It’s kind of strange, I’ll readily admit, but I thoroughly enjoyed and benefitted from cleaning during my birthday today. I first had the car, inside and out, cleaned and polished. After driving off, I had the distinctly odd feeling that the windows were so clean that they had been removed. I don’t think the car was ever that wiped. Later in the day, I cleaned our home, top to bottom, for 2 hours. My office is also clean now. All the laundry is clean and put away as well. Truly, I can now think more clearly and feel more deeply and hope more madly than I had been able to do so in probably 3 or 4 months.

Well, tomorrow’s my birthday, and I’m not too excited about turning yet another mid-30s number, but what I *AM* excited about are the plethora of new albums (and books) that have recently been released. Just in case you’re interested, My Amazon.com Wish List itemizes these desirable cultural goods, by artists from Cat Power to Sea & Cake (remember them?) to Loose Fur and The Chemical Brothers.

It’s always nice to be validated. Many Web sites show a little icon like this one [ ] which shows that its Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS) are up to accepted standards. I’m happy to announce that the following MANOVERBOARD properties are W3C Valid: Deckchairs on the Titanic, MANOVERBOARD.com, and The Site at MANOVERBOARD. Although I’m dweeby enough to check my site, I’m not enough to post that little icon on each site. And I won’t mention CSS validation again, either.
Try your own URL here: W3C CSS Validation Service. FYI, IBM.com, CNN.com, Amazon.com — not valid!

It works.

I, like most people my age, grew up with Fred Rogers, who passed away yesterday. He will be sorely missed – I remember him being a comforting, soothing televisual soul and a person of deep caring for kids on his program. I don’t know why, but I particularly liked the character-puppet King Friday XIII, whose deep, concerned voice was probably Rogers’ own; Friday was the ruler of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

‘Human Shields’ Begin Deploying in Iraq is a news story worth talking about. I have almost no respect for people willing to die publicly in a war in which they do not want to fight through historically far more powerful means. Conscientious objectors, for the past 100 years, have risked their lives sitting in jail (and far worse) or otherwise protesting acts of violence against others. Their call to arms, especially during the Vietnam war and in the 1980s, speak about their private belief in a public forum – but they do so out of the preservation of (their own) lives, a living testament to the power of civil disobedience. In this case, human “shields” are not shielding anything from anyone – they simply put their own lives (and many others who shelter them) at risk without staking a claim on anything worth living for. Although they lay claim to high moral ground, ironically, they are the ultimate moral relativists, the penultimate cynics, wasters of life, and sadly are politically ineffective. I may be wrong, but they seem to me to be one step above suicide-homicide bombers.

One of my all-time favorite artists, Melissa Gould, is being featured on New York Foundation for the Arts Web site this week. I’ve featured her work not once, but twice, on The Site. Melissa works with the weight of historical memory, connecting large events to physical spaces and transcendent imagery.

Okay, so I went online, very reluctantly, to see what the Government has to say about a potential nuclear blast on ready.gov, the new Web site of the Department of Homeland Security, and it’s the most sanguine instructions I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to believe that the first thing they ask you to do is “take cover.” This site almost scares me more than the possibility of a terrorist threat.

It’s official, Deckchairs on the Titanic is now powered by Google, who bought Pyra Labs, the tiny company that runs Blogger.com. Oh, and about a million other Web logs are now Googlized, too.

I purchased the new Delgados album, entitled Hate, on mere whim, but I did not realize that Dave Friedmann produced the record. Mr. Friedmann is probably best known for working with The Flaming Lips (a good but overrated band) and Mercury Rev (a painfully beautiful band). Well, the Delgados finally got it, and it must be thanks to Mr. Friedmann; the album reeks of sincerity and anger pushed through a sieve of glam-pop, My Bloody Valentine synth, and lovely recording.