small amount of shock that we haven’t done it since the rail opened or Reliant was in place, so in many ways it’s a whole different thing. The train makes it RULE, though; parking is no longer an issue at all.

Wednesday
Uneventful; it always is. It’s quiet, with few folks around since many of the corporate tents — and no small number of the private ones — have no event scheduled for that night. A few, like Cold River, do a sponsor-only party on Wednesday, and we never miss it — it may be the best steak we get all year. We made an error when, having just missed a train, we elected to drive down — only to discover parking was a nightmare even on the least-populated night since so many lots weren’t even open yet. Oops. We did, however, notice that the tent’s new position is:
  • No longer next door to another very loud private tent;
  • Pleasantly close to the main stage; and
  • Immediately adjacent to a booth selling, among other things, chocolate covered cheesecake on a stick.
Make of this what you will. We ate a lot, drank a little, and were home by 10 or 1030, and behaved well enough that I was back at my desk by 0630 on Thursday.
Thursday
A little bit louder now, to coin a phrase; this time it was the Heathens plus the betrothed pair of Little Miss Redhead and the Dancin’ Teachin’ Drama Machine (HeatheNames subject to adjustment later). After a much smoother trip down — the train drops you off maybe half a mile from the tent, and the walk is through the carnival — we were among the first in line for the food, which was a lucky thing as we were all four starving. Well fed, we went a-wandering to check out the lay of the land; on Wednesday, we’d noticed a seriously hoppin’ party in the northwest corner, but couldn’t see whose tent it was, so we went up to see who they were. Aha. Corporate: It’s for Cazadores, Bacardi’s premium tequila, and the “tent” is only a “tent” in the loosest possible sense. It’s got a faux-adobe front, for crying out loud, though it’s certainly the only time I’ve seen a pseudo-traditional hacienda-type tent with a velvet rope. Recession or no, the rum people were definitely pulling out all the stops. We kept it low key — as all loyal Heathen understand, pacing is vitally important in four-day party situations — but the official log does contain a few entries of note:
  • Choice quote: “I’ll bet the Amish look great naked.” (LMR)
  • Even at the Cookoff, nobody loves Centerpoint; their (large) tent was nearly devoid of people.
  • Is it more “BBQ Burning Man” or “BBQ Ren Faire?” Hard to say.
  • Frankly, as an eighties cover band, you’re probably doing it wrong if you think you can do justice to both Loverboy *and* the Cure. Just saying.

Stay tuned for Friday and Saturday recaps as they become available.

Um, what?

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Filling out a (Federal) form for a background check related to a new project at work, I was asked for my height. Do you see anything unusual about the dialog options below?

how tall am I.png

Dept. of Iconic Overload

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Does a local blogger really need this many icons at the bottom of every post?

iconorama.png

I’ve been online since before there WERE browsers, and consider myself pretty clueful, but I’ve got no friggin’ idea what most of those are even for. Considering that most readers are less sophisticated than I am, I wonder at the utility.

Can someone…

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…please point me to an example of Forrester, Gartner, or any of those analyst houses having been at all consistently prescient about anything? I don’t mean “did one guy say something that came true;” I’m sure that, with enough analysts typing enough papers, they’ve all come up with one or two things ahead of the curve. Big deal. Value would lie in a wheat:chaff ratio greater than “1”, and I’m willing to bet nobody’s got one.

Seriously, these whitepaper factories seem to exist primarily to do logrolling with each other, or to extract money from muzzy-headed biz-dev types whose first thought in encountering any new technology is “how can I destroy the communication value of this thing by INVADING IT WITH MARKETING NOISE?”

Eleventy Million kinds of Cool

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Zoe Keating:

Via Wil Wheaton, who explains a bit that makes the track above even cooler:

See that MacBook next to her? She uses that to sample herself several times to build a rhythm, and then she plays over it, like a one-woman string quartet. Or quintet. Or awesometet. I didn’t realize this the first time I heard her; I just thought her music was haunting and beautiful, but once I knew what she was doing, I was awestruck. In fact, knowing how she does it, I defy you to listen to it again and keep your jaw off the floor.

We here at Heathen Central are longtime fans of classical instrumentation in modern music; I once saw Rasputina (of which Keating is an alum) in a now-defunct bar in downtown Houston, and a really awesome modern original string quartet played at the Heathen Hitchin’. I’m glad to discover Keating; I suspect I’ll be hitting iTunes shortly to get some more. The piece above is “Tetrishead,” found on “One Cello x 16: Natoma,” $7.92 at iTunes.

Dept. of Things That Could Not Be More Awesome

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We are not making this up: In WWII, a Polish unit had a bear mascot — eventually “drafted” — that carried shells for them and, on occasion, fought Nazis. Said unit still exists, and its insignia now memorializes said bear (at right).

