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The Guardian recently interviewed Dave Eggers and found that the Staggering Genius is no more.

Time to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don't you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). "No, not at all," he says. There is a look of mild amazement on his face as he tells me this and it's not disingenuous; as he will explain later, he feels a certain sense of distance from his old self. Perhaps he prefers not to remember exactly how he used to be.

Tags: Dave Eggers   interviews

This chart from the utility company EPCOR contrasts water consumption in Edmonton, Alberta on two different days. February 27th is charted to show a normal day. February 28th was the day Canada won the Olympic gold medal hockey game. As you can see, a huge percentage of their customers waited for breaks in the game to “go”. Link -via reddit

Sometimes you can see a cover coming a mile away. I know “Twist and Shout” was the first song Bruce Springsteen learned to play on the guitar, so when the E Street Band plays it live, I’m not exactly surprised. There are times when a musician or a band covers a song, though, and I’m absolutely flabbergasted. Sometimes it’s because the song is played in a style far removed from the original. Sometimes it’s because the two artists’ music, style and personalities seem at odds. Sometimes it’s simply because I didn’t know that artist loved that song so much. While the Boss’ rendition of “Twist and Shout” is pretty good, it’s covers like these –- the ones that come seemingly out of left field –- that can really put a smile on your face.

“The Wizard” – Ahmet Zappa, Dweezil Zappa and John Tesh

John Tesh is a pianist and a composer and performer of pop and contemporary Christian music. He toured with Yanni. He played a Klingon in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He actually released an album called Sax on the Beach (and you thought that was just a Simpsons joke!). Making fun of him is sort of like unleashing the nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia on a single barrel of fish. He is, to say the least, a little uncool.

Every dork must have his day, though, and one night on Conan, Tesh got to sit at the cool kids’ table and jam on some Black Sabbath with Frank Zappa’s boys. The keytar finally makes sense to me.

“Romeo and Juliet” – The Killers

Brandon Flowers is correct on two points here: Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the most beautiful songs you will ever hear, and his band probably could not do it justice. I’ll tell you what, though. Never in the Killers’ jittery, 80’s-style alterna-rock did I get a whiff of the kind of deep, abiding love for the Dire Straits that they’re talking about here, and anyone who loves ‘em like that is alright with me. No one could do this song justice, but we can’t blame the kids for trying.

“Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” – The Cardigans

There are three kinds of bands that come out of Sweden: Phenomenal death metal bands, terrible death metal bands and bands that remind you of ABBA if only because they’re from Sweden and don’t play death metal. The Cardigans are in the third category and are best remembered for their first international hit, “Lovefool.” If you’re in the vast majority of people that remember them only for this, then it might shock you that not only did the Cardigans make music before and after “Lovefool” and are actually still around, but they put a Black Sabbath cover on their debut album. It actually sounds pretty awesome with sugary sweet vocals and Rhodes piano.

“Oops! I did it again” – Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson has earned an Orville H. Gibson award for his acoustic guitar playing, an Ivor Novello Award for his songwriting and a lifetime achievement award from BBC Radio. He has never shaved his head nor shown his genitals in public (at least that I’m aware of). He’s about as un-Britney as one can get, and yet, he makes the song his own.

“2 Become 1” – Paul Gilbert

Paul Gilbert is regularly included on those “Greatest Shredders of All Time” and “Fastest Guitarists of All Time” lists. It’s true; he’s pretty good. Like, mile-a-minute-fret-board-melting-OMG-how-many-hands-does-this-guy-have good. (Also: former member of Mr. Big, but we can see past these things). You really want to think that this Spice Girls cover going to be some self-indulgent technical exercise where he noodles all over the song, and it is, but only at the end (followed by a special surprise). For the most part, it’s pretty faithful to the original, and the way he talks at the beginning of the video makes it seem like he genuinely loves the song, which is sort of endearing.

“Breakin’ the Law” – The Supersuckers

The self-proclaimed “Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World” have been known to make occasional forays into country music. With this song, they drag Mr. Rob “the Metal God” Halford, kicking and screaming with them.

