You already knew something was up.  Normally I get this post out by Friday at the latest but tragedy fell on the house of Foote.  It started out like any other day really.  Get up, relearn how to work the coffee maker, acquire toast…turn on the computer.  Except this Friday my trusty sidekick didn’t power up.  Where there had normally been a kind of sleepy groan of the robot coming to life, this time it’s helpless little power light just blinked at me.  How could this be?  We made it halfway around the world and back!  The cold truth eventually came over me; there is no court of appeals, sometimes Johnny 5 calls his children home for no reason whatsoever.  I’m in Boston for the week so I can’t really take it apart to see if it was the motherboard, or the hard drive, or who knows what.  The autopsy will have to wait.  The best I can do is scrape together a pathetic little morality fable out of this dark turn: Back up everything.  Just do it.  Just drag that big file over to dropbox now.  If it turns out I can’t get into the hard drive there is no telling what I’ve lost.  What would you lose?

On a lighter note our sovereign credit rated was tarnished.  My advice to the United States – if you see a number you don’t recognize on the caller ID just let it go to voicemail.

Blogs!

Out of the gate and off, The Sound of the Stick has been a busy blog since it started.  This week we got a native’s look at John Boehner’s district plus some Ohio trivia.  The most recent post talks astroturfing and how to pay for twitter followers.  This is probably as good a time as any to remind folks to keep a close eye on your comments.  Comment spammers are pretty savvy these days and I’ve seen a few get passed the wire here on the Commons.

Footenotes’ favorite Zines at the Brooklyn College Library has two posts up from Devon Nevola @Devonmaeve and Alycia Sellia @Alycia.  Both of them got a chance to look through some hand picked zines from the NYPL collection and take a peek into Malcolm X’s notebook.  I’m so glad CUNY and Brooklyn College Library are doing this project and can’t wait to read more about it as it shapes up.  Keep blogging!

Anthony Picciano had a busy week over at Tony’s Thoughts.  The highlight was this post about a sugar daddy connection site for struggling students looking to arrange some private scholarships.  Didn’t Woody Allen already write a short story about this?

And last but not least was Helldriver.  Somewhere years ago in Rolling Stone I remember a kid they were interviewing saying “It takes your whole life to make your first record, then they want your second album a year later.”  Let’s see…I have that and, uh, this article about bands discussing their worst gigs ever.  That’s all I got.  That was a hell of a post.  It’s a shame the only time I spent listening to thrash was when I briefly worked for Jackson guitars.  We had to listen to Anthrax and Megadeth all day because they had contracts with us.  Not that it sucked, in fact Dave Mustane really grew on me, but I was knee deep in patchouli at the time so it was a hard sell.  In any case I never picked up a taste for it.  Now I have to go back through that whole post and look for youtube clips of everyone.

Till next week!