"All the single ladies, All the single ladies."

Ok, Beyonce.

Seriously. Please, sit down for a second and listen to what I'm about to say. Get your producers in here. They need to hear this, too.

The fact that a song gets stuck in your head all day long doesn't mean it's a good song. Ask anyone who's ever heard that "song that never eeeeeends" from Lamb Chop's Playalong.

Therefore, when I'm walking around, unable to get "If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" out of my head, I don't think you're a talented performer or a savvy marketer. All I think of is that I'd love to get that song out of my head without using a claw hammer to do so.

Furthermore, that song has usurped "Bombs Over Baghdad" as the top of the list of songs that white people like, but have no idea how to dance to. If we can't step-touch, we're basically lost. I'm sure people go nuts when that song comes on at a club or what-have-you, but roughly thirty confused, Caucasian seconds later, they're standing in a confused circle, moving erratically to syncopation their hips can't comprehend.

(Which leads me to another topic: White people insisting on standing in a circle on the dancefloor. It happens at every wedding where there's a DJ, and it never fails. I blame some sort of pagan-druid instinct in our WASPy reptile brain.... but I digress....)

So. In short, Beyonce, et. al., that song is annoying. And not in a good way.

Thanks for your time. You're really pretty and have a nice voice.

State of the New Year.

'ello, all.

It's been a bit. It's 2009 now. I'm not sure why we I'm not writing this from Low Earth Orbit, petting my robot dinosaur, but oh well. I guess the future isn't the future.

Then again, we also haven't had to fend off any zombie apocolypses, either, so take the good with the bad, I suppose.

What's new? Well, the above image is of an igloo that used to be my car. Its transmission decided to take a break before Christmas, so now it's just a tidy little curb ornament. That's useful, however, because it serves as an awesome snow collector. We're getting pounded here, people.

Pounded.

Christmas was great. So was New Years. My Grown Man brothers and I bought each other toys. Good toys. Remote controlled helicopters. Transformers Mr Potato Head. Belt-fed Nerf guns that fire 3 darts per second.

I guess it is the future.

I got to spend some time with the lovely Jen. We went up to the mountains for a bit. All great stuff. 2009 is fairly solid so far.

What's next? This week, I have a deadline, am participating in a mock trial, and am performing at Sketchfest. That's all by Thursday. Yowzers.

More on all that later. Here's a cool little random thing. I heard about this on an old This American Life on NPR. Back in the late '90s, a couple of artists (Komar and Melamid) hired a market research firm to find out what people wanted to see in a painting. They did this in several countries, and below you can see what they produced for the US, based entirely on poll data.

A blue-hued landscape with mountains, deer, a family, and George Washington.
You can see the most and least favorite paintings for all the countries here:
http://www.diacenter.org/km/painting.html

If you want to hear the episode, I recommend subscribing to the This American Life podcast.

Subscribe to Radiolab too. And The Splendid Table. And Filmspotting.