To the semi-drunk woman at First Avenue who gave me a thumbs-up and shouted in my ear, “Way to get out!”: thanks for the encouragement. The home doesn’t give me day passes very often and I usually have to be back for lights-out at 9. But sometimes you have to buck the rules, y’know? And tomorrow is when I get my regular weekly bedbath, so life is looking pretty good.

The concert itself wasn’t bad. Duffy’s voice has a disconcerting warble in its live version, but that may improve with more touring experience. Assuming she avoids an implosion of Amy Winehouse proportions, she could be an interesting artist to watch.

Got about 45 minutes to kill? Check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a series of web videos starring Neil Patrick Harris (remember Doogie Howser?) and Nathan Fillion (remember Firefly?). Harris plays Dr. Horrible, a somewhat shy and awkward aspiring supervillain who desperately wants admittance to the Evil Council of Evil. Fillion plays Captain Hammer, Horrible’s cocky himbo of an archnemesis. Joss Whedon (remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) wrote the script and it’s chockful of his trademark snark. Oh, and it’s a musical, but not too musical, if that makes sense.

In short, it’s pretty great. It has geek appeal, but it doesn’t leave everyone else scratching their heads. Whedon has already committed to doing more episodes, which can’t come soon enough.

AMC’s Mad Men returns this week for another season. I haven’t been watching much television this summer, but my TiVo stands ready to record these new episodes. Set in 1960 New York and its bucolic suburbs, the show takes a magnifying glass to a Manhattan ad agency; its executives, pitch men, and secretaries. And through their stories, we see a country that is making the transition from the buttoned-down, conformist Fifties to the freewheeling, iconoclastic Sixties. The writers are particularly good at exploring the sexual politics of the era. It’s fascinating to watch these ad men discuss how to sell a brand of soap to America’s wives while they brazenly demean and exploit their own female colleagues. It’s equally fascinating to watch the show’s women chafe against their expected roles as wives, mothers, and sexual objects.

The show is cloaked in a perpetual fog of smoke. Seriously, every character seems to have a cigarette glued between his or her fingers. And while I have no desire to see the skinny tie make a comeback, I’m all for serving bloody Marys at meetings.

Book publisher Tor is giving away free electronic editions of various science fiction and fantasy novels as part of a promotion for its revamped website. The selection includes Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, one of my favorite books from the last few years. I’ve downloaded several titles to keep on hand for rainy days. The promotion ends July 27th (tomorrow), so if you’re going to grab them, you’d better act now.

I was in a meeting today talking about issues related to personal care attendants and the subject of training came up. In Minnesota, there’s a fair amount of interest in giving PCAs more opportunities for education and training as a means to enhance skills and possibly prepare them for other health care professions. I’m in favor of anything that gives PCAs the professional regard they deserve. But it occurred to me that we don’t give much thought to training the people who actually receive PCA services. We don’t advise people on the best methods for training their attendants. We don’t give them suggestions on how to make hiring or firing decisions. In other words, we treat them as passive recipients of a service rather than active participants in their own care.

Wouldn’t it make sense to focus training efforts on both sides of the equation: the PCA and the person with a disability (or their family)? Doing so would probably create better outcomes for everyone involved. Plenty of states, including Minnesota, are moving towards a more person-centered support system for people with disabilities. But doing so is going to require a wholesale change in our traditional (which is to say, patronizing) views of disability.

I promise: no more policy wonk posts for the rest of the week.