jane dark's sugarhigh!

Smash List

Fresh figs: don't you wish you had them more often?

Free music: it's open round the clock! A few minutes ago I was reading an old email from Rob Sheffield, one of those notes so melancholy and sweet that you save it forever in your your special file, and noticed that he has passingly quoted "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." And I would have driven downtown in the rain to the late-night record shop, and blown some of my isn't-it-excellent-to-be-a-former-music-critic? store credit on a little Billy Joel, just to, you know, have the full experience of Rob's letter. But the record store is closed, so I just jacked it from someone I will never know, who doesn't think it was stealing. Thank you, IP 192.xxx.1.97.6346, for ripping your entire Pop Rock 1977 to disc; regarding "the internet," it's for people like you that keep it turned on. Please drop in and steal, mmn, "Ode to Bille Joe."

I would also drive downtown, though perhaps not in the rain, to satisfy my yearning for a guidebook to Beijing; I'm going in 20 days, and getting anxious. But the bookstore is also closed, and the guidebook as I understand it doesn't exist in particularly trustworthy format online, so I'll have to wait. Meanwhile, when is someone going to get on the ball and start making digital guidebooks, files that take the form of playlists downloadable to your iPod? So you would click browse, and get a menu from which you'd choose lodging, and then you'd choose, say, price and continue on by clicking yuan 500-999, and there your list would be, with addresses and phone numbers and so on. This is a very good idea but I am lazy, okay? Get on it!

[Look, I am sure that these byteguides exist for the PalmPilot, but I am willing to carry only a limited number of digital devices at any one time, and the PalmPilot is a poorly-implemented joke. The cargo pants craze, blatantly driven by the explosion in little devices we are expected to carry around as badges of membership in the forward-facing bourgeoisie, cannot last forever. Meanwhile, even the iPod is awkward and bulky, even my pink mini. Why does my music delivery system gave to be an item? The reasonable delay between digitized music and songs being beamed directly to my head by satellites at all times should have been 18 months, tops. What's the holdup?]

Louis, who is on a fact-finding roll today (consider this link he sent along), wonders about "Ode to Billie Joe," and it is the day to wonder, after all (though not a good day at all for the folks in the sleepy, dusty Sacramento River delta). His curiosity, as a Yankee, is piqued: is June 3rd late enough in the Delta season to be chopping cotton? Please advise. I realize that I have never wondered exactly because the song is so unconscionably great that I trust every little thing it says, implies, or even hints at. Which is pretty much its thing.