Well, that was unexpected. I was all set to lapse into ArcadeFirecentricity, with only an occasional Swimmers song breaking the monotony of my non-ticket-having despair. But then all of a sudden my sister appeared with AF tickets, and I unexpectedly found a bunch of other music to be excited about. And the Dismemberment Plan are playing a reunion show! Everything's great!

In fact I just got back from seeing Karmella's Game at the Black Cat with Yglesias and Catherine. It's been years since I last saw KG, but they were just as charming as I remembered — and now they had better songs to back up their overwhelming charisma. I really don't understand why these guys aren't better-known than they are. When a band performs harmonies with as many parts as it has personnel I take it as a very good sign. Well, if they pull it off, anyway, which Karmella's Game did.

So that bring us to this post's first mp3. Have at it (and my apologies to the band for hosting it — I wouldn't have, except your last.fm page is broken):

Karmella's Game – Safely Negative

Moving on! I stumbled upon The Wombats a few days ago. I know that their NME heyday may have already come and gone, but their new EP (leaked in December, apparently) seems stronger to me than their last album (although that's good, too — more mp3s here):

The Wombats – Backfire At The Disco

Caralyn posted about Patrick Wolf's "Accident & Emergency" a while ago, but at the moment I listened to it I was too exhausted/hung over/sick to really fall for it. But the track Stereogum posted this week caught me at the right moment, and it made me a believer:

Patrick Wolf – The Magic Position

And finally, the peak of the mashup fad may have crested, but there's still a lot to be said for combining two guilty pleasures into one plausibly-deniable whole. Check it out:

Team 9 – When You Were Starlight (Killers vs. Muse)

Okay! Music over! Tomorrow: Philly Arcade Fire tickets, DC D-Plan tickets, and maybe, MAYBE some graphs of congressional cosine similarity matrices. But only if you're good.

I said I'd have a similarity matrix for you, didn't I? Well, here it is.

The Sunlight Foundation is holding a mashup contest, and I've been screwing around with the data they've made available on opencongress.org to see if there's anything cool that I can do with it.

I started off by scraping every member of congress's voting record, then running a comparison of how similar they were (this photo wasn't taken just because I'm pretentious — I had another reason, too). This graph is sort of my way of checking my work so far: it orders members by party, then state, then district. So the block in the upper left represents the democrats, and the one in the lower right is the republicans. The diagonal white line represents where each member is plotted against themselves (they'll always have an identical record, of course, so it's worth blanking this out to show that it isn't valuable data). The brighter the color, the more similar the voting record.

Of course, some members are too new to have cast enough votes to make analyzing them worthwhile, and I haven't bothered to filter them out yet (hence the scattered black dots). And this isn't the interface I intend to use for this data — it's static and visually boring, and unlikely to wow any judges.

But it's still kind of interesting, and you can draw a few conclusions from it (many of which are easier to see in the black & white version, behind the jump). For one thing, you can see that the republicans vote like one another more consistently than the democrats do — as a result, their block is darker (on the black & white graph; it's brighter on the color version, but it's a little hard to compare red pixels to blue ones directly due to how our eyes work). For another, you can see that the bands of dissimilar color are often a few pixels wide (again, particularly among the democrats). These correlate to particular states' delegations that tend to vote unlike their parties. Unsurprisingly, these tend to be folks like Iowa democrats and Texas republicans.

Those are just my initial impressions, though, and I could be misinterpreting something. Tomorrow I'll put up a simple DHTML browser that lets you see which column belongs to which legislator. That should make it easier to see whatever glaring mistakes I've made.

The west coast was great — more on that later. Right now I'm in Austin for SXSWi and, as you can see, I'm a bit behind on things.

I've got a ton of photos and lame California jokes that I intend to put online, but at the moment I'm occuppied with blogging over at sxsw.echoditto.com — head on over and have a look, if you'd like.

