Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

A video remix of the Radiohead song played by old electronic equipment. Xiu Xiu on the n-philes forums brought it to my attention.

Up until this point I’ve done pretty well in avoiding giving breakdowns of "What I did on this day," because, well, they’re usually pretty silly and annoying. Or at least I think mine would be. But Friday was pretty cool. I went and saw The Happening with Allie and her family, which was… well, let’s just say the company I was with was better than the movie we were watching. Later that day me and a bunch of friends went up to Domy Houston (comic book/art/book/hipster toy store) for the Gary Panter book signing.

Gary Panter, for those unknowing (probably everyone reading this save for the people that went with me), is an underground "punk" comics guy who also paints, is a musician, an animator, an interior designer, and about a million other things. He’s done Frank Zappa album covers and had his stuff in about a million big-name magazines like Time. He also designed the set for Pee Wee’s Playhouse (won a few Emmys for that), which is why I got him to sign my copy of volume one of said show. He even drew some sweet pictures all over it. He was really nice and talked to me for a while (he didn’t seem to concerned with the line) about Paul Reubens, politics, and friends of his who also helped design stuff for the show.

A little later on he narrated an art slide show and told wacky stories about Matt Groening, psychedelic light shows, and who knows what else. All in all it was a pretty awesome day and you should all be jealous for not being there. Unless you were there. In which case, I’m glad you came.

Except for you, Steve. I hate you. Tonight I kill you in your sleep.

Okay, sorry about that guys. Back to not doing "what I did on _____day" posts.

The John Templeton Foundation published a great little pamphlet posing this question with essays from a handful of scientists, a mathematician,  a philosopher and an archbishop. There are arguments going both ways, and it all makes for some pretty good reading. You can either request a physical copy of the pamphlet or you can not be a baby and just read them online. My personal favorites are probably Steven Pinker’s, Michael Shermer’s and Victor Stenger’s, but it’s all worth looking over.

You can read the essays here if you’d like.

As most of you probably already know, I work at a book store. An unfortunate side effect of this is that sometimes I end up flipping through books that I would be better off not ever seeing the contents of. I don’t mean things that offend me morally, usually they’re just complete wastes of time that I feel dumber for laying my eyes on. Take for example the semi popular Bad Girls Guide to (whatever) series. My first encounter with these books was some time ago in the travel section with The Bad Girls Guide to the Open Road. I was looking through it to figure out if there was a way for me to not have to shelve it in my travel section (luckily I was able to expedite it to the “humor” section due to the terrible attempt by the book to be funny), and even the few pages I read were enough to make me want to carve off my kneecaps with a hacksaw. I’ve since flipped through a few more of the books in the series, including The Bad Girls Guide to Getting What You Want and The Bad Girls Guide to the Party Life. After the knowledge I’ve gained from these books, I’ve discovered the single most important thing you absolutely must do if you want to be a “bad girl.”

What is this thing, you might ask. What is it that you have to do to go from a kindly, reasonable human being to a sassy, bitchy, sexually independent bad girl? Well, the one thing that each and every one of these books that I’ve looked through had in common is that they all, at least once, recommend that while stopped at a stop light in your car, a cute guy in the car next to you with his window down is an open invitation to throw your panties out of your car window and into his lap. I guess this is supposed to be some kind of sexy tease that makes guys turn to putty in your hands or something. All it means is to me is that from now on at stop lights I will make sure to keep my window up, just in case someone actually bought one of those stupid ass books.