You'll Never Look at a Ten Dollar Bill The Same Way

Like many four-eyed, Brooklyn-dwelling culture nerds, I was tickled when the Obama White House hosted an evening of music, poetry and the spoken word last May.  Somehow I missed this clip of artist and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda performing "The Hamilton Mixtape" until I saw it on clusterflock last week. 

Not since They Might Be Giants venerated James K. Polk has a dusty figure from American History received such a hip musical tribute. Now if Sarah Vowell would compose a marimba tribute to Roger Williams, and Billy Joel would perform an a cappella ode to Imre Nagy, my life would be complete.

Convergences

A recurring theme with apologies to McSweeney's brilliant Convergences Contest, curated by Lawrence Wechsler. Convergences are submitted without comment, but feel free to add your own thoughts. 

AND

New From Google or "Is This Anything?"

Last.fm just served me the Matt Pond, PA cover of Champagne Supernova. Last.fm knows me. I like that Last.fm knows me.  I like when my web-based applications know me and recommend great stuff for me. However, for some reason, people freak out when it comes to Google knowing about them. I think it has something to do with Skynet. I don't know, ask this guy. 

Google knows that we don't like it that they know so much about us - because they're inside our heads. So, in the name of transparency and to give individual users more control over their privacy settings, Google launched it's Google Dashboard. 

I opened up my own Google Dashboard expecting to find that the Mothership has stored my social security number, my credit rating, dress size, innermost fears and late-night snacking habits. In reality, I found a bunch of boring stuff like my number of RSS feed subscriptions, number of conversations in my Gmail Inbox, number of widgets I installed on iGoogle, and my age, gender and zip code. I'm pretty sure the staff of the Ketchum Mail Room knows more about me than Google does.  The only thing that looks potentially interesting is my web search history, which also happens to be particularly boring at this moment.  So, Google Dashboard - is this anything? Personally, I'm more excited about the new Google Music Search Feature.

This would have come in handy yesterday when a colleague and I were trying to remember who sings "Right Here, Right Now" (Ans: Jesus Jones).  Of course, when I just ran a search for "Right Here, Right Now" in Google it pulled up the Fatboy Slim version. Nice start Google, if your aim is to collect enough embarrassing data to blackmail me into joining the robot uprising in 2040 you're going to have to try harder.