Visiting Austin and California was great, but it's a relief to be home. The last ten days have been busy ones, and I'm feeling the effects. I did manage to finally kick my traditional month-long spring cold, but my shoes weren't up to the amount of walking that a party-filled conference and unexplored city demanded: my legs ache and I feel pretty worn down.

For a conference about the internet I spent surprisingly little time online: electrical outlets were precious commodities, and although the organizers made an admirable attempt, the Southby wifi left a lot to be desired. So I'm slowly, painfully reimmersing myself in the internet, as if it's a scalding-hot bath. Eventually I'll be relaxed, reengaged and recovered, but for right now the 1,324 unread RSS items staring at me from NetNewsWire are more than a little intimidating.

I've got to tie a few more things up over at the EchoDitto SXSW blog, but later on I'll start putting stuff up here. For now, here's my collection of SXSW photos — I'll probably elaborate on the better ones later on, but at the moment I need to put these up so that I can steal the generated HTML and cross-post it to the EchoDitto blog.

A promise is a promise, even if no one particularly cares. Here's that DHTML similarity matrix I promised. I haven't done much cross-browser testing, but in Firefox at least you should now be able to see which state delegation are the most homogenous* and which are the most loyal to their party. The results won't shock you (Californians are better Democrats than Kansans!?!!), but it's nice to see that my math seems to be correct.

Now that I'm home (and Southby preparations are over with) I can devote some more time to this Sunlight Foundation contest. I've got a few ideas and a bunch of very good leads courtesy of son1. The deadline isn't until mid-April — I think I should definitely be able to come up with something cool by then.

toggle color

X Axis:

Y Axis:

* Yes, I know that I misspelled "homogeneous". I just feel very strongly that it ought to be spelled "homogenous". Milk isn't homogenie-ized, is it? Yeah, that's what I thought. WHAT!

UPDATE: Looks like the DHTML is a little finicky. Given that this isn't the final form that this data will be visualized in, I don't think I'm going to bother fixing it. It still works on the permalinked page though, so if you want to see it in action follow that link.

There was a lot of good swag at SXSW, most of it in the form of promotional trinkets that a self-describedly net savvy individual such as myself will proudly add to the constellation of brands that define his persona, despite their uncaring and inhuman nature (they would take our blood if it could be used to cool CPUs). In fact, I'm wearing a Yahoo Pipes t-shirt right now. Capitalism works!

I didn't realize it at the time, but the best or at least most interesting swag came in the tote bag that every attendee received. For one thing, there was the pin from MAKE Magazine that I cherish but have already almost managed to destroy. But this curiousity was even more striking:

I didn't have the guts to try it, but Ben did. "My hands feel great," he said, after an initial period of wondering whether it would do anything. "They're all cool and relaxed." Presumably this was menthol Nicogel.

I'd try it, but I'm too chicken — I feel like I use my hands an awful lot. So I've given it to Charles, who seems to be in the Nicogel's target market. Hopefully he'll give it a shot and report back.

Even better, though, was the unassuming inclusion of a copy of Wizard, which was one of many magazines in the packet (Linux Journal is really good!). Any other nerds reading this will probably be familiar with Wizard. During our childhood it served primarily as a price guide for comics, reporting made-up numbers that were supposed to chart a complex economy defined by two whole companies and a million parents' basements. It always sounded like an interesting thing to read, and sort of was — until you realized that reading actual comic books was way more fun than reading meta comic books.

Nowadays it's a bit glossier and more accessible. In this issue, at least, there are a lot of two-page spreads devoted to essays on things like "What's in store for the X-Men in 2007?" They get quotes from comic writers and artists, and everyone talks about the characters as if they were real people (just like in Soap Opera Digest, if the covers are any indication). It certainly helped me figure out some of the gibberish that Kriston and Matt have been spouting the last few months. I may even make the effort and catch up with this whole "Civil War" storyline.