“Fat Bottomed Girls” – Oxford University’s Out of the Blue

The fine young gentlemen of Oxford University –- who, in my mind, still considered powdered wigs and breeches “casual attire” –- recite the lyric “left alone with big fat fanny/she was such a naughty nanny/heap big woman you made a bad boy out of me” and all is right with the world.

On February 27th, someone created a Facebook group that’s called “MY SISTER SAID IF I GET ONE MILLION FANS SHE WILL NAME HER BABY MEGATRON.” Already there almost 750,000 fans, and the due date isn’t until August. And over at the discussion boards, one thread asks what the middle name will be.

Easy: Destroyer of Worlds.

Link (Image: ©Hasbro)  -via College Humor

The Dems have hit a bit of an ethics and scandal rough patch of late. But let's be honest. They've got quite a ways to go before they get into GOP 2002-08 territory. To put it mildly. Good of them for pointing that out.

How soon they forget.

Or rather, how soon some Republicans think people will forget all of what happened ... what, two years ago?

Hill Dems to Rahm: Enough of the deadlines for health care reform!

If you want to try human breast-milk cheese, make sure you stop in at Klee Brasserie in New York City the next time you visit. It's made from the chef's own wife, and he tells the New York Post, "It tastes like cow's-mik cheese, kind of sweet," and changes flavor depending on "what the mother eats." His wife says, "The breast is there to make food." Maybe, but I'm thinking this is a good way to shave a little off the cheese budget.

(I'm so sad nobody can comment on this post for now.)

"NYC Restaurant Serves Breast-Milk Cheese" [The Daily Beast]

Wisconsin's lemon law for cars is pretty strict. If a customer demands a refund on a newly bought car that won't run and can't be repaired, the manufacturer has to comply within 30 days or pay double the purchase price plus legal fees. Marco Marquez has been fighting Mercedes-Benz for 4 years now over a $56,000 E 320 he bought in 2005 that immediately stopped working. He says the company deliberately stalled on giving him the refund in time, and last week a judge awarded him $482,000.

Because the lawsuit keeps dragging on--a judge ruled in his favor in 2007, then an appeals court overturned it and a jury sided with Mercedes, the last week another judge overturned the jury verdict--the cost of the payout keeps ballooning. In 2007, the award was $202,000. Of that $482,000 awarded last week, only $168,000 covers the car (double the purchase price plus interest).

Marquez says whether he ever sees the money or not, he'll never buy another Mercedes--although he says he's still driving this one until the company gives him a refund.

"Mercedes-Benz hit with large 'lemon law' judgment" [Associated Press via Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

The dramatic 911 emergency call from James Sikes, the driver of yesterday's runaway Toyota Prius, indicates how frightened he was and how aware CHP dispatchers are of the procedure needed to stop a Prius. Audio below the jump. More »

Matt Hardigree

The Toyota Tundra rusted-through frame recall's probably expanding, like the company's headaches. [Pickuptrucks] More »

Ben Wojdyla

Jessica Palmer at the blog Bioephemera recently had a bad run-in with a bookseller on Amazon, which she talks about at great length in a post. The mistake she made, she says, was that she didn't exercise due diligence in researching the seller for complaints, and she didn't read through all the many reviews on Amazon to see if the negative ones demonstrated a pattern. But her bigger issue is that there's still no way to shame a bad retailer the way local news stations do with local brick and mortar stores, which is why it's so important to stick by your complaints once you make them.

She writes that the bookseller, which had ignored her emails during the month she waited for her book to arrive, contacted her immediately once she'd left a negative review on Amazon and asked her to change it in exchange for a refund on shipping fees. Palmer notes that for many customers, it might be appealing to make a little extra money back in exchange for retracting a bad review, but it hurts the whole system:

What's so wrong with buying off disgruntled customers? Isn't it the nice thing to do - to give them a token of apology for their trouble? Sure. But the net effect of this practice is detrimental to the buyer community as a whole, since the bad seller's feedback rating is no longer an accurate reflection of its performance. The buyers who have been bought off with the token of apology are still unhappy, after all! They're just less unhappy. Competitor sellers who actually engage in good business practices, accurately describe their merchandise, and have decent customer service still didn't get that valuable sale. And most importantly, the feedback information used by future buyers to pick the sellers they want to buy from is not accurate, so in future transactions, both good actor competitors and buyers will continue to lose out.