1AF398F4-0AA3-4277-992A-757018332BB0.jpg

On duty, Voytek was trained to carry cases of ammunition and mortar shells down the line to waiting artillery, each one weighing hundreds of pounds. On one occasion, he wandered into an empty shower stall and surprised an Arabic spy who had been listening in on top secret information. The spy quickly surrendered and immediately confessed to all of his crimes, probably because he was smart enough to realize that any military unit possessing Anti-Espionage Bears are likely going to be on the winning side of the war.

After the war, he retired to a zoo in Edinburgh, where he was frequently visited by his former comrades. He died in 1963.

(The first link is a random blog, but he’s also in Wikipedia, for crying out loud.)

Why Privatizing Prisons is a BAD Idea

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Two Pennsylvania judges are now going to prison for taking in excess of two million dollars in kickbacks over a five year period in exchange for increasing the headcount at private juvenile facilities.

Ciavarella, 58, along with Conahan, 56, corruptly and fraudulently “created the potential for an increased number of juvenile offenders to be sent to juvenile detention facilities,” federal court documents alleged. Children would be placed in private detention centers, under contract with the court, to increase the head count. In exchange, the two judges would receive kickbacks.

The Juvenile Law Center said it plans to file a class-action lawsuit this week representing what they say are victims of corruption. Juvenile Law Center attorneys cite a few examples of harsh penalties Judge Ciavarella meted out for relatively petty offenses:

  • Ciavarvella sent 15-year-old Hillary Transue to a wilderness camp for mocking an assistant principal on a MySpace page. (Emph. added)

  • He whisked 13-year-old Shane Bly, who was accused of trespassing in a vacant building, from his parents and confined him in a boot camp for two weekends.

Dept. of Literary Observances

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Watchmencovers.pngWatchmen was a product of its time — by which I mean full of mid-80s, duck-and-cover era of superpower brinksmanship.

When I read it again in the mid-90s, it seemed dated, and delightfully so. The Wall was gone. The Russians were our friends. Nuclear annihilation wasn’t on the table, everything was rosy, and the pessimism of Moore’s text seemed like a bad dream remembered years later.

I’m reading it again now, in advance of the film. I’m sad to say it doesn’t seem so dated anymore.

Yes we’re gonna have a wingding / A summer smoker underground

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Now playing on Heathen Radio: The Nightfly, by Donald Fagen, largely because of this excellent retrospective on its place in popular music (via Andrea, at Facebook). Check it out, unless you are — like certain wives of mine — allergic to the axis of Fagen/Becker.

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be A.O.K.

Dept. of Movies We Need to See

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Some years ago, I had a strange dream wherein I was living in a Cicely, Alaska, type town in the middle of the northwestern wilderness, and part of the quirky charm of the area was the intelligent moose population — but part of the tension of the dream was that, unbeknownst to the population at large, the moose were under predation by some vampiric influences, resulting in a near-complete conversion of the moose population from “herbivore” to “blood-drinker.”

Yeah. No idea.

Anyway, a discussion of this dream later made me realize that while vampiric moose are funny, the whole idea of a weremoose was enough to send me into beverage-spewing hysterics, and indeed is making me giggle even as I type this. Which is why seeing this prop over at Io9 makes me want to see this movie so very much.

The film — Black Sheep — centers on a young man with a horrible phobia of sheep returning to his ancestral New Zealand ranch to sell his share to his brother. Unbeknownst to our hero, the black-hearted brother has been experimenting on the sheep, turning the docile little buggars into bloodthirsty carnivores whose bite — you guessed it! — turns humans into bloodthirsty were-sheep. Madcap hilarity must, of course, ensue.

I Am Not Making This Up.

Who’s with me?

Darn. And also Cool!

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Cafe Montrose never reopened after Ike, which is irritating and sad — it was a great neighborhood joint for a quick bite or a resplendent feast. I’ll miss it.

But in its place, we’re getting a cured-meat-and-wine-bar (“Vinoteca Poscol”) from Marco Wiles, he of Da Marco and Dolce Vita, which could be a lovely thing.

“Buh-bye, Dubai”

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This is brilliant; check it out:

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.

Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.

The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolf or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.

Gahhh.

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So, I’m trying to find a good online running log/community site/etc. There are several, mostly of them I’ve linked here before. The one I hear good things about in terms of community is RunningAhead.com; the one with the most Google-juice is MapMyRun.com, a division of MapMyFitness, apparently.