But Wizard is no longer just about comics. They've also branched out into the wider geek world. And although they're not the greatest interviewers in the world, the writers proceed with an entertaining lack of pretension. Let's be honest: nobody gives a fuck what a producer from Lost thinks about mythological archetypes. They just want to know who the Others are, and when Kate and Sawyer are going to do it. Wizard is sensitive to this fact. Every question in every interview could be rewritten as, "No, seriously, give us some spoilers." It's great.

And in this issue there is, in fact, an interview about Lost. It's with David Lindelof, one of the show's creators. You can find it here, and it's wonderful. Not because it contains any satisfying revelations about the plot — it doesn't reveal anything. But at the very end it officially releases Lost dead-enders like myself from the show's infuriating grip:

You’ve said that there is a sort of five-season plan in place for "Lost." Are you guys still on track for that plan?

Did I say that?

I think you said it...

I think that’s one of those things that has been attributed to me that no one has actually said. There have been sort of vague questions as to how much story we have or what the plan is, and I think that the only thing that I’ve ever said on the record is that if we were in a position to actually end the show on our own terms, that it would probably be at the end of four years. That would be the ultimate nexus point for the show. But unfortunately, it’s completely moot whether it’s four years or five years or seven years, because I don’t own the show and [co-creator and executive producer] J.J. [Abrams] doesn’t own the show and [executive producer] Carlton [Cuse] doesn’t own the show - Touchstone and ABC own the show. And as long as it’s a show that is popular and that people are watching, they’ll never let us end it, which is sad and depressing.

There you have it: confirmation of the show's inevitable X-Filesification. The only thing you can do is stop watching, then swoop back in when its cancellation has been announced. Thank you, Wizard.

And thank you for tricking Emily into reading you. Guys, how many times have you been asked to analogize Marvel vs. DC to Playstation vs. Xbox? I don't even think she was asking it sarcastically. Not entirely, anyway.

A little while ago I wrote a series of posts outlining some steps that Movable Type admins can take to cut down on the comment spam they receive. I didn't promote it — I probably will later, in a different context — and it didn't receive a lot of traffic.

But it sure does get a lot of attempted spam, at least relative to all of the other entries on the site. I can only think of a few explanations:

1. The spammers are searching for anti-spam entries and specifically going after them to discredit their contents.
2. Maybe spammers search for anti-spam entries to serve as test beds for their methods.
3. Someone doesn't like me and signed me up for a list of URLs that's frequently spammed.
4. ... Or it's just random.

It's weird. Fortunately the anti-spam stuff is holding up — this morning is the first time that any got through (that I can remember, anyway), and only two comments made it before the URL rotated and it all stopped.

I don't know if anyone else has stumbled across the Man Vs. Wild marathon that Discovery played tonight, but if you haven't seen the show I recommend you track it down and give it a few Tivo thumbs-up. It's a survival show hosted by an ex-special forces badass (but he's British, so he's charming). Tonight I got to watch him rip the meat from a zebra carcass with his teeth and squeeze life-sustaining water from elephant droppings directly into his mouth. Seriously! And that was just one episode!

Anyway, if you've got an inner boy scout you should really check this out. It makes that Survivor Man dude — who is admittedly awesome in his own right — come off like that weirdo who keeps spending his family's savings on anti-bear suits that the military then refuses to buy.

You're probably pretty sick of reading posts from me that start off by complaining about how far behind on everything I am. So am I, for what it's worth. But a lot happened over the course of the ten days when I was gone, and I feel like I need to sift through it if I'm ever going to return to the state of continuous partial attention that I left.

It's tempting to just hit "mark all as read" on every feed in my reader, but I'd be a real jerk if I didn't point out that my friends did a lot of cool stuff while I was gone (or while I was too busy preparing to leave to link to anything). So, a few plaudits. If I left your amazing accomplishment off, well, I guess I'm still a jerk. I promise I'll write about it as soon as I read about it.

