End of Tower Classical

I had heard about Tower Records going bankrupt a while back, but it took this article to make me realize that this means the end of the classical section in the store at Lincoln Center. I remember many a leisurely afternoon spent browsing there and listening to recordings through their very nice headphones. And, I got a bunch of my favorite CDs there, including the Böhm Tristan and the Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Bach cantatas recording. Anyway, I guess I should enjoy Amoeba while I can.

New York Times Reader

I've been using the Times Reader application on and off for a couple weeks now, and overall it's very nice, though there are some annoyances. I first read about the reader in an article on Slate, which raved about the readability of articles inside the reader. I agree that the text rendering and automatic columns in the reader make a huge difference, especially for long articles. Also, being able to read offline is really nice. On a recent flight, I was able to read most of the Sunday Times without having to flip pages on a crowded plane.

There are some problems, however. Although the Slate article claims that a week of the paper is stored, I've found that articles are deleted within a day, which is actually really annoying. Also, I've found that certain articles just never appear in the reader; I assume this bug is fixable. For some reason, the reader consumes an obscene amount of memory, often more than 100MB. This isn't a deal breaker, but if reading 5 papers through similar readers requires 500MB of memory, then that will be a big problem. Finally, it's annoying to be separated from the web while reading the articles; I don't see the most-emailed articles list, and it's harder to quickly search for something on Google or Wikipedia.

Anyway, if you have Windows, the reader is definitely worth a look.

You Know

It's yet another web site on The Wire that sucked up an hour of my time. The Q&A sessions with David Simon are especially worth reading.

Clothes on The Wire

A behind-the-scenes feature was just posted on clothes in The Wire. It's cool how much thought goes into these things.

GOP Contract Tanking

The Tradesports contract on whether the GOP will keep the House has gone way down in the last few days, as you can see above. Let's hope this holds up.

The State on iTunes Store

MTV has just released Season 1 of The State on iTunes, and supposedly if it sells well, it will eventually be released on DVD. The members of The State even did a new skit to promote it. I bought an episode to give it a try, and overall I'm not impressed with the experience. First, playing the video back on Windows maxes out the CPU on my laptop, and it's not a slow machine; apparently this is a problem with Quicktime for Windows. So, I can't even watch the thing in full-screen mode. Second, they took out the copyrighted music from some of the skits. In the "Pants" skit, it's a little strange to not hear "Cannonball" during the pants shopping scene, but it's not a big deal. However, "$240 Worth of Pudding" is now missing "Sexual Healing," and they did a terrible job of sticking in another song. The skit was originally done in front of a live studio audience, with Showalter and Lennon responding to the crowd. Now, they dubbed in a fake laugh track over the new song, and it's just not nearly as funny. Anyway, I might still buy the DVDs, but for me the episodes on iTunes aren't worth it.