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Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.William Dement, in Newsweek, 1959 via The Quotations Page

I laughed out loud when I saw this: It’s a reference to the recent iPod virus issue.

For all one of my readers that faithfully listens to This American Life (TAL) on NPR, TAL is now available as a podcast! I’m pretty pscyhed because I usually only happen to catch snippets of it while I’m running around doing Saturday morning runs to Home Depot and the grocery store. Other favorite NPR shows (dorky, I know…): Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz - acclaimed artists and up-and-coming performers as they share music and memories with their legendary host, Marian McPartland. Car Talk - The "Tappett Brothers" diagnose your car over the phone...and make fun of you. A Prairie Home Companion - Something of a live stand-up comedy show. Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know? - Another fun quiz show with celebrity guests. Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me! - Fun news quiz show. Jazz with Dick Buckley - plays rare recordings and shares his personal stories of the greats of jazz. That's the short list. Most of these are on Saturday and Sunday mornings/early afternoon and it's a favorite tradition of mine to make a purpose to be either in my car or in bed when these come on so I can thoroughly enjoy them.

This evening, a few friends and I went to a restaurant called Timo, formerly Thyme. This place is right up the street from me and I’ve passed it dozens of times and have always wanted to check it out. I must say - one of the best dining experiences I’ve had. Ironically enough, the outdoor garden patio is rated as one of the best in the city, but being that winter has come early that was not an option. Regardless, the food more than made up for that. Service was excellent with sneaky waiters finding a way to continuously refill the water without being noticed and folded napkins in the event that you left the table (which we did to check out the garden patio). ...

Just to further illustrate the point made in my last post… This is fall in Portland, Maine: And this is fall in Chicago: Yup…that’s snow.

I know where I’ll be next thirsty Thursday! Only so many Thursdays left…

That’s right - a low of 32 degrees this evening. Welcome to fall in Chicago…

I’d like to take a moment out of my normal ramblings to wish a Happy Birthday to my Grandmother. It’s days like these I wish I could be closer. Happy Birthday from thousands of miles away (and soon even a couple more thousand! ;o))

I’ve been obsessed with listening to music lately. Check out my Last.fm page for what I’ve been listening to. I only turned Last.fm’s recording feature back on tonight, so it’s not too extensive but I’m sure there will be a lot of tracks on there that you won’t recognize. But why am I so obsessed lately? I’m on a mission. A mission to find new, interesting, passionate music that I can incorporate into the dancing world. Funky stuff. Groovy stuff. Stuff with feeling and passion that hits home and makes me want to jump up and stop working and start moving. I even spent almost eight hours this past weekend searching for methods, algorithms, and software to catalog all my music into different dance genres, however the best I could find were research papers on the subject - it seems it’s still a difficult task. Pretty cool stuff, though. If F. Gouyon and S. Dixon have any of that software available in the public domain, I’d love to get my hands on it and run my entire collection through it. It doesn’t seem they’ve released anything concrete, however. One place I like to go for new funky music is the Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape - I’ve found some pretty cool stuff on there. I’ve also been making use of iTunes’ new “Just For You” feature which recommends songs based off of previous purchases. I really enjoy that feature and it has resulted in me spending money I probably wouldn’t have otherwise…just what Apple intended.

…who wants to go for a drive?