• Charles recorded an album! I got to witness the break-neck pace at which they threw this thing together. Their devotion to the process was impressive, but hearing Aaron sing the same apparently atonal chorus a million times left me gritting my teeth for an irritating final product. But I was pleasantly surprised — I think that this is the best stuff I've ever heard these two guys record (they collaborated with Bayes, but I've never heard anything he recorded). If you haven't gotten around to downloading the whole thing from Charles' site, here's a flash player that should let you pick and choose from the tracks. I'd suggest starting with track 7 — it's got a an impressively catchy (and New York-y) guitar hook that'll burrow straight into your cochlea and stay there.
  
  
• Congratulations to Heather for putting together DCist Exposed, which by all accounts was an enormous success. I haven't made it down to Warehouse yet to check out the photos, but I intend to tonight. Way to go.
• Sommer was interviewed by Fox 5 for their "Blogapalooza" feature and handled the ridiculous premise with grace, walking the line perfectly between promoting DCist and being impolite to her interviewer.
• Spencer's in motherfucking IRAQ! And he's issuing excellent dispatches here, there, and allegedly in various print outlets (paper is deprecated). I can't wait until he's safely home and the backlog of morbid jokes can be unleashed. In the meantime, go read his stuff. Hanging out with Spencer and witnessing the gallons of boundless energy that pour from him every second makes it easy to forget what a great writer he is. But god damn! Not only is he putting his ass on the line, he's wringing an amazing amount of humor from a dangerous and difficult assignment.
• Speaking of my writerly friends, Kriston's got articles all over the place. I hear the Guardian is opening a Florida Avenue bureau.
• Yglesias doesn't write about the news, he makes the goddamn news.
• Rounding out the flophouse's journalistic successes, Catherine's Washingtonian blog is off to a great start. Be sure to check out the glamor shot from her photostream of the Washingtonian web team. They look like they're promoting their new Fox show about doctor-cops who are also lawyers, yet find time to have complex romantic lives. William Shatner guest stars as the curmudgeonly but lovable Garrett Graff.
• Finally (because it's actually happening in the future), Ray's playing a show at DC9 on Sunday. I've seen his band before (at the Grog, no less) and can vouch for 'em. I intend to be there on Sunday; you should, too.

I'm sitting on the couch, watching Tivoed episodes of Tony Bourdain's fantastic travel show, sipping coffee and settling in for a day of coding-for-fun and basketball-watching (I got off to an okay start, but I know I'm doomed). It's so, so nice.

Naturally enough, I'm psyching myself up for all of this by reading some old material on the internet about professional wrestling. What could be more logical? I used to know an awful lot about it, considering myself a "smart mark". I even went to the theater to watch Jake The Snake Roberts smoke crack on film. I don't really keep up with it anymore, but it's relaxing and familiar, and that makes it just right for this morning's pre-caffeinated period.

So, a wrestling-themed link trail:

• Bad News Hughes' glorious wrestling career
• Roland Barthes' ur-analysis of professional wrestling. You've probably already read it. If not, you should.
• A few years ago the Village Voice surveyed the state of academic inquiry into the field and asked (among other things), "[shouldn't wrestling] stand for [labor] unions?"
• Answer: No

Why aren't there more reviews of leaked albums? The delay between when blogospheric buzz leads me to hear a record and its actual release date seems to have increased in the last six months. These days I frequently find myself wondering what the press thinks about the albums I'm currently most excited about, only to realize that they're abiding by the laws of the labels, not the anarchy of the internet.

The tradition of holding off on reviewing a CD until it's on shelves seems defensible to me. It'd be a shame to let those who have taken advantage of leaked copies hurt artists even further by depressing their sales with potentially buzz-deflating reviews. And of course the leaked product isn't always the final one, so judging an early, surreptitiously-obtained copy might be unfair. I've done it, but I'm just a lowly amateur blogger. Major reviewers seemed to respect release dates, and it seems admirable that they do.

But I wonder how long it'll hold. Stereogum's a blog, sure, but they've also got a gigantic audience. And they're now making a feature out of reviewing leaked albums. It seems unavoidable that the practice will seep into Pitchfork, then Rolling Stone, then, hell, I don't know — NPR?

