Before I get into the music, arrived at this interesting article through Jason's Xanga, 18 Tricks to Teach Your Body. Jen and Fabrice benefitted from one of them almost immediately. And I learned a lot of interesting stuff so if you have a few minutes do yourself a favor and read up!

Had an enlightening conversation with T-mas earlier in the night regarding Coldplay and a platform they supported. Chris Martin can usually be seen with markings on his hand or messages written on his piano (we were watching some recorded performance after the clock ticked over) and Tom quizzed me to see if I knew what they represented.

Basically Coldplay was approached by OxFam to promote the Make Trade Fair campaign and at times, Chris Martin will either scribble the URL on his hands or make something more abstract. This encourages people to ask him what it means, giving him the opportunity to pitch the campaign. Guess Coldplay is more than just cool album art.

And so in appreciation of a platform that I guess I can say that I support, (tariffs are ridiculous, protecting local industries that make no sense which in turn punishes other countries that export to us and in the end the consumers. If we can't be as efficient in producing a particular product, maybe the people in our country should be subsidized in other ways, perhaps asking them to grow another crop or moving into different industries) without reading and understanding everything there is to it, the Coldplay X&Y album is the first I'm hearing/listening in 2006.

Earlier last month I had the pleasure of listening to Lennon Live while at the YMCA. On the anniversary of his death, artists from around the world gathered to do their rendition of one of Lennon's songs. And so I've been on a Lennon kick ever since and am looking forward to hearing (or listening) the entire Lennon Live event in full if I can ever find it. BBC had it available for seven days after it first aired, but that has long since passed and I don't see any torrents available for it.

Fall Out Boy, I downloaded one of their albums a few years ago because I came across it and thought Fallout would appreciate it. Never did give the album a hearing session, but I just read that in their rider, they asked for vintage Transformers toys. "We don't get'em a whole lot. They give us new Transformers, but no one gives us the first-generation metal ones from the '80's. They're rad." And so Fall Out Boy, you guys just earned your first hearing session.

Moving away from music, Roger at SASI told me the other day that CMU's basketball team was actually decent this year. Can you believe they are undefeated? That's right, our Tartans are 10-0, they even made it onto ESPN for defeating Princeton, the first Division III team to defeat Princeton in 23 years. Currently ranked first in our University Athletic Association Conference, and #22 on D3hoops.com.

On déjà vu, Tom also tried enlightening us yesterday about this particular phenomenon. According to Tom, when a person sees something, the brain processes it and then stores it into long term memory. But sometimes, the brain misfires and immediately stores it in memory before pulling it back out to the conscience and digesting it as something happening. Therefore, the process of pulling that sensation out of your memory makes you think that you've seen it before. Interesting reading here. I tried making an analogy with how data is stored in ram and then to the harddrive, but in the end it didn't workout.

For Jammer...