[...]

Even if you have no ideas for changing the system, I urge you to think about the feedback you do leave as a public service. Truthful feedback really can help other buyers avoid getting ripped off, and direct business to sellers who act in good faith. And while it may feel futile or pointless, it's one of those benefits that can only accrue if a lot of us chip in for no immediate reward.

"Shaming in the Marketplace: who polices online sellers scammers?" [Bioephemera]

Nancy Pelosi may be convinced that we have to pass health care reform in order to find out what's in it, but if it passes, there's at least one provision we can already count on: an individual mandate to buy health insurance. Polling shows that this requirement is one of the bill's least popular features, so it's not exactly surprising to find that states are taking action to allow individuals to bypass such requirements. More than 30 states are considering such laws, and a ban on mandatory insurance has already passed in the Virginia Senate.

Will these individual protections work? An article in TPM yesterday says that Virginia's law is "almost certainly unconstitutional" because "the Constitution's federal supremacy clause makes clear that when federal and state law conflict, federal law takes precedence."

I asked a couple of legal and constitutional scholars what they thought, and the consensus seems to be that though state laws barring mandatory insurance shouldn't be unconstitutional, it's likely that if health reform were passed and they were challenged, the Supreme Court would rule that they are. However, we don't actually know for sure, and there is legal precedent for the Supreme Court to side with a state in a federal/state dispute.

All of them also noted that, regardless of whether or not these laws and amendments eventually stand up to challenge, they're strong political signals of opposition against the insurance mandate—which is arguably the centerpiece of the Democrats' federal health care overhaul (the other key regulations don't work without a mandate). 

On the constitutional question, Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute says, "It isn't simply the Supremacy Clause that would make the state law unconstitutional, but rather the constitutionality of the federal statute together with the Supremacy Clause and the inconsistent state law." In other words, the Supremacy Clause alone wouldn't render Virginia's law unconstitutional. Instead, it would be struck down only if and when a federal individual mandate was passed and ruled constitutional.

Like many of those I got in touch with, Pilon thinks the better bet is that, should a mandate be enacted, it would be ruled constitutional—though he also thinks it probably shouldn't be. (For more on that, see here and here.)

There is, however, some question over whether such a ruling would actually invalidate state law. As this Wall Street Journal piece notes, "If Congress passes some version of health legislation, the federal law may preempt these state laws. But states do have the right to provide extra protections beyond what federal law guarantees. Many states, for example, have freedom of speech protections that go beyond federal law."

In Arizona, which will vote on a constitutional amendment that preserves the freedom of individuals to decline to participate in any health care system this November, the Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick has prepared a Q & A on the issue. In it, he notes several legal precedents which suggest that states might be able to preserve individual protections. In particular, he singles out a case involving a "right-to-die" law in Oregon:

In the case most closely on point, Gonzales v. Oregon (2006), the Court upheld the state’s “right-to-die” law, which was enacted by Oregon voters, over the objections of the U.S. Attorney General, who argued that federal law pre-empted the state law. Applying “the structure and limitations of federalism,” the Court observed that states have great latitude in regulating health and safety, including medical standards, which are primarily and historically a matter of local concern. Holding that the attorney general’s reading of the federal statute would mark “a radical shift of authority from the States to the Federal Government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality,” the Court interpreted the statute to allow Oregon to protect the rights of its citizens.

In other words, though perhaps unlikely, it's not impossible that state laws preserving an individual right to opt out could survive legal challenge. And no matter what, the existence of these laws send a fairly powerful political signal—one that will almost certainly factor into the decisions now being made by undecided House members.

The U.S. Supreme Court is agreeing to decide how much personal information the federal bureaucracy may acquire on its workers.

The justices, without comment, decided Monday to review a lower-court decision surrounding the concept of so-called “informational privacy.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down intrusive background checks last year on nearly three dozen National Aeronautics and Space Administration contractors as being too invasive — calling them an unconstitutional, “broad inquisition.”

The checks sought information from any source surrounding their sex lives, finances and even drug use. The contractors being investigated were not privy to classified information.

The Obama administration, in seeking review of the lower-court decision, told the justices the checks were the same type conducted on all federal government workers -– now numbering about 14 million. The background checks are part of a 2004 security directive from President George W. Bush.

