If jazz fragments into millions of digital files, future generations could be left with a maddening cultural jigsaw puzzle. This music could quickly become one of the mysterious art forms that is translated to the public by a small group of experts.--From an article about online music stores (ITMS, specifically) and jazz.

The author fears that a lack of accompanying information (thorough liner notes, album cover art, etc.) will make jazz seem too Great-Man-ish. See, me, I thought jazz was too Great-Man-ish already, and that it has been a mysterious art form yada yada since before I was born, and that a radio station is as likely to give you a single track as iTunes is. Of course, I also thought that a major advantage to digital files is their durability, which makes it far more likely that future generations will have jazz to enjoy. Also, talking about ITMS instead of file-sharing shows a real indifference to hard numbers. So, to summarize, I disagree with this thing nearly completely.

Here's a P.J. O'Rourke interview with Colin Powell. I definitely like Powell a lot better than I used to, though, y'know, I can hardly stand the guy.

When you heard about the Mario Brothers hitting the big screen, did it ever once cross your mind that you might see people eating dead, fried lizards? I mean, I thought I was going to see Audrey II bust out of a pipe and chew Bob Hoskins. I was pretty sure we'd see Mario dress up like a raccoon and hopscotch across giant turtles. My point is, I can't believe the film actually managed to surprise me. Yeah, it sucks that I wanted invincibility stars and ended up with fried lizards, but at least I didn't see it coming.--from a SMB review.

Eisenstein and Warioware? But for the proper nouns, would that make a good Googlewhack? Not anymore, I guess. Avant Gaming has a fairly stupid name, but I absolutely love this recent flourishing of somewhat-intelligent (or at least not-bought-and-paid-for) writing about video games. Here's some more game stuff--an account of Maniac Mansion's expurgation-for-NOA, Sonic rendered in Flash, a list of GBA games with multi-boot support (and one of GC games with GBA support) and 1UP's 50 essential games.  ¶ 11:43 AM