The Trials and Tribulations of being Coz.

Maintaining the "hard mirror" of NotAbbott.com was just too much work during the trip to Germany, and now I'm really far behind in keeping the two sites in sync, so I think I'm going to kill the LJ updates. I've got an RSS feed that covers everything anyway, and there's an outside chance I'll finally add the plug-in that would crosspost automatically.

Entered them on MFLS before tonight's match, if you have to know.

Chivas 2 :: 1 Los Angeles
Salt Lake 1 :: 1 Colorado
Houston 1 :: 2 New York
Kansas City 1:: 1 Columbus
Chivas 0 :: 3 Dallas
New England 2 :: 1 Chicago
DC 4 :: 0 Los Angeles

It's amazing how much needs to be done before you disconnect yourself from the daily grind for two and a half weeks. Not a lot of time left for opining, wiseassed commentary, or whatever the hell it is I do around here.

I leave for Germany and the World Cup on Saturday, and will be blogging from there about the tournament as much as I can and mirroring it on soccercentraltime.com if possible.

Because I know you're dying to know what I think about AP reporter John Solomon's recent "reporting" on Harry Reid, I pretty much agree with Josh Marshall. Part of the reason the media ends up being complicit in propogating bad information seems to be that they're stretched so thin and under so much pressure that regurgitating something that's pitched to them without much thought seems like the Occam's Razor default setting.

Okay, so I'm out for nearly three weeks starting on Saturday. There may still be newsletters in that time in one form or another, but that hasn't been finalized yet. Neither has where I'm staying in Berlin for a short stretch of the trip, for that matter.

( click here for this week's picks )

Malcolm Gladwell is considered to be a really smart guy. You should listen to him.

And no, this has nothing to do with Purple Rain, although it was showing at the bar I visited last night.

I'm intrigued by this effort, although I don't really have a firm grasp of what they're up to. My position is that any effort to address the problems of the current two-party stranglehold is worth investigating further. For now, I'll probably add the blog to my subscriptions and see what they talk about.

On a basic level, this could provide a ready apparatus for also-rans in the primaries from each side, which would be interesting enough in its own right given my gut feeling that somebody like Rudy Giuliani would have a tough time getting the GOP nod. On the other hand, I'm wary of efforts so squarely focused on "netroots," as online communities have a long history of not dealing well with real-world action.

This article caught my eye the other day, mostly because I had the same problem from the other direction. Banana Republic and Express both carry off-the-rack suit separates, which are handy for those of us who are attending weddings the next day and finally threw out all their old suits from ten-plus years ago. Not that I know anyone like that.

Anyway, this hypothetical person wears an extra-large shirts, which translated to a 46- to 48-inch chest size in suit terms. As policy, neither Banana Republic nor Express carry larger than a 44 in their retail stores.

No, really. They sell extra-large shirts, but not extra-large suit jackets? On what planet does this make any sense whatsoever?

Fortunately, a third option that did not involve tailoring also presented itself, so I -- okay, it was me, like you couldn't tell -- didn't have to slum it at the wedding, but I'm almost insulted by this. These stores are explicitly telling me that they don't want my business. I'm not even going to get into the collective widening of American, or at least Americans, because I think this only tangentially hits that topic. I'm not some kind of giant, Gheorge Murasan-esque freak or anything. I'm just a 6'2" guy who needs a frickin' suit.

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend. I also hope you all had air conditioning. I didn't, and I'll be rectifying that particular situation tonight.

( click here for this week's picks )

If you don't hear from me, it's because I melted.

I'm not sure if I've ever had an apartment with this much eastern exposure, but between that and the lack of air conditioning, last night was brutal. On my way home from a brief appearance at the office, I had thought that the humidity had broken, and that I could wait until today to buy a window unit. Needless to say, I was wrong.

Of course, the AC in my car isn't working, either. I still may kick that down the road until after I get back from Germany. And walk a lot.

In this era of American Idol, I guess I just got voted off the island. Or something. After three solo gigs in about four weeks over at Redmond's, I've been uninvited for my fourth. They're "moving in a different direction."

Part of this bothers me, in that I don't particularly like being bad at things. Which isn't to say that I fell like I'm necessarily bad at these solo gigs, but given my age, ability level and song selection, coupled with the abject lack of crowd on Sunday and Monday nights when I played there, I can see how I might not have fit in with their particular aesthetic over there.

And there's a tangible difference between being bad at singing and playing guitar, and being bad at three-hour solo gigs. I feel like I'm passable at each, but you sorta have to buy into the schtick -- which is to say the song selection -- and I fully realize not everyone will dig it.

