So when I happened to hear a few weeks ago about some sort of This American Life live show that was happening at one of the NYU theaters, I bought tickets without thinking twice. I wasn’t really sure what a live stage version of a radio show would be like, but I figured it was bound to be worth seeing.

The show was last night, and I can confirm that it was, indeed, worth seeing. You may have heard about it, actually, if you follow technology news, because one of the interesting things about it is that it wasn’t just a stage show. It was a stage show that was broadcast, live and in HD, to movie theaters all over the country. The sheer technical logistics required to pull this off are pretty daunting if you think about them, and certainly we as the audience were aware that we were watching something unusual when we saw that the theater was full of pretty serious brodcasting equipment. Outside, there were a couple of trucks with their own wifi network my iPhone picked up and an oversized satellite dish.

But once the show actually got underway, I didn’t think much about the cameras except when a guy with a Steadicam wandered onto the stage once in a while, or the house lights would come up so they could get a shot of the audience. Because as it turns out, Ira Glass is exactly as capitvating on stage as he is on the radio, once you get past the deeply unsettling feeling that results from hearing a familiar radio voice coming out of an utterly unfamiliar head.

Much of the discussion was about the process of translating the radio show to television, as the second season of the Showtime series is starting on Sunday. I don’t subscribe to Showtime, but I did buy the first season when it became available in the iTunes store, and after the clips I saw last night I’m really looking forward to the second season. So to the extent that the event was probably at least in part designed to get us excited about the television series again, it was certainly a success. But I just enjoyed soaking up my favorite radio show in a completely different format, and I hope they do something like it again soon.

The damage? Essentially none. There isn’t a single mark on the touchscreen itself, not even a nick. On one of the side edges, there is the smallest of scratches, which I blame on the first subway platform incident. One of the cocktails left the Home button slightly sticky for a day or two; it has been fine since then. Really, the durability of the thing has far exceeded my expectations, particularly given how battered my iPods became after a few months of heavy use. All in all, I’m about has happy with it as I could be.

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.

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.

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.

Of course, MacBooks and Macbooks Pro were extremely popular – nothing surprising there. But what did surprise me was how many black MacBooks there were. I have never paid much serious attention to the black MacBook; after all, you’re paying an extra $200 for nothing but a slightly bigger hard drive and a paint job. I acknowledge that there are probably people for whom that drive bump makes all the difference. It’s just something that I would never buy, much like I would never have bought an iPod Mini. But I guess that extra $200 is nothing when you’re selling million dollar paintings, because I don’t think I saw a single regular MacBook at the show that wasn’t black.

Also very popular was the Sony VAIO, which I saw probably as often as the black MacBook and slightly less often than various configurations of MacBook Pro. And a few PowerBook hold-outs, particularly in the 12 inch model (which is of course still prevalent outside the art nerd world as well). Beyond that, only a handful of notebooks from neither Apple nor Sony, and I don’t think I saw any booths with no laptops at all.

Overall, a subtly different collection than you’d get among the average group of non-art nerds and wildly different from the average population, I suspect. Oh – and the art was good, too.

Last week was also Valentine’s Day, of course. Chris and I celebrated in our usual way — which is to say, we mostly ignored it, being not so much fans of going out in Manhattan on holidays. Interestingly, we both bought each other new notebooks. Mine is covered in fantastical monsters and came with roses, his features a monkey and came with a zombie card. (Yes, of course they’re both from Etsy. Where else would I find a valentine on the topic of zombie euthanasia?) All in all, a satisfying day completely free of last year’s 1800flowers.com nightmare.

And the third noteworthy event last week was that this site turned nine years old on the fifteenth. I am pretty sure that means it’s over the hill in Internets years; maybe I can use that to excuse the infrequency of my posts. And consider the usual regrets about missing the first year of archives appropriately expressed. Incidentally, this also means that this time next winter the site will be an entire gorram decade old, which is more than a little terrifying. I suppose terror cupcakes will be in order.

No, you don’t want to know what time I normally wake up.

The weirdest part is that it wasn’t even from my dentist, a lovely person who would never robocall me at coffee o’clock on a weekend morning. No, this was from a guy I went to exactly once, when I urgently needed to replace a lost filling about two years ago. I never went back to him because he was the kind of dick who interprets “I am raising my left hand repeatedly to indicate that I am actually not numb at all and wish you would stop drilling” as “I would like you to comment briefly on my probable pain and then just keep going.” And now I am getting automated birthday calls from him, I guess. So there’s that.