Now, so, the features I want are:

  • Easy logging. Make it simple for me to enter a new running/walking event.
  • Easy GPS integration. Ideally, I just plug it in and say “upload” and the event get tagged on my calendar, potentially even without any other metadata. (But I should be able to add metadata like “crappy run” or “raining” or “had cramp” later.)
  • Decent community forums & such.
  • Open access to data, so I can pull it out on my own via (ideally) a RESTful API or somesuch.
  • Facebook integration (which is actually an outgrowth of the previous item).

And when I talk about data integration in the log — i.e., from the GPS — what I want is:

  • Date of run
  • Time of day for start and stop
  • Duration of run
  • Distance of run
  • Average pace
  • “Split” times for each mile, i.e. time to mile X and pace for mile X

Everyone seems to be mad for RunningAhead, but it’s a labor of love from ONE GUY who appears to be absolutely allergic to code he didn’t write. Even the FORUM at RA is homegrown, which makes precisely zero sense, and he’s making noises about a 100% custom GPS integration solution (i.e., instead of utilizing the Garmin plugin that’s FREE and available NOW). Consequently, people have been asking for features for literally YEARS at RA — like GPS integration and data publishing/API/Facebook/Blog support — that are all coming “real soon now” and which may never see the light of day.

So, there’s that.

The other critter, MMR, is only marginally better. It supports the Garmin, and data flows in pretty easily, but it’s doctrinaire and rigid about some data I don’t care about (type of run, description of run). I’d rather it just sucked the data in and put it on the calendar automatically. Further, it doesn’t seem to gather splits data at all, focussing instead on the route, the time, and the average pace. That’s cool, but it’s incomplete.

Also, and this is the real kicker, the MMR site is FUGLY. It’s chock full of ads and would give any usability expert absolute HIVES. It’s poorly coded, poorly laid out, and fails to retain preferences or settings with any reliability (relying on cookies instead of internal profile data, for example).

So near as I can tell, they all suck, and nobody’s doing what I want, which is annoying. Heathen Nation, prove me wrong, would you?

(I’m also kind of afraid I’m not really getting all my data into an open format right now. The Garmin desktop is hokey and proprietary, but I can see splits there. Ascent will also show them. What I really want is an online tool like Ascent, and I’d even pay for it, but I’m not even sure it exists.)

Run Run Run Run Run

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A good one today: 5.01 in 1:01, average pace 12:18, and there was no walking after I started running after a two-block warmup. And — get this — my mile times got faster as I went: 12:50; 12:27; 12:31; 11:55; and a personal best 11:44 on the fifth mile after bargaining with myself for 2 miles about when I was going to take a walking break. (Turns out, the answer was “after the Garmin says I’ve gone five miles.”)

The kids demand a followup

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Fellow Malleteer AJ (the tall black dude, not the short white girl) commented on the prior post, demanding I provide some NEW music I found equally compelling.

Sad to say, of course, but he’ll learn soon enough that music you encounter after 30 tends not to be as personally meaningful as the stuff you found before 30, and that’s reflected in the lone 21st century entry on the prior list (Radiohead’s Amnesiac). I’ll give it a swing, though.

The rules change a little: I’m going to pick records not that have lodged in my personal history as irrevocably as the other list, since this isn’t yet knowable. Instead, I’m going to give my best guess for 20 (or so) records I think I’ll still be listening to in 20 years, and I’m going to do my best to avoid any overlap artist-wise with the prior list (so, Radiohead’s already represented, e.g.; re-including U2 was unavoidable, however).

  1. Lonelyland, Bob Schneider, 2000
  2. Post-War, M. Ward, 2006
  3. Stories from the City, Stories from Sea, PJ Harvey, 2000
  4. Transcendental Blues, Steve Earle, 2000
  5. Essence, Lucinda Williams, 2001
  6. Big Boi & Dre Present Outkast, Outkast, 2001
  7. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips, 2002
  8. Blacklisted, Neko Case, 2002 (tie: also, Fox Confessor Bring the Flood, 2006)
  9. Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, Foo Fighters, 2007
  10. Elephant, The White Stripes, 2003
  11. Funeral, The Arcade Fire, 2004
  12. A Ghost is Born, Wilco, 2004
  13. A Tale of God’s Will, Terence Blanchard, 2007
  14. Z, My Morning Jacket, 2005
  15. Medulla, Bjork, 2004
  16. The Rising, Bruce Springsteen, 2002
  17. Sea Change, Beck, 2002
  18. Scar, Joe Henry, 2001
  19. O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, Various artists, 2000
  20. All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2, 2000
  21. Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam, 2006
  22. Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain, Sparklehorse, 2006
  23. Hardwire Healing, The Dexateens, 2007
  24. Strays Don’t Sleep, Strays Don’t Sleep, 2005
  25. The Shepherd’s Dog, Iron & Wine, 2007

Happy Now?