At the end of the day -- and most of these gigs were -- I could only barely afford to lose the time that I did to these gigs. I'm overextended and I know it. The slimming of the current musical dance card is one of those things I need to be done for me, anyway, as my inclination is to not turn down any gigs anywhere, because I crave attention love performing so much.

Three or four songs a week at Vaughan's may ultimately be the most appropriate application of my acoustic "act." I'm okay with that.

Had my first business trip in something like five years this week, which only goes part of the way to explain why I haven't been posting. The sheer amount of stuff I have to do before leaving for Germany in June has come into sharp focus lately. I'm hoping this is just my usual process of working myself into a panic well in advance of the point where I'm going to totally run out of time.

I was also reminded that, try as they might to make it look otherwise, Midway is a minor-league airport. There's something about the security check-in that just seems glaringly unprofessional to me. It didn't really move that slowly, but it was an unorganized mess that didn't inspire any confidence that you would reach the front anytime soon. Then, any delays on the runway reverberate noisily through the entire system, as there just aren't enough runways to deal with any kind of disruption.

The trip out was an interesting study in entitlement. The guy behind me in the security line tried to sneak in front of me at some point. This made no kind of sense. One place in line? What does that even get you? Unless I was just the first ring on a long chain of surreptitious movement. Then the guy sitting next to me on the plane kept sighing like Al Gore in a presidential debate every time our status was updated by the pilot on the runway. This was followed by more surreptitiousness (no, I didn't just get a word-of-the-day calendar), as he would call somebody on his cell phone well after being instructed not to use it. From what I could tell, he had some back problems as a result of carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Then there was the screaming baby to end all screaming babies, which made me very happy that I found my headphones that block out a goodly chunk of the outside world. God bless the iPod.

Dulles might just be under construction, but it didn't seem like a very nice airport. Got more quality time there on the return leg, but nothing really disabused me of that notion. The continual announcements to ignore the solicitations of cabbies is amusing. Makes me wonder if that has to do with lobbying.

Also, the "Club Lounge" in my hotel was in room 666. This could explain a lot about our government.

Kevin Drum flags some slow learning from the punditocracy. I would add that, if you voted for Bush on the basis of him making for a better drinking buddy, you still got jobbed, because he doesn't even drink anymore.

I seem to make a lot of references to TV this week. Must be sweeps.

( click here for this week's picks )

The link to a Washington Post story on how the government might seek to prosecute reporters appears to be broken.

This is how it begins. First they go after the reporters. Then the web links.

(cue X-Files theme music)

3-3 last week, 18-22 overall. And I didn't intend to pick a total of one point for six home teams, that's just the way it turned out.

Chicago 1 :: 0 Houston
Chivas USA 2 :: 0 New York
DC United 2 :: 1 Columbus
New England 2 :: 2 Dallas
Kansas City 2 :: 1 Salt Lake
Colorado 1 :: 0 Los Angeles

I guess it's only fair, seeing as how I know of at least three different songs in the last couple of years where she gets mentioned, that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gives Bono her top ten in today's Independent, for which the U2 frontman played guest editor.

I love when people of a certain age hold up some classic rock band as evidence that they're still kind of cool, as Rice does with Cream. It's a hard line to walk. I think David Souter did it better when he made reference to Modest Mouse.

And I actually like Kool & The Gang, but I don't know about "Celebration" being "just a great song."

This is pretty funny. Apparently the BBC's 24-hour news channel had a live on-air interview with someone totally different than they thought they were interviewing. As if that weren't enough, they couldn't even figure out who they interviewed. First, they thought he was their intended interviewee's cabbie, but it turns out he was in the offices interviewing for an IT job, and thought it was some sort of guerilla job-interviewing tactic.

The scary thing is, I don't doubt that the American 24-hour news channels have had this happen before, but nobody would notice over here.

Great op-ed piece in today's New York Times on the efficacy of the NSA phone record analysis. On guilt by association:

Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970's he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader's brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.

Everybody together: And this is an argument against the methodology?

I've got a quibble with this bit:

A second problem with the spy agency's apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the "strength of weak ties." As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you'd let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.

That's not saying that looking at points of contact won't work, it's just saying that you're looking for a different pattern than frequency of contact. Good data mining, after all, uncovers non-intuitive, more latent relationships between entities.

And speaking of abstract pattern recognition, here's a transcript of an interview with the guy who, literally, wrote the book on it.

Pearl Jam, Live and Alice In Chains all in the same week? Bust out those flannel shirts you've had in storage since 1993 or so.

Seriously, though, there's a metric assload of good shows this week.

( click here for this week's picks )