Here's a fun little comic strip about two NYC roommates, Alien and Predator.

Behold, Coochy Shave! It's the "extra gentle shaving lotion for private areas!"

...you dirty pagans.

It's all downhill from here.

The iPod decides this is the optimal way to start the work week:

1. Belly - Slow Dog . Classic early 90's college rock. Ahh.
2. Colorblind James Experience - Colorblind's Reel.
3. Sonic Youth - Purr. More classic early 90's college rock. More ahh.
4. Uncle Tupelo - Screen Door. "Where we're at / Everybody is equally poor"
5. Derek & The Dominos - Tell The Truth
6. Horace Silver - Safari.
7. Neil Young - Birds.
8. Spoon - No You're Not.
9. Yo La Tengo - Barnaby, Hardly Working. Great great song.
10. Stereolab - Des Etoiles Electronique.

...shall become the peepees.

[Cleveland City] Council unanimously passed a law this week ordering the city's adult bookstores to install video cameras in each peep-show booth to monitor what goes on.

Ron O'Leary, a Cleveland chief assistant director of code enforcement, said Thursday that council members were shocked last year to learn that some men masturbate while watching X-rated movies in the private booths.

"Any kind of sexual activity in a booth constitutes lewd behavior," said O'Leary. "Sexual activity includes masturbation or sex between two people. There is a law that forbids this activity in public and allows the city to close the business down where it occurs."

The cameras will only show images of peep-show customers between the neck and knees.

via Cleveland Plain Dealer.

I always knew there was something funky about Domino's pizza...

Oh, what new things have I acquired....

• Grandaddy - Sumday. The iPod loves this one, plays songs from it all the time. It's not as interesting as their preceding The Sophtware Slump, not as adventerous. The songs use a lot of the same sounds from the earlier record - the same yummy synth sounds and swirly production, but the songs themselves don't grab.
• Rogue Wave - Out of the Shadow. The iPod hates this one, never plays it, which is sad because I like it. In my own vast interconnected universe of bands and influences, Rogue Wave sits somewhere between Iron and Wine and The Shins, closer to the latter. They're not as sleepy as Iron and Wine, and not as jumpy as The Shins can be, but there's that same kind of laid-back, slightly dreamy guitar rock. I really like it, and play it at home quite often since I can't hear it at work (throws a scolding look at the iPod).
• The Cure - Pornography. Only ever had this one on cassette. So I figured I oughta get a digital copy. Not my favorite Cure album, but I like it well enough.
• White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan. It's a White Stripes record. If you've heard one, you've heard them all. Luckily, I like them, so I don't mind hearing more of the same. Sure, there are a few new angles here, but they aren't shocking - they're just new approaches to the same basic stuff, and there are little things on every White Strips record that stand out from the basic crunchy minimalist blues-rock thang. They just never explore those things for more than a song or two.
• Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine. Mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. It keeps growing on me, and the iPod loves it.

The other day, Jesse, at Pandagon, was slicing up a John Tierney column about raising the retirement age to save Social Security because older people are more physically fit and energetic than they want us to believe: the wicked AARP has succeeded in promoting a lower retirement age and now all those seniors are just loafing around avoiding work - or something.

Anyway... over this past weekend, I ran in a big race, the Race For The Cure. Over 18,000 people registered to run or walk in the three races (women-only 5K, open 5K and 1-mile fun run). There were approx 1000 timed runners in the race I ran, the open 5K, and an uncounted number of walkers - it was a mob. So, while thinking about Tierney's point, I wondered, do seniors perform at the same level as other age groups? I assumed the answer would be a resounding No, but wanted to know what the race results said. Luckily, the official results pages list the age of each competitor along with their time. So, I did a little text-fu on the results page and slipped the data into Excel, created a scatter plot and... here it is:

Just looking at the graph, the best conclusion I can draw (not being a statistician) about age vs 5K time is this: as age increases fewer runners of that age show up for big 5Ks; but, the times for those who do show up aren't remarkably slower than any other age group. The fastest 60+ runner wasn't as fast as the fastest 20-30 year old, but the slowest senior beat the slowest runners from the 18-55 group. And most of them fit nicely into the meaty section of the results from all ages.

That is all.

South Knox Bubba gets a great shot.