song for the health care debate

"I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)" by Conor Oberst from his eponymous album

The thing is, though, I kind of do want to die in the hospital. That is to say, as a self-employed person who pays a significant portion of my income for a shockingly meagre health plan, dying in a hospital seems pretty darn luxurious.

song for people who think the rise of twitter may mean the end of the world is nigh

"Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me
but you won't let those robots eat me"
--"Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I"
The Flaming Lips

I hate Twitter. I won't say I'll never be on it but only because I've learned to not make grand proclamations on Things I'll Never Do. (Hello there, Gabrielle version 2006 who swore she'd never blog -- how ya like me now?) But I actually do feel a revulsion toward Twitter that I've never felt toward any other social networking website or related technology, and that I'm not sure I can fully explain.

Our song comes from the year 2002 and everyone who knows me will know that it's one of my favorites.* I happen to like robots, though. One of the saddest things I read about the global economic crisis was that the recession in Japan was devestating the robot industry. It wasn't all going to be building robot girlfriends for the socially inept either. There were going to be robots to care for old people, and you know, we could really use those.

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*It is also one of Will Landsman's favorites as readers of Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac will surely know.

Song for Anxieties about the Escalation of Troops to Afghanistan

Ah, so many songs to choose from. It could have been "Road to Joy" by Bright Eyes or "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones (though that's about Vietnam and last night President Obama swore that Afghanistan is not Vietnam, right?...) or "It's a Hit" by Rilo Kiley. But we'll save all those for another day. I think I'm going with "Intervention" by Arcade Fire. (That's why it's sporting the bold, see.) I wrote half of my next book, The Hole We're In, listening to this one, by the way -- if you could wear out a digital file, I would have. I remember hearing that song for the first time in a hotel room in Santa Monica several years ago and thinking that I needed to get on writing better books.