From the public service department here at Caoine.org, step by step instructions on evading the all-encompassing sense of doom and despair that so frequently crops up on Sundays. (At least, my Sundays.)

1. After a full week of being quite miserably ill, score a full night of sleep unmarred by coughing fits of any kind and interrupted only by the occasional cat paw gently inserted into mouth.
2. Spend the morning painting your nails, catching up on RSS feeds, avoiding genuine productivity of any sort, and skipping breakfast.
3. Around noon, head to the Village for an extravagant brunch with Saucy Nicole at Five Points. Get to feel like a rock star when you’re seated immediately while all the no-reservations suckers stand around outside in the drizzle. Stuff yourself with churros and home fries and specialty cocktails, making up for that whole skipping breakfast thing.
4. Proceed immediately home while still full and tipsy and fall asleep on the couch watching Roman Holiday. This may escalate to a full-on nap heap involving all members of the household, both human and feline.
5. Wake up as it’s getting dark and realize you don’t have to make dinner because you’re still full from brunch. Score!
6. Sunday Blues successfully averted; spend the remainder of the evening however you wish. I recommend catching up on email and listening to Beirut.

Next year it will be a decade that I’ve lived in New York, and one of the things I have come to love about the city is the ubiquitous union rat. It seems like almost every neighborhood I’ve worked or lived in has had a rat nearby for some period of time, and in fact there’s one near my new office right now. However, I only recently started to consider exactly how many union rats must exist in the world for me to have seen such a large number of them. There must be so many, in fact, that surely there’s a company whose primary business is the production of inflatable rats. And what about the people who work in the inflatable rat factory? Are they unionized? If so, what happens when the Inflatable Rat Makers Union goes on strike? Do they set up an inflatable rat outside the inflatable rat factory?

It turns out that there is, of course, a company that produces the union rats: Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights. And in fact there is a whole variety of union rats: small rats, big rats, rats with festering scabby bellies and rats without. For the union that’s sick of giant rats, there are giant inflatable cockroaches, inflatable greedy pigs with top hats, inflatable corporate fat cats, the works. Big Sky itself is, interestingly, a non-union shop, so I suppose the inflatable rat workers won’t be striking anytime soon. Even so, I am now convinced that Chris and I need a six-foot rat for our apartment. It could live on the balcony and scare away the pigeons.

I’m confident that if you’re the sort of person who listens to Nine Inch Nails even a little bit, you have heard about Ghosts I-IV by now. I pre-ordered one of the physical editions earlier this week, and after a couple of false starts I managed to download the digital version that came with it. I tried to keep my expectations fairly low. Honestly, doesn’t it sound like there’s kind of a lot that could have gone wrong with a 36-track album that’s entirely instrumental and was created in only ten weeks?

In reality, though, it’s hard for me to imagine an album more perfectly tailored to my tastes. I have always loved the instrumental bits on previous NIN albums; they’re often my favorite tracks. And this is exactly the kind of instrumental music I like best: there’s enough going on to keep my attention on the subway, but at the same time it’s unobtrusive enough for me to leave on while I’m working. I’m also infatuated with this album’s sound, which reminds me at times of everything from older NIN to newer Skinny Puppy. Certain tracks sound a lot like PlatEAU to me, too, but at the same time I don’t really get the sense that Ghosts as a whole is derivative of anything in particular, perhaps because there’s a distinct NIN flavor that’s never far away.

I also really appreciate the attention to the little non-music details, like the way each track already has its own album art when you download it, or the digital extras pack that comes with the music. All in all, with the possible exception of the server problems earlier in the week, I’d say this release is a definite success.