Cities aren't breaking open new boundaries but add them to the list of very competent new waveish rock bands out there (aka Interpol and everyone after).

Cities / "A Theme" (left-click from MySpace)

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I like the Office, and now I'm beginning to like Office, too.

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It turns out "An Inconvenient Truth" is more of an inconvenient set of half-truths.

Zing!

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Luke Wynn from Sports Illustrated takes a moment to pimp Sound Team.

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Kal Penn (aka Kumar) plays a serious role. And yep, that's Jacinda from the Real World: London.

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The softer side of Skeletor.

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One of my favorite blogs is No Frontin', who offered some cool links in addition to the usual barrage of quality tunes:

- The Times says:

"Neanderthals, too, may have had perfect pitch. In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at Reading University, argues that Neanderthals sang but did not speak, and that it was Homo sapiens’s development of language about 100-200 thousand years ago that allowed us to create the superior skills that, in their turn, allowed us to drive the Neanderthals into extinction. Thus music may not only not be of great cultural significance, it might even be an evolutionary hindrance, which may explain why babies discard perfect pitch."

The Guardian says:

"The flexibility of the English language allows us to imagine that we are an inherently witty nation, when in fact we just have a vocabulary and a grammar that allow for endlessly amusing confusions of meanings."

He also turned me on to Grand National, but I'll post more about them later.

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While on the topic of language, check out this fucking cool article:

The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist. Apparently colors aren't very important to the Pirahãs, either -- they don't describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."

Equally perplexing: In their everyday lives, the Pirahãs appear to have no need for numbers. During the time he spent with them, Everett never once heard words like "all," "every," and "more" from the Pirahãs. There is one word, "hói," which does come close to the numeral 1. But it can also mean "small" or describe a relatively small amount -- like two small fish as opposed to one big fish, for example. And they don't even appear to count without language, on their fingers for example, in order to determine how many pieces of meat they have to grill for the villagers, how many days of meat they have left from the anteaters they've hunted or how much they demand from Brazilian traders for their six baskets of Brazil nuts.

The debate amongst linguists about the absence of all numbers in the Pirahã language broke out after Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.

The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."