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All Apple news sites are frantically clogged right now. Not a surprise. MacInTouch: Mac news, information and analysis (original) has some news on the Apple announcement, and I’ve pieced together some more stuff from here and there. Three new things: New iPods. Yay, 30 GB iPod. Some kind of a docking station, too, which seems unnecessary but whatever. I actually like my Firewire cable that doubles as a power cable when I go mobile so a docking station might be a step back. New iTunes. Supports AAC, which is I guess MPEG-4 audio. Five bucks says that change was so that Jobs could tell the music people that his new online music thingie wouldn’t support evil MP3s. The new iTunes supports Rendezvous for auto-discovery of other iTunes users on your network. I don’t know what that means either — auto-discovery is cool but what does iTunes do with it? Shared music libraries? ...

Patricia Hearst, post-sentencing. (Thumbnail: follow the link for a full-sized picture.)

Pro wrestling’s seen a lot of unusual venues — Pyongyang comes to mind. But I never thought I’d hear about a lucha libre match held at the Tate Gallery. That’s surreal above and beyond the call of duty. The wrestlers are the real deal, too; could be a fun little match. The artist, Carlos Amorales, apparently uses a lot of lucha libre in his work. I found a few scraps (original) of info (Quicktime video) on him (original). Pomopro wrestling.

“We expected to see a lot of meat slapping here tonight.” I’d like to introduce the above quote as the most convincing evidence yet that the first round of the NBA playoffs should not have gone to seven games. The announcers are starting to get just a little punchy.

I was wandering through work today prior to some network maintenance, and happened to notice a copy of GURPS Prisoner on someone’s desk. I really like my coworkers. And my company, for that matter.

So one frequent criticism of anti-war types is this: “You’re only against this war because Bush wants it.” Sometimes it’s phrased as “You wouldn’t be against this war if Clinton were fighting it,” which is nicely non-falsifiable. Either way, though, the appropriate answer is “No duh?” It’s perfectly reasonable to be against a specific action because of the President who’s promulgating it. For example, if Bush said “I’m going to hold an overnight prayer meeting with the cast of Bend It Like Beckham,” I wouldn’t particularly think twice about it. If Clinton said the same thing I’d think it was a rather unwise move on his part. ...

WISH 44 is all about picking games (original). How do you choose games to join or to run? What factors influence you: timing, people, system, genre, etc.? Do you weigh different factors for different kinds of games, e.g., online vs. tabletop vs. LARP? Is it a group decision or a decision you make on your own? Well, the easy answer is “yes.” I’m attracted to games based on genre and people. For a new group, the genre needs to be interesting and the people need to seem suitable. I’ve never been particularly interested in random D&D games, and I’m careful about getting into games with people I don’t know. ...

Via Die Puny Humans, The 25 Best American Comic Book Covers (original). Also includes the 12 worst. Beautiful stuff.

MyMind (original) looks like it has potential as an outliner. I suspect it does not export OPML files. Horrors! The cool thing is the linkage to a visual mindmap; that’s going to be really useful for sketching out campaigns. Um.

This story is about how the Dixie Chicks posed nude, but that’s not what I care about. It contains the following claim: “Within days of the comment being published, Maines apologized, but many U.S. country music radio stations all but banished Dixie Chicks hits from the airwaves, some fans smashed their CDs and sales plummeted.” The thing is, that’s not true. Immediately after the controversy broke, Amazon sales of all their albums increased. I just checked the Billboard Country Top 20 Chart, and Home is at #3 — down from #1 last week. Tickets are going for a couple hundred bucks each on EBay. If this is plummeting sales, there are plenty of musicians who’d want some of that humble pie.