1. OK Go, “This Too Shall Pass.” In case you haven’t seen it.
   
2. School kids covering Phoenix’s “Lisztomania.”
   
3. Laura Stevenson and the Cans – “Gathering and Leaping.” Ed turned me on to this band, and I really love them. She has a pretty phenomenal voice, and more bands should use accordions. Their cover of “Wave of Mutilation” is also pretty solid.
   
4. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – “The Mighty Sparrow” (live on Fallon). I didn’t expect to like this album, but I did. Also, the last time I saw Ted Leo, he hit his head with a mic and bled for most of the set.
   
5. The National – “Terrible Love.” Ed beat me to this one too, but I’m excited for the new album and upcoming tour.
   

More potentially-related posts:

1. Musical shares.
2. Five for Friday, January 29.
3. 3. Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair

1. “Fatal Distraction” (Gene Weingarten, WaPo)
   “‘Death by hyperthermia’ is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall.”
2. “A Rake’s Progress: Marion Barry bares (almost) all” (Matt Labash, Weekly Standard)
   “Barry, now in his second postmayoral term as a councilman representing the city’s poorest ward, is these days something less than a political powerhouse, but my interest had recently been rekindled in the man universally known as one of the two or three finest crack-smoking politicians our nation has ever produced.”
3. Held by the Taliban (David Broder, NYT)
   “We reached a dry riverbed and the car stopped. ‘They’re going to kill us,’ Tahir whispered. ‘They’re going to kill us.’”
4. Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices (Sheri Fink, NYT Mag)
   “[I]nvestigators were surprised at the number of bodies in the makeshift morgue and were stunned when health care workers charged that a well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses had hastened the deaths of some patients by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs. Mortuary workers eventually carried 45 corpses from Memorial.”
5. The Man Who Crashed the World (Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair)
   “[N]early a year after perhaps the most sensational corporate collapse in the history of finance, a collapse that, without the intervention of the government, would have led to the bankruptcy of every major American financial institution, plus a lot of foreign ones, too, A.I.G.’s losses and the trades that led to them still haven’t been properly explained. How did they happen? Unlike, say, Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme, they don’t seem to have been raw theft. They may have been an outrageous departure from financial norms, but, if so, why hasn’t anyone in the place been charged with a crime?”

All the articles are worth reading. For that matter, so is Friedersdorf’s blog.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Five for Friday, March 12.
2. Beloit College: Making Yr Ass Feel Old Since 1846.
3. Why we should let the South re-secede.

[Writing] is about rolling the dice, and it’s paramount that you give yourself as many chances as possible to toss those bones. It was easy for me, I was either going to write or drive a cab–probably both. I wasn’t really capable of doing much else. So whenever I’m faced with a smart group of kids who could be doing something else, and making more money than me doing it, and they’re asking for advice it’s always weird. I feel like so much of my life is in spite of formal education.

I’d say this is true, as far as it goes, but it misses another important point, made by Dwayne Betts:

[F]rom reading this blog, and from hearing TNC talk about all the books he still reads – I think it’s pretty apparent that the actual education one puts into a job is always going to go beyond the walls of the university. … And that’s what I’ve found kids don’t always get.

This is a good time to point out that my career path owes as much to making Command and Conquer fansites as my B.A. in English. After the jump, Betts’ comment also gets at a second point I wanted to highlight from “The Recession’s Long Shadow“:

Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle¹. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told [article author Don Peck].
[...]
As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.

These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment. Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.”² She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.” … Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers.

First, I’d like to reiterate: I am really lucky to have a job that is more or less tailored to my interests while appeasing the material girl in me. The fact that I more or less fell into a job³ that rewards my love of web design, statistics and the written word is still kind of amazing.

Second, I don’t think there’s anything I hate more than the “everyone’s a winner” mentality⁴, and I’m glad to see evidence that it’s bad for kids. Those “My child is a terrific kid at Fuckface Elementary” bumper stickers I see around Baltimore drive me insane.