At any rate, this trend seems inevitable and superficially unfortunate, but also something that musicians can probably adapt to without too much trouble. Reducing the amount of time between the end of mastering and the album's official release date is the most obvious solution, although that'll necessitate less carefully-scheduled releases. But that's probably fine, too: the only real justification for such precise timing that I'm aware of is a label's desire to stretch its releases out so that revenue stays even through the year, and so that similar acts in their stable don't step on one another's toes. Maybe there's another reason, but if there is I can't think of it at the moment.

I think the labels are doomed anyway, so removing their scheduling abilities isn't any great tragedy. Bands will record on their own. If they need to schedule strategically, their smaller number of personnel will make it easier to prevent leaks. More often they'll probably just release the album as soon as they can — I can't imagine that too many artists enjoy having to wait to release their work.

I should've seen this one coming: I had a problem with my math in the similarity matrix stuff. I didn't think through the problem carefully enough, and failed to realize that a given representative might vote several times on a piece of legislation as various amendments and procedural votes come up. That resulted in a screwed-up data model, which resulted in taking dot products of vectors of variable length, which shouldn't have worked at all (Perl is apparently pretty forgiving about referring to variables that don't exist).

It still sort of worked, as you can tell from the graph. But it wasn't accurate, and most of the CPU time I had spent so far went to waste.

I think I've got it all sorted out, but I'll have to rerun all of those cosine comparisons (I've improved the algorithm's efficiency; it might take less than a day this time). But progress continues: I've also written the infrastructure for segmenting the votes by issue. I'll beat this goddamn thing yet.

Things aren't helped by Sunlight's data being somewhat messy. Some voting histories have multiple vote-records that have identical bills numbers, descriptions and dates. The only thing that varies, in fact, is the value of the vote that's stored. That's pretty goddamn confusing, so I'm just using the one that the page's order implies to be chronologically first and hoping for the best.

The Post's article on H Street is getting blogged-up all over the place today. Aside from the ridiculous ending ("OHHHHHH it's SYMBOLIC"), it's pretty good. The opening struck an especially familiar note:

A white woman and a little white girl are walking west on H Street Northeast, the 1300 block. Behind them, three black men are walking, not far behind, but close enough to invade their space, as if there is such a thing as personal space on a public sidewalk in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Three invisible men, residents who lived in the meantime, the in-between years when this street was desolate, neglected by the city, when some white people would not be caught walking in this block of H Street.

One black man shouts: "Ma'am, please tell your daughter she don't have to be afraid of us!" The white woman turns and smiles. It is not a nervous smile. But she does not slow her pace; this does not appear to be done out of fear but is more a pace one might keep while running errands on a busy afternoon. The little girl holds the woman's right hand.

The men continue, as if to prove something. "Ma'am," one of them says again, "please tell your daughter she don't have to be afraid on H Street."

The woman climbs into an SUV and drives away.

I used to run into this sort of Affability Test all the time. Now that my neighborhood's a little more gentrified and I'm a little older and (hopefully) a little less bewildered-looking, it doesn't occur as much. But it still happens from time to time, and it's usually discomforting or depressing.

The best of these types of interactions are like the one quoted above: they're just overwhelmingly sad and plaintive. The speakers are daring you to disappoint them by failing to engage and acknowledge them. I do my best to defy that expectation with a cheerful response. But that's just self-flattery — it'd be a stretch to think that those guys don't have a good reason for their yuppie-equals-jerk heuristic. And, to be honest, I'm not usually thrilled about having to stop what I'm doing in order to cheer up and/or prove my worth to a stranger. Maybe that makes me an asshole.

And if it doesn't, then surely the way in which I respond does. Am I being patronizing when I pick my words, or just recalling the high school truism that a constrained vocabulary turneth away wrath? Are the subtle colloquialisms I find myself unintentionally affecting as glaringly artificial to the person I'm speaking to as they are to me? Probably, although the person on the other end of the conversation is usually very kind about it. In fact, when I find myself speaking to folks in these situations they're almost always very nice.

