You're killin' me, CMJ. I really wanted to see at least a couple of shows. Brian Jonestown Massacre, and the Polyvinyl showcase with Saturday Looks Good To Me and Of Montreal. And hey, Aloha as well, not my favorite but they used to play at the Halfass back in college.

But then, aw crap...Jonestown is playing at 1am. And I'm going to feel guilty that I became a fan of their music only after seeing DiG!. And there's 4 other bands playing before them, probably all psychedelic bands with long drawn-out songs that will melt my brain before Jonestown even gets onstage. And...oh, great. Aloha at 7pm, SLGTM at 10pm, and Of Montreal at 1am. Could you spread that out a little more? I want to spend as many hours at this show as I do at work just beforehand. Thanks a lot CMJ...just forget it. At least I got to see Arcade Fire at the Mercury Lounge last year.

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I have to say, I'm really excited about this. Every issue of the New Yorker ever, from February 1925 to February 2005, in scanned page form, on a set of 8 DVD's. To me the New Yorker is like a continuously created encyclopaedia, only it's written far more interestingly than any encyclopaedia, because of the way it tells the stories behind people, places, and events. My only complaints about this are two disadvantages that seem to arise from the decision to put this great reference on DVD rather than online: one, there most likely won't be any seamless update for recent issues, and two, full text search is not possible. But then again, I'd be much less likely to pay an online subscription fee for this than I am to pay a one-time ownership fee. It's $63 at Amazon.

Speaking of the New Yorker, I have a word of the day that came from a recent issue: synecdoche, pronounced sin-EK-duh-kee. It's a literary term meaning a type of metaphor that refers to a thing by a part, or to a part by a whole (or to something by the kind of thing it is, or what it is made of). My favorite examples from the wikipedia entry are: referring to "one's wheels" to mean one's car (first type), or referring to "plastic" to mean a credit card (last type). I love this word because until now I didn't even realize I was using these metaphors every day, let alone that they were a specific type of metaphor that had a name. I did however learn in a college class that we use metaphors much more than we are aware, and that they probably inform our very thinking as much as they appear in our writing or speech. This book lays it all out.