“The ramifications of the decision below are potentially dramatic,” the Obama administration told the justices in its petition to the court. The justices likely will hear the case this fall.

The NASA contractors worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which generally engages in the scientific study of the earth and solar system. They sued, successfully stopping the government from delving so extensively into their backgrounds.

The administration said collecting the information, as opposed to disseminating it, was constitutionally acceptable.

See Also:

• Court’s Steroid Ruling Pumps Up Computer Privacy
• Google Book Plan Hits Privacy Snag
• VeriChip’s Merger With Credit Monitoring Firm Worries Privacy Activists
• Airport Scanners Can Store, Transmit Images
• Court Stiffs Veterans Caught in Privacy Breach

Two artists have been playing pretty games with the UK Royal Mail’s automated sorting offices. It seems the machines simply read the colour of stamps to check whether the correct postage has been used, so it doesn’t matter what shape they are. Kim Rugg and John Spurgeon each use proper stamps, only they are cut into tiny pieces to create the art on the envelopes. As long as it’s cancelled, it counts! Rugg creates tentacled monsters (pictured), fireworks and beach scenes, while Spurgeon has a collection of vintage postcards sent with confetti postage called ShakesMyMail.

Link to Kim Rugg’s work. Link to John Spurgeon’s Flickr set.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by longbird.

I took an unusual road trip yesterday, to a cemetery near the Mexican border. There’s nothing inherently unusual about visiting a cemetery, of course, except that in this case, I didn’t know anyone who was buried there. Technically speaking, no one does.

Some people call it the Juan Doe cemetery. It’s a potter’s field: hundreds of anonymous paupers’ graves, unadorned save for a single, dun-colored brick assigned to each, spread across a few muddy acres of ground on the outskirts of a one-horse farm town a few miles from California’s border with Mexico — the kind of place where residents have grown accustomed to desperate strangers knocking on their doors in the dead of night to beg for food and water. They are undocumented migrants, and those that don’t survive their journeys and cannot be identified end up here, among the indigent dead of Imperial County. It’s a sad and symbolic place, and one I wanted to see for myself.

Just as these tragedies are largely hidden, so too are the graves. The Terrace Park cemetery looks like any other from the road, with its manicured grass, shade trees and neatly-tended plots.

Along the back of the cemetery, a narrow opening in the hedges reveals a long, muddy lane rutted by backhoes and bulldozers, which can dig and fill a pauper’s grave in just fifteen minutes. At the end of the lane, beyond a second row of weedy shrubs, lie the indigent, the undocumented, and the unknown.

As I walked down the lane, the breeze shifted and I was overwhelmed by a sudden stench. I was downwind, I realized with some relief, from a nearby feed lot.

A pauper’s burial costs about $1,000. That includes the brick, a simple wooden coffin, and a concrete grave-liner — stacks of which I noticed at a corner of the lot.

A group called the Border Angels visits the cemetery every so often to plant tiny wooden crosses and say prayers over the graves.

The only official signage are these cave-in warnings, planted every few rows.

It had just rained, and indeed, some of the graves were caving in. The wooden cross reads “No Olvidados,” or “Not Forgotten.”

These were not easy deaths. People interred here perished alone in moonscape deserts from heat exposure, suffocated in airless trucks, drowned in canals and rivers, were killed by wild animals, and were struck by lightning. There are even unconfirmed stories of migrants dying in explosions while being snuck through military bombing ranges.

Despite the fact that migration from Mexico has fallen off somewhat due to the recession, migrant deaths are still on the rise. Some of them, inevitably, will end up among these anonymous stones, or in the dirt lot adjacent, which sits empty, waiting for the dead.

A day after a 2008 Toyota Prius went rogue at speeds over 90mph on a California interstate, Toyota has announced that is adding a few hundred thousand more vehicles to its already record-setting global recall.

According to a spokesperson for Toyota, the specifics of the newest additions to the recall list haven't been announced yet because the car giant "hasn't developed the remedy yet."

The 2008 Prius was already on the recall list for floormats that were causing the accelerator to stick to the floor of the vehicle, but Toyota had merely been telling owners to remove their floormats until a fix was figured out.