When they're not, they're generally homeless people with mental problems or young guys trying to assert their dominance in front of their friends. In those cases it's tough to know what the right note is to strike between friendliness, assertiveness and submission. Is it going to give offense or spark further engagement if I make eye contact, or if I fail to? In the case of the homeless, once I'm acknowledged as being okay how can I continue to be polite without getting sucked into a five-minute-long spiel about bus tickets that ends with me lying that I don't have any cash on me?

Maybe I'm just a less friendly guy than I like to think, but there's a definite edge to these interactions. I don't think I can be blamed for not wanting to be scrutinized by strangers. I haven't done anything wrong, although I know that the fact of many other people like me doing the same not-wrong things is, in aggregate, doing harm to the city's long-time, poorer residents. But what can I do about it? And what can they do, other than stop me on the street and demand answers without asking a question?

I don't mean to sit here and complain about being forced to interact with my fellow man. But I can't pretend to enjoy these little chats, either. Being confronted with a stranger's sadness and anger is uncomfortable, no matter how politely-expressed or justified it is.

As I've mentioned before, I really like the Technology Liberation Front. My own ability to maintain righteous indignation over the DMCA waxes and wanes, and it's good to know that someone's holding down the fort.

But I do occasionally find their posts frustrating, and none more so than when they talk about the cell phone market. Too often their objections to regulation in this industry seem to boil down to, "If there was enough consumer demand to justify a market for having a free market, the market would have selected for it! Market!" I appreciate their enthusiasm for capitalism, and it's a good reminder for a legislation-happy liberal like myself. But you'd have to be completely insane to think that the American cell phone market is open in a way that offers meaningful choice to consumers.

And, courtesy of Michael, here comes a reminder of that fact. This one concerns a free conference call service that we use at work:

Dear FreeConference User:

AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, and Qwest Are Blocking Your Conference Calling As of Friday, March 9, it's come to our attention that Cingular Wireless has begun blocking all conference calls made from Cingular handsets to selected conference numbers. If you call our service, you receive a recording that says, "This call is not allowed from this number. Please dial 611 for customer service".

Earlier this week, Sprint and Qwest joined in this action, blocking cellular and land line calls to these same numbers. This appears to be a coordinated effort to force you to use the paid services they provide, eliminating competition and blocking your right to use the conferencing services that work best for you. Don't Let AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, or Qwest Take Away Your Right to Use the Conference Service of Your Choice!

We Need Your Help! Please Take the Actions Below:

etc. etc.

Now, maybe it's not foul play. Lately there's been a rash of non-toll-free numbers attracting huge amounts of inbound traffic in order to exploit legislative loopholes. Maybe FreeConference.com was accidentally lumped in with them and the blocking will be temporary. Maybe they all resell POTS access from the same provider, who's accidentally blacklisted freeconference.com. Or maybe not.

Either way, we're kind of screwed until the carriers deign to fix the problem. Our clients can't reliably call in to the service, and getting them to switch cell phone carriers is of course not a plausible solution. In fact, even for those of us who use the service daily, selecting against the crooked carriers wouldn't make any sense — termination fees, locked handsets, an occasional lack of synching tools... Yes, I can imagine a world in which consumers rise up and demand an end to these lousy practices — it's just that it's clearly a fantasy world. And I don't buy that cell customers' unwillingness to grab pitchforks and torches and march down to Cingular HQ means that we somehow don't deserve the better and more flexible service that we say we want.

But instead of punishing the companies that have screwed up, we'll be forced to switch conferencing providers. Which, if the freeconference.com people are to be believed, is exactly what the networks are conspiring to accomplish.

Now compare the situation to my VoIP vendor. If I'm using an open protocol (and, since my home Asterisk server speaks SIP, I am), the decision to switch vendors is as simple as googling for a new provider, filling out a web form and altering a configuration file to match the credentials that will have been emailed to me. That's how it ought to be: if Cingular starts screwing you over, forward your calls to the T-Mobile trial account you just set up — all it'd take is changing a few settings on your handset. If you like it, switch for good for whatever the current, reasonable number-portability fee is.

