Monday rush. I’m supposed to skip
but I just found Sunday in your hips

It sounds too good to be true. A Marxist hip hop band from Oakland, California. How could I have slept on The Coup? Especially when Boots shares his insights on “the study of how bodies may be tossed and folded”:

Thoughts wrangled up, legs tangled up,
baby do this feel good angled up?
Can’t be expressed by a sangle fuck
Wanna gently caress it and bang it up

I could wax poetic about this track, but That Good Good really nails it:

[Boots] flips a paradoxical metaphor with a claustrophobic outside and a universe under the weight of his girl and then thoughts of “lost aerobics” are oddly accompanied by a double time handclap creating a mini flamenco-fire with a [Stevie] Wonder-esque harmonica meandering over it. Suddenly his sex/work debate spurs a thought of burning his workplace down if not allowed to head home by 5:02. He taps into a working-class disgust of not getting paid for every second he has to be in service to the boss. Strings come in as he struggles to make his decision. At least the cymbals of the trap set and symbols of the political set (a Jesse Jackson? speech reiterates Day’s query) combine to make beautiful music together…

Those strings. Oh those strings.

The Coup – I just wanna lay around all day in bed with you (Epitaph, 2006)

Download if you really must, spend a buck if you like quality music.

[H/T: Orsii, aka lil' miss sunshine on LDBK]

Hamstring tear or not, I’m working out. Swam 30′ pain free minutes on Friday and made a half-hearted attempt at aquajogging. I’m sure it is an excellent post-op recovery method, Wikipedia, but you look like a doofus out there (lexical hat tip to Sandy W.). On Saturday, I cycled. For an hour. I. Love. My. Bike. Will go for a longer ride today and try to resume jogging on Monday.

Picture taken from the brilliant velodramatic.com website.

I am one of the 28,492 people who follow NYU Professor of Journalism Jay Rosen’s tweets. Jay is well-known for launching the People Formerly Knows As The Audience acronym and for mindcasting instead of lifecasting on Twitter. He also has a knack for curating content.

The Gawker story Jay recently linked to is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism (in itself a practice many ‘journalism-is-dead’ advocates never thought would be possible online). The story reconstructs the off-the-record email traffic that ensued when the Eliot Spitzer story broke. Mark Peterson calls it “unwriteable discourse”, Gawker calls it a “the inside of a PR meltdown”.  A recommended and surprisingly cordial tale of news management:

You’d think that, with blood in the water, the traditional coziness that develops between official flacks and the beat reporters who have to talk to them every day would break down into some kind of last-man-standing slugfest. But in the Spitzer case, the opposite happened. The revelations upended the worlds of both reporter and flack alike, and the uncertainty, long hours, and breakneck pace of the scandal actually seemed to throw them together as they worked toward what seems, if you read the e-mail exchanges, like a common goal of getting the news out and behind them.

Managed to injure myself during an LSD run Monday afternoon, 11 days before my scheduled marathon debut. It’s my first endurance sports related injury since I picked up triathlon four years ago. Today’s sonogram confirmed my worst fears: I have a small (0.8mm) tear in my right-leg hamstring muscles (biceps femoris). I’m on a strict R.I.C.E. diet this week and hope to be able start (and finish) the race on November 15.

First, K-Swiss partners with IM, then with kspace.tv and now with the man.

I can’t wait for José’s sophomore effort, Blackmagic, to drop. I know what I’m buying my family and friends for their 2010 birthdays/anniversaries/newborns/sex changes.

She said it’s really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning won’t be lost or misconstrued
But I’ll repeat myself, at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover

The military percussion in this song is sheer perfection.

She said it grieves me so to see you in such pain
I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again
I said I appreciate that and would you please explain
About the fifty ways

So is Paul Simon’s flow.

She said why don’t we both just sleep on it tonight
And I believe in the morning you’ll begin to see the light
And then she kissed me and I realized she probably was right
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover

Pure genius.

Paul Simon – 50 ways to leave your lover (Columbia Records, 1975)

Trivia: do you know of the 45 additional ways to leave your lover?

Professor Sir David Watson, who recently won the Times Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award, has nine laws of academic politics he would like to share.

* Academics grow in confidence the farther away they are from their true fields of expertise (what you really know about is provisional and ambiguous, what other people do is clear-cut and usually wrong)

* You should never go to a school or department for anything that is in its title (which university consults its architecture department on the estate, or – heaven forbid – its business school on the budget?)

* The first thing a committee member says is the exact opposite of what she means (“I’d like to agree with everything the vice-chancellor has just said, but…”; or “with respect”…; or even “briefly”)

* Courtesy is a one-way street (social-academic language is full of hyperbole, and one result is the confusion of rudeness – or even cruelty – with forthrightness; however, if a manager responds in kind, it’s a federal case)

* On email, nobody ever has the last word

* Somebody always does it better elsewhere (because they are better supported)

* Feedback counts only if I agree with it

* The temptation to say “I told you so” is irresistible

* Finally, there is never enough money, but there used to be.

[H/T: timeshighereducation.co.uk]

File under “statements that make me dance”.

Exhibit A.

A single person can now speak to millions of people without touching a reporter. In many cases, it’s thrilling, but for the most part the tools are primitive; we are at the utter beginning of what this means for news production.

Exhibit B.

Online, what a public needs, far more than reporters or endowed professional newsrooms, is a way for everyone to do this more effectively.

Cody “the LeBron James of news production” Brown, news visionary and future millionaire. Anyone with an interest in media and journalism, I suggest you read Cody’s latest blog post.

The latest trend for ailing news organizations is to adopt a bricks-and-clicks business model. What with evaporating advertising revenues, news organizations such as Corelio in Belgium are dipping their toes in online retailing. For instance, just last week Het Nieuwsblad launched their Nieuwsbladshop.be, hoping to lure their readers into buying wine, DVDs and books.

For some sports you need a ball. For triathlon you need two. Writing a PhD however, requires a third. While said to be benign, the growth is known to induce severe moodswings, bouts of paranoia and insomnia. Other side effects are self-indulgence, weight loss and Sehnsucht.

One way I try to escape from it all is by running. Long distance running. Ran a 20k trail race yesterday with long time buddy Danny and was able to run consistently and comfortably at my (ideal) marathon pace of 12km/h. All along, I ran to Vaughn Mason & Crew’s timeless bassline.

Vaughn Mason & Crew – Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll (Brunswick, 1980)