"When you're carrying a book with the big fat title <I>Embalming</I>." Lisa Takeuchi Cullen has written a gentle update to <I>The American Way of Death</I>. Putting aside her statement that "death is a big, huge bummer," it sounds interesting.

Metaphors help us understand the universe, but what if they're really helping us get it wrong?

Rumor is that the suits at MTV are beginning to kvetch about the expense of having bottled water delivered to the NYC offices of the network. Man, when the bottled water bill gets up on the bean counter radar nothing good can come of it.

Also, I made one other change when I removed the Ayre gear from my system: I switched from the Ayre&#150supplied and &#150spec'd Cardas cables to Furutech Evolutions. Incidentally, it was right around this same time that I read <a href="http://www.bluebirdmusic.com/Build_Your_System.htm">Jay Rein's essay</a> on system synergy.

Another subway pun, this time the title refers to the project that created the London Underground. Must be something in the air (hah, I slay myself) today.

Not as in counterculture, but as in the London Underground, Cool tour of unused and abandoned stations. Gosh I love this stuff&mdash;the only thing better is actually sneaking in yourself.

I'm a complete sucker for jargon. Specialized vocabulary identifies you a an insider and, whether you mean it to or not, it reveals a lot about your group.

My buddy Jeff Wong and I were talking about the collector's mentality on one of our bike rides recently. Jeff observed that there are two major strategies for collectors who have it bad: Try to collect <I>everything</I> and the other is mine a tightly defined subgenre.