More potentially-related posts:

1. “The Army pounds it into your head… Kill everybody, kill everybody. And you do.”
2. I hate arguments like this.
3. Ska is not a crime.

Times and a column of parentheses? Of all companies, I’d think that Apple would require tasteful typography for their playground-bullying lawsuits.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Five for Friday, Sept. 4.
2. Entirely in favor of net neutrality.
3. We got the chrome.

[F]or every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.
[...]
[T]he unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.

The whole piece is expansive, so I’ll have more on other parts of it later. But, you know, here’s a depressing place to start.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Feel better, Beloit College kids.
2. John McCain’s last stand.
3. The luckiest.

1. My friend J-Wy got into MICA, and will be living with me for a few weeks. Sorry if that ruins the surprise for people she hasn’t told yet.
2. These messenger bags made from life jackets. If I could wear yellow, I would be all about it. I can’t, so I bequeath this to you.
   Update: It is €129. So, never mind.
3. Darkon. Less than five minutes in, there are night/dark elves. Talking in an elf-language. Wearing blackface. And then it gets legitimately touching, and pretty good. Worth watching.
4. Finally, proof that guinea pigs can code.
5. Getting paid. Paychecks are tremendous, but direct deposit rules the schools.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Five for Friday, February 12.
2. Five for Friday, February 19.
3. Five for Friday, November 13.

Google is planning to build ultra-high speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the country. The plan is to deploy 1 Gbps, fiber optic connections directly to people’s homes. This connection would be 2,000% faster than the fastest connection currently available to Baltimore residents.

My rationale for including Bmore in this project:

1. High population density in the city itself. Houses are small and are literally touching, in many cases.
2. Small physical area. The whole of Baltimore City is less than 100 square miles.
3. Much-needed competition. Comcast offers overpriced, slow service, and Verizon, although cheaper, is similarly slow and doesn’t offer fiber optic service in many areas.

If you’re in or around Baltimore, you should lobby Google and voice your support.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Hats off.
2. We got the chrome.
3. 502 errors from the 410.

The term “slush fund” was originally a nautical term; the slush referred to the fat or grease that was obtained by boiling salted meat, the sale of which could then be used to provide the crew with special luxuries. The money obtained from this sale was placed into the so-called ’slush-fund’.

More potentially-related posts:

1. A clear, bright morning.
2. Priorities.
3. Twenty-five.

1. Shift into neutral for acceleration, or downshift for brake failure.
2. Apply the brakes. If your brakes are out, gently engage the emergency brake.
3. Hit your emergency flashers, find somewhere to pull over and kill the engine.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Ska is not a crime.
2. At least they didn’t rip her a new one.

The salient grafs from the three stories:

1. A top Toyota official claimed that a negotiated agreement with U.S. government auto-safety regulators prevented a widespread vehicle recall and saved the Japanese auto giant more than $100 million, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post after it was turned over to congressional investigators.
   [...]
   Under the heading “Wins for Toyota & Industry,” [Toyota North America president Yoshi] Inaba wrote: “Negotiated ‘equipment’ recall on Camry/ES re. SA, saved $100M+, w/ no defect found.” “SA” stands for “sudden acceleration.”
2. Kabul Bank’s boss has been handing out far bigger prizes to his country’s U.S.-backed ruling elite: multimillion-dollar loans for the purchase of luxury villas in Dubai by members of President Hamid Karzai’s family, his government and his supporters.

   The close ties between Kabul Bank and Karzai’s circle reflect a defining feature of the shaky post-Taliban order in which Washington has invested more than $40 billion and the lives of more than 900 U.S. service members: a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace.

3. A federal judge on Monday morning approved a $150 million settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bank of America over allegations that the firm lied to investors about bonuses and mounting losses during the financial crisis of fall 2008.
   [...]
   And although the bank will be able to put this episode aside, it faces another major lawsuit by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that charges both the bank and two former top executives with fraud. The SEC declined to charge any individuals.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Would Bin Laden endorse McCain-Palin?
2. He sure does–ask his wives.
3. My BO has a first name.