This article isn't necessarily deep, but it does make the point that even in the age of the digital single, artists still aim to produce an album. The artists and critics quoted suggest there's something in our natures that responds to the form, the need to be taken on a journey, the desire to hear a story.

I can relate. I like that people buy single songs from RFE online, but I know we design our CDs to be listened to as wholes. It all reminds me of the boy who separated the legs, wings, eyes and body of the fly, and then said, "All these parts are here. But ... where's the fly?"

Have you heard people say about the decay of privacy rights during the Age of the War on Terror, "Hey, if you don't have anything to hide, you've got nothing to be afraid of."

Hasan Elahi, a Bangladeshi-born American artist who landed himself on the terror watch list (for not doin' nothin', I might add) seems to have nothing to fear (or everything to fear) and he's proving it by making his life into an open book. In fact, you might say he's spying on himself. He's got a GPS in his pocket, and if you look at his web site, Tracking Transience , you can see a map of his location. Look a little further, and you'll find receipts of what he's bought, photos of where he's been, airports he's been to, and so on.

Wired Magazine has the report. Apparently, the government is still keeping an eye on Elahi, and he knows that from tracking web hits. "It's really weird watching the government watch me," he says.

When Little Bobby D set to spying on himself back in the John Birch days, he sang, "Hope I don't find out too much."

I've been reading science stories this morning, as filtered through RawStory's Biz/Tech column.

First, a finding that humans are actually evolving, genetically speaking, a lot faster than we'd imagined.

Second, this article looks at recent data provided by Voyager 2 and talks about the new shape of the solar system.

Sometimes you've got to step back and try and see a bigger picture.

Between this guest editorial from ConsortiumNews.com arguing that America needs a shot of the Spirit of the Sixties just about now, and the video below from a totally unexpected side of things, you get the feeling people might just be ready to say and hear some things that haven't been said quite that way or heard that way in quite some time. Not that I know firsthand, but it sure does strike me as different.

In music news, Gibson is marketing the first self-tuning guitar. The article points out that it's frustrating for beginner's to tune at first. A pro says it will help him get alternate tunings quickly in a concert. I have to wonder if it's the first step toward what happened with the piano in the 18th century, I think, when players stopped tuning their own pianos and left the art to professional tuning men.

If you're interested in Chavez and what's going on in Venezuelan politics, here's an interesting take on the weekend's electoral setback for the Prez.

And here we've got a chimp who can beat college students on a memory test. I'm not sure I'm convinced that it means the chimps are waiting in the wings for humanity's final bow, but I have been interested in the idea of co-evolving species, and how we humans can help our fellow creatures up by their bootstraps, to who knows what end?

I've been meaning to post some sites that a friend pointed me to, particularly this Japananese Street Fashion site. Click on the different neighborhoods and you'll see six photos posted each Sunday of the best outfits found from people walking around that week. You can go back to previous weeks, too. Clearly there are new looks developing.

Loads of other sites around the world with similar takes on street fashion exist: Helsinki, Tallinn, Kiev, Istanbul, Jakarta. Once you tap into these, they start to link to others -- Mexico, US, Europe, on and on...

One of the things I was noticing is that people are using old articles of clothes and putting them together in new ways. And then I happened to google an old artist and musician friend in Seattle, Boma Cho, and I found a recent article from the Seattle paper featuring him. He's now buying items of clothing from thrift stores, silk-screening his own images on them and selling them in a stand on the street. Here's that article.

Have fun browsing.