Is that kind of flexibility really so unimaginable? And would it be so terrible to legislate it into existence? I'm not saying we should dictate technical implementations to carriers, but surely discouraging their lockin-focused contract scheme would improve competition.

...as I reminded myself the hard way this morning. Save one little template over another one, where the latter happens to have all of your configuration constants and utility functions? Bad things happen. And no, of *course* I didn't have a backup. That'd be ridiculous!

I think I've resurrected everything except the Technorati functionality, but if anything seems broken I'd appreciate your letting me know.

Also, there's a new header graphic to go along with the beautiful weather outside (that's what started this mess).

I've got a bit of a reputation around the office for being completely useless and insufferable before I've had my first two or three cups of coffee. Although I'm not that bothered by this, I'm also not particularly pleased about it — I think that participation in the geek cult of caffeine is a fairly lame affectation, and I'd like to think that I can function without a chemical crutch. I haven't intentionally cultivated this reputation; I guess I've just accidentally been kind of mean to people.

But it's definitely true that I'm a better Tom when I have a few cups of coffee in me. I'm happier, smarter, and a much better writer — especially when I'm perched in that perfect spot between very- and too-caffeinated.

I don't think I'm much of a coffee snob, or at least I hope I'm not. I drink enough of the stuff (and take it unadorned) that I don't taste very much as I down it unless it's a particularly strong brew or has been burnt into sourness. And even if it has, I'll drink pretty much anything. I may talk excitedly about burr grinders and occasionally bring in bottles of vinegar to clean the office Mr. Coffee, but I'll happily suck down Flavia, too (so long as it isn't the flavored kind).

But the last couple of days have gotten me wondering about my brand. My all-time favorite is Trader Joe's house beans, which make me ecstatically wired and have most often done so when I'm working from home (this definitely helps build up positive associations). But at the office I'll drink whatever shows up in the kitchen. We've recently switched to this Storyville stuff, and the last few days I've found myself walking around in a foul-tempered funk. Each time a cup from Caribou cleared things right up, though, bringing me back to a relatively ebullient version of myself.

I know this is probably all psychosomatic. Still, it's a little weird. I've had extreme reactions to particular coffee before (although in that case I sort of suspect that the stuff was tainted with a distinctly non-coffee ingredient). Other folks have theorized that Starbucks' popularity is due to its much higher caffeine levels relative to other brands. And it's not as if caffeine is the only psychoactive chemical in coffee — there's theophylline, theobromine, and who knows how many others (partially burning food creates lots of chemical variation ). Like chocolate, there are probably a whole host of subtle physiological and psychological effects induced by coffee that aren't easy to consciously notice, but which contribute to how we use and perceive it. Is it unreasonable to think that different brands, blends and roasts may represent different ratios of these chemicals, and that they may induce varying affects? We've all heard people claim that tequila makes them crazy, or that gin gives them headaches, or that Jaegermeister makes them fight people. Right? Is it so crazy to think that this could happen, albeit on a smaller scale, with coffee?

The answer is almost certainly Yes, Tom, it's crazy to think that. The fact that you've been staying up late reading terrible Civil War comic books probably has a lot more to do with your foul moods over the last two days than anything you've had to drink. The difference is that fussing over coffee is more fun than not-reading-comics.

But now that I've convinced myself of this chemical curiousity — no matter how slightly — all hope of a rational explanation is gone. Until I settle on a similarly-magical countermeasure, I'll probably keep thinking that Storyville beans make me a jerk.

This really is a pretty good This American Life parody.

Speaking of which, when are episodes of the new Showtime series going to leak? I've read that preview DVDs are in the hands of reviewers — seems like it can't be long now.

God dammit, I don't want to join Facebook. I mean, yes, I have a profile. But as you may be able to tell from the listed interests, it's not much of a serious