After yesterday's incident in California, the owner of the car told reporters that he had received a recall notice and had attempted to have his vehicle serviced at a dealership, only to be told that his car was not on the list.

Last night, both Toyota and NHTSA said they were taking the Prius incident seriously and were each sending inspectors out to take a look at the car. It is not yet known if the car's floormat was the culprit in Monday's case of the runaway hybrid.

Toyota Working on Prius Recall Fix [WSJ]

The recently unveiled secret agreement that Apple makes iPhone developers sign supports what many have suspected all along: Apple is trying to control the universe.

Much has been written anecdotally about the Apple app-approval process, with the words “arcane” and “Kafkaesque” coming up a lot. But the letter (and crimping spirit) of the agreement was a matter of pure speculation until the Electronic Frontier Foundation had the clever idea of making one developer an offer he couldn’t refuse.

That developer was NASA — a government agency that can’t exactly keep all the secrets it might want to — and the offer was really a demand under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit organization that defends free speech, privacy, innovation and consumer rights. Senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann used an FOIA request to compel NASA to release Apple’s nondisclosure agreement for iPhone developers. Apple forces developers to sign the NDA before they can access the software development kit for the iPhone OS, which also powers the iPad.

Apple is possibly one of the most tight-lipped companies on the planet, so glimpses like this into its inner workings are rare. Making matters worse, the agreement itself bars developers from making “public statements” about the agreement’s terms, so without this confluence of events, it may never have come to light. As Wired.com’s Dylan Tweney tweeted, “The first rule of the iPhone developer program is: You do not talk about the iPhone developer program.”

A full recounting of the contract is reported by Gadget Lab’s Brian X. Chen. Judging from the March 17, 2009, revision of the agreement (.pdf), Apple’s treatment of app developers doesn’t come near putting them in a virtual sweatshop, and indeed, some of them should probably thank Apple for creating the platform that made them rich.

That said, Apple exerts total control over which programs are allowed to run on the iPhone OS run by the iPhone, iPod Touch and the upcoming iPad, from the early development stage all the way to the marketplace. As I pondered last week, “Who would have thought that in 2010 everyone would be so excited about a computer that only runs software approved by its manufacturer?”

The iPod was a music player, but an iPad is a computer. As Apple migrates its App Store model from MP3 players and cellphones onto a computing platform that for some, could replace a laptop, the company’s rules about what those app developers can and can’t do are coming under increasing scrutiny. Just think about what would happen if Microsoft were to demand such authority over the software that runs on its tablet PCs. One can only imagine the backlash.

With the iPad, however, many seem willing to lock themselves in a walled garden of approved software and throw away the key. (Yes, we know, you can jailbreak the iPhone OS and install whatever you want, but that comes with its own set of trade-offs.)

Terms of service often bar signatories from all sorts of normal-seeming behavior, so the non-lawyers among us should take these with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, Apple’s choice to sell devices that only run approved software, and only software sold in its own store, could ultimately make people wonder whether the cameras in the company’s infamous “1984″ commercial may have been pointed in the wrong direction.

See Also:

• Apple Change Quietly Makes iPhone, iPad Into Web Phones
• Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit,’ Adobe Is Lazy: Apple’s Steve Jobs
• Apple Adds and Removes ‘Explicit’ Category from App Store
• Apple Explains Semi-Ban of Sex Apps
• Apple’s Next Revolutionary Product: iTunes
• Apple Tablet Will Likely Support 2 Kinds of Apps

When Wired.com's Autopia recently chose a list of ten perfect snowpocalypse vehicles, the site's readers howled in protest. After enduring a pummeling over their choices, the staff invited those readers to come up with their own list. Here it is. More »

Wired Autopia

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about cliches, maxims and other writing traps I'm always trying to avoid when my companion pointed out most of the ones I was referencing come from Shakespeare, George Bernard Show, Mark Twain or Jesus. There's "blessed are the poor" and "the lady doth protest too much" and "I have never let schooling interfere with my education." Also, from Shaw: "sincerity is everything, once you can fake that the rest is easy." We don't know if Vavon205 is faking it or not in his response to our QOTD, but if he is the rest is easy. More »

Matt Hardigree