My impressions of last night’s concert:
Shirley Manson is hotter than an exploding star. My God, the woman is beautiful. But more importantly, she and the rest of the band put on one of the best musical performances I’ve seen in recent years. Manson tore into almost every song with self-assured relish. The playlist was equally divided between some of their older material and their new album, “Bleed Like Me.” As other Garbage fans might expect, the songs that generated the most enthusiastic crowd response, as well as the band’s most manic performances, included “Queer,” “Stupid Girl,” and “I Think I’m Paranoid.” But I also liked some of the newer, more metal-driven songs like “Run Baby Run” and “Bad Boyfriend.” Manson has a magnetic presence on stage; she was constantly in motion, prowling around the stage with a fierce, diva-like intensity. And when she spoke in between songs in that lovely Scottish brogue of hers, my heart shattered into a million tiny pieces.
First Ave was packed, but I found a good spot right behind the mixing board that afforded me an excellent view of the stage. I was completely boxed in by other people; this place is not for claustrophobics. On my right was a guy furiously playing air drums during the whole concert. Behind me was a cute dark-haired girl using my chair as an armrest. And what is it about me and drunks at a concert? During or after a show, some obviously intoxicated person always comes up to me and wants to be my friend. In their alcohol-induced hazes, they seem to think they’re doing me a favor by striking up a slurred conversation with me. This time, I got ambushed outside the club as I was heading home. Fortunately, a couple friends who happened to be walking down the sidewalk rescued me from this encounter.

Blogs can be put to all kinds of creative uses. Exhibit #1: A blog written in the voice of Darth Vader. Whoever’s behind this is a true Star Wars geek. He (or she; mustn’t discount the possibility) knows the names of Imperial Star Destroyers, minor characters, and obscure planets that are only casually referenced in the movies. The scary thing is that I don’t have to look up any of those references. The blog itself is actually rather funny. Here’s Vader describing his dispatch of an incompetent Imperial officer:
The problem is solved now, however. I crushed his trachea with my mind, and promoted Piett to command the fleet. I have transmitted to following note to Ozzel’s kin:
Dear House of Ozzel,
I regret to inform you that your son has been killed in the line of duty.
He was an incompetent, yammering boob and he will be missed by none. I have allowed the men to pillage his personal belongings, which is why we have enclosed nothing but the sole remaining item: a torn advertisements page from a magazine of midget pornography. May it shock and disturb you, and may you think of it always when you remember your dearly departed son, the ninny.
This is geek humor, so if you’re not a Star Wars fan, you’ll probably just be puzzled by the whole thing. I’d like to see more bloggers do metafiction like this. How about a blog as written by Sauron? Or by Professor Moriarty? I’m not sure it would work as well for “good” characters. A blog by Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins would probably come across as a lot of self-righteous sniveling and whining.

One little-noticed provision of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act is one that will severely limit the right of Medicare beneficiaries to receive in-person hearings in front of an administrative judge. These hearings usually occur when there’s a dispute about whether Medicare will pay for a certain service. In the past, beneficiaries would usually present their case to a judge in person. Now, hearings will be presented via videoconference. This has a lot of disability advocates concerned, and rightly so. It’s a lot more difficult to give a judge a complete picture of a person’s health when you’re communicating through a television screen. Sure, you can submit a whole forest’s worth of medical records, but that’s not the same thing as letting a judge see a person’s severe arthritis or labored breathing. One quirk of human nature is that we usually react most strongly to the things we can see ourselves. A stack of medical records doesn’t measure up to seeing someone sitting in front of you. But these are tight budget times and certain sacrifices must be made, I suppose. Let’s just hope that the video screens are high-definition.

The blogroll on the right side of this page has received a much-needed update and redesign. Have fun exploring the links and let me know if anything is broken.
Also, a big shout-out to my homie PZ Myers, who has a great op/ed piece in today’s Strib criticizing efforts to introduce intelligent design theory into our public schools. ID theory is basically creationism dressed up in a fancy suit and PZ does a good job of explaining why it’s pseudoscientific garbage.

If I have an extra hundred bucks lying around, I plan on using it to participate in National Geographic’s Genographic Project. You send them a DNA sample on a cheek swab and they’ll sequence it to determine your deep genetic ancestry. In other words, the results won’t tell you the identity of your great-great-grandmother, but it will show you your genetic connection to the earliest human beings and the specific migratory path of your ancestors as they journeyed from Africa and spread around the globe. If I had to guess the trajectory of my own ancestral migration, I would assume that they crossed from Africa into the Arabian peninsula and eventually into Eastern and Northern Europe. But I’d be really curious to see the actual results. I hope this project gets participation from a wide cross-section of the population, including indigenous peoples. Some people are already accusing the project of bio-prospecting for future genetic patents, a charge which the project directors vigorously deny. I can only imagine the number of hoops the directors had to jump through to get approval from their IRB (Institutional Review Board). Still, the collection of thousands, or even millions, of DNA samples will one day be attempted by a for-profit corporation with substantially fewer scruples. If we’re not careful, we could see human genomic research become the basis for future military or weapons applications. The general public gets all in a tizzy about cloning, but I think the real concerns lie in the fact that governments and corporations will eventually figure out how to make all those As, Ts, Cs, and Gs in the human chromosome do their bidding.