The Guardian notes the subterranean shift in US foreign policy while we can.

Yet beyond this immediate choice is a much larger question: will President Bush be ready to leave the White House with Iran still possibly edging crab-like towards secretly developing a nuclear weapon? Is he prepared to bomb Iran to prevent it, or at least to slow it down? We know that the Pentagon has contingency plans for bombing suspected nuclear sites, with the air force saying they could do it and the army crying out that it's their soldiers on the ground who will have to cope with Iranian-made retaliation in Iraq and elsewhere. In detailed surveillance and planning, the spooks and special forces are apparently down to the level of plotting individual air vents, seeping hot air or traces of radioactivity from possible hidden facilities (or maybe just boiler rooms - or decoys). We also know that the Pentagon's war-gaming of the consequences of bombing Iran ends with a bloody nose for the US, and that virtually all the political advice inside the US government is against it.

But in the end, one man will decide: Bush. And here's where we come back to that subterranean shift in attitudes towards the use of military force as the best means to win the "war on terror". Has it reached him? Will it reach him? His defiant and still militaristic rhetoric around the fifth anniversary of 9/11 suggests not. But rhetoric is one thing, reality another.

******

Cool but not something the average person will ever need:

The world's third-largest LCD TV maker said its "triple directional viewing LCD" splits the screen light into three different directions, generating a different image depending on whether the screen is being viewed from the left, center or right.


******

Patrick Wolf's Wind in the Wires was mentioned to me numerous times by Mulley over the past year, and even after he gave me the entire album (and I liked it) I managed to completely forget about it for about three months. Well, I finally shelled out for the CD and now Wolf is getting set to release his third album in Feburary 2007, preceded by singles this fall.

Wolf, still only 23, is your typical oddball singer-songwriter boy-wonder. With two LPs already to his name, he writes and plays all his own music, full of rickety violins, piano and orchestral arrangements juxtaposed against skittish beats and melodramatic vocals that owe at least a little bit to Pulp's Jarvis Cocker. The first new single is below:

Patrick Wolf / "Accident & Emergency" (yousendit)

******

Speaking of weirdos, Mark Linkous released his first new Sparklehorse album in five years on Tuesday. It's what you'd expect of the 'horse--fragile, creaky, melodic but occasionally loud. Pitchfork likes it, and also gives a decent synopsis of the stop-start way that it was put together. Linkous admits to making the album largely for financial reasons, so the fact that it doesn't sound totally thrown together is a pleasant surprise. It also explains why some older tracks and B-sides from previous LP recording sessions made it onto the album.

Fortunately one of those random songs is "Shade & Honey," which I first heard in 2002 in the trailer for the Christian Bale flick Laurel Canyon. Linkous wrote three songs used by the fictitious band in the film and he has a small role as a member of Alessandro Nivola's group; the song on the soundtrack and in the film is actually performed by Nivola. The Sparklehorse version has been floating around as a B-side since at least 2002, but this is the first time it's on a proper full-length.

Sparklehorse / "Shade & Honey" (left-click)

*******

Bill Simmons on Colbert. Not funny at all really, but it's interesting to see him on TV rather than print.

*******

Jason Whitlock has left ESPN, but not without some interesting stuff to say. I didn't always agree with Whitlock but he's a far more interesting journalist than Scoop Jackson, who he has some parting words for.

There's a big dropoff from being associated with Ralph [Wiley], Hunter [S. Thompson] and Bill [Simmons] than being linked to someone doing a bad Nat X impersonation. It pissed me off that the dude tried to call himself the next Ralph Wiley and stated some [shit] about carrying Ralph's legacy. ... Ralph was a grown-ass man who didn't bojangle for anybody. Scoop is a clown. And the publishing of his fake ghetto posturing is an insult to black intelligence, and it interferes with intelligent discussion of important racial issues. Scoop showed up on the scene and all of a sudden I'm getting e-mails from readers connecting what I write to Scoop. And his stuff is being presented like grown folks should take it seriously.