Here are some of the things blowing my mind this week:

• “Night Ripper.” This album, which my cousin brought to my attention, is just an assault on the senses. As Pitchfork puts it, “The record’s pacing is astonishing– with more than 150 sample sources (all thanked in the liner notes), it ricochets from Top 40 hits to obscure gems and back again like a cool breeze.” Identifying what sources you can is a fun, audible version of that Motorola movie. Except much, much more difficult. (There’s still this bit in track 8 that’s driving me crazy.)
• “The Oil We Eat“, an old Harper’s article [via]. Sample line: “David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years.”
• Chicago recycling. Or, more specifically, the appalling lack thereof. There’s a sidebar to that story, not online, that notes that Chicago garbage crews feature three people including a Teamsters driver who gets $29/hr and is not required to handle garbage. And surprise: they still work slower than smaller crews.
• Tokyo trains. Now this really sounds too good to be true: “I just saw a travel program on Tokyo, Japan, and […] it said that the [bullet] trains are _so_ accurate on time, that if one is actually late, you can get a _note_ from the station for your boss, because otherwise they won’t believe you about the train delay.” (A subsequent comment agrees.) I want bullet trains!
• Oh, and that Landis thing was pretty good too.

Update [21:50]: Oh, and this is definitely blowing my mind. On so many levels.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.