I recieved an email from Susan over at Indigo Bridge letting me know that they’ve extended their hours to include Sundays. Indigo Bridge will now be open:

• Mon-Wed 8am-6pm
• Thurs 8am-10pm
• Fri-Sat 8am-11pm
• AND Sundays 12pm-10pm.

I feel like a shill since I didn’t get a chance to make it over for their Grand Opening, but as fate would have it, my schedule got a little backed up last weekend. If anyone made it to their Grand Opening, please let me know how it went, and feel free to share your impressions of the store.

In related news:
The Cultiva Coffee location on 15th and South now offers video rentals. via

Cultiva Coffee Roasting Co., 1501 South St., has bought 3,600 DVDs from Spindle Records, 122 N. 14th St., a collection that includes predominantly independent, foreign and Criterion Collection films…

…Movie rentals are $1.49 each, and if you buy a pound of coffee, you get a free rental. The shop also will buy and sell DVDs.

Well, add one more to the list of completely useless laws. In what can only be seen as a ploy to butter-up voters John McCain wrote and G’Dub passed the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008 (sic) on Monday.

The intent of this law is to keep perverts from being able to sign up for accounts on social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. How it will work is that registered sex offenders will be required to submit their email address to a database which sites can then query during the registration process to help weed out the bad eggs. Granted this all sounds well and good until you consider the fact that it takes like five minutes to register an anonymous webmail account.

Wired has a little better coverage on the law, along with the history of where this bill came from. My favorite tidbit of the article it this:

Here, Fox’s interests and McCain’s converge perfectly. For any social networking site, it’s much easier to check an e-mail address than to effectively police message boards and friends lists for signs of predation. And this plan allows McCain to appear tough on child predators, while opposing more serious efforts against pedophiles that offend the far right.

Here’s a couple things to help liven up your Thursday.

• First off is a track from Marnie Stern, she plays some pretty catchy mathcore rock. It’s fun, uptempo music to start your night off right.
  
• It never fails to amaze me that people can get even creepier than they already are. Here is an interview that Matt Lauer did with women who collect “Unliving Dolls” which are eerily lifelike/lifesize baby dolls that cost upwards of $4,000. The saddest bit is that some of these women treat the dolls like real children.
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• For a good chuckle check out the Passive Aggressive Photostream on Flickr. You might even learn a new word.
• The rumor mill has it that NetFlix might allow streaming to Macs by year’s end. This is good news for people who don’t want to run Parallels/Windows just to watch movies on their Mac. For those who don’t want to hold their breath on a rumor, you can already watch a smattering of flicks on Hulu.com, or if you are a NetFlix member with an Xbox 360 you could just wait until November when their Fall Update hits the street. If this rumor turns out to be true, my question is how will this effect Apples iTunes video service?
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Remember to watch the Vice Presidential Debates tonight. They start at 8pm Central Time, and are airing on pretty much all of the major networks.

Some quick news to ponder on the ride home:

• It’s about damn time. A spokesperson for the Anglican Church admits that the Church of England owes renown scientist Charles Darwin an apology for trashing his theory of evolution. After 200 years of encouraging naïvety you have to wonder if the admission is even worth the trouble? Charles Darwin’s great-great grandson, Andrew Darwin doesn’t, it sounds like he thinks the apology is a load of bull-dung. via
• Researcher James Barrett theorizes that Viking rage wasn’t caused by want of glory or blood lust, but was most likely due to a ferocious need to get laid. According to Barrett’s theory the practice of female infanticide had dwindled the female population so much that lusty young men sought to conquer ladies from far off lands. via
• My passion for video games feels a little bit vindicated by a recent report that video games might not be all that bad for kids, since it is a good way to encourage social interaction amongst their peers. via

Rollingstone has a nice little article on How Bush Destroyed the Republican Party.Apparently, it’s not entirely uncommon for the Republican party to tear itself asunder and rise again. It’s kind of like a phoenix that way, but instead of rising from the ashes they slap a roll of duck tape on and douse themselves in holy water to hide the bloated stench of their undead political party.

• It’s time to point your telescope away from your neighbor’s bedroom and turn it up towards the sky. There will be a partial lunar eclipse this Saturday evening—8.16.08. via
• In natural science news, it seems that Octopuses may be less eight-legged than we originally thought. It’s more like they have two back legs, two front arms and the other four appendages kind of help out in either direction depending on the situation. Also, scientists are noticing that individual Octopuses have their own distinct personality. Which begs the question, is it ethical to eat something that has a favorite color? via
• Sugar coated paper may hit the market soon. Don’t get any ideas, this isn’t edible paper. What they are doing is extracting the lignin from sugar cane and creating a waterproof coating that can be applied to paper. The benefit would be that the ligin coating would replace traditional wax coating, which is a petroleum product, making the paper 100% recyclable and helping us to be that much less dependent on a finite resource. via

That’s right, Trent Reznor may finally get to realize his film aspirations. Trent has recently pitched the idea of turning his 2007 concept album Year Zero into a two season maxi-series for HBO, and from his point of view everything went well.

I just pitched it to HBO two weeks ago in L.A. It went great. Ideally, we’re trying to get them to do a two-year limited series. I prefer that over a film. We would have a second ARG tying into the second album and ties into the series and they all happen together with a budget needed to pull that all off. There would be a tour down the road. The record completes the story, the ending that no one knows. I know what happens. I knew when I started it. And it’s not what people think.

As I said back in the day Year Zero was always intended to be more than just an album, as was evident by the backstory that was laid out in an elaborate ARG that preceded the disc’s release. I for one am excited to see this vision realized, dystopic futures and paranoid conspiracies are the syrup on my pancakes.