Sick

Sorry kids - it's been over a week, but don't fret; I have not abandoned you. I have, however, come down with the Norwalk (or Norwalk-like) virus, at least according to woman at 1-800-UnitedHealthCare. Today is the first day I have not dragged into work, and having run through my entire Office Collection, it seems the perfect time to update you on what you have inevitably missed from the past week:

1. Annie "Heartbeat" Video Leaked Released

You can find it at Annie's official website. And yes, it is awesome. And yes, I still maintain that the Pitchfork redesign blows.

2. Observer Continues Dapper Irrelevance

On the perils of NYC restaurant lighting:

"I have walked right out of restaurants because the lighting was so bad," Jennifer Loeber, a magazine photo editor in New York, told me last week. She decried fluorescent bulbs and bad ceiling spotlights that "can make you look half dead."

So true.

2. Google Video!

On the contining brilliance of Google, the company that could do no wrong:

The premise: there’s a lot of information on TV that’s just passing into the ether; Google, being in the biz of indexing (and commoditizing) all information in the world ever period, did something so simple and sensible we’re surprised it’s never been done before: set up a bunch of machines to capture and index all the closed captioning data on the line (and grab a few screen shots along the way for context). [Thanks Engadget!]

3. Album Leaks

The BitTorrent unvierse saw bootleg copies of new Doves, Beck and Daft Punk albums surface. Are any of them any good? Don't know; after the now-ancient Radiohead HTTT debackle, I've given up downloading pre-release albums. Here, however, are early reactions to NewDaftPunkAlbum from one well-conXed blogger:

And now that I've hedged a bit, I'll say that I think Human After All marries the aesthetics of Homework and Discovery well and I really like it a lot of it. The songs are mostly loop-based, though, and don't really go anywhere. That isn't necessarily a problem but it'll be interesting to see what I think once the excitement subsides. [Thanks OneLouder!]

So there you go.

In other news: Arcade Fire interviewed in Interview, angstidentprone gets a new look (don't ask me what it all means), Interpol get a new show added (tix go on sale Thursday at 10, with Blonde Redhead opening), and sledding is so much fun. Seriously.

Now it's time to sleep again. Wish we well folks.