The new Queens of the Stone Age album, Songs for the Deaf, is finally out and its good. A limited edition DVD is included with the CD. See them live on September 18th in Minneapolis or on September 4th on The Late Show with David Letterman. Go to their official site for more QOTSA news. Here's an article from L.A. Weekly on the history of the band.

Meanwhile, it looks like Mudhoney are making a comeback.

The US Mint is releasing new quarters with designs provided by each of the 50 states. Five quarters are being released each year from 1999 to 2008, in the order that the states joined the union. Nineteen coins have been released so far.

Here's an article from Slate complaining that many of the designs are ugly. It includes a slideshow of some of the designs. CoinWorld.com has a website dedicated to news on the StateQuarters. Wisconsin's quarter will be released in 2004. Follow the links at the bottom of this page to see the nine finalists for the Wisconsin coin. Minnesota's quarter will be released in 2005, but no official discussions have begun on the Minnesota design.

Let the Pigeons Loose: Blogenheimer can now be found on Google. Click here.

My favorite internet film critic is Mr. Filthy. His reviews are funny and insightful. You can read his reviews here.

Every 10 years, Sight and Sound magazine asks film critics and directors to name their 10 favorite films. The results are compiled into a list of the 10 best films of all time. This year 145 film critics, writers and academics, and 108 film directors voted. Citizen Kane was voted #1 by both the critics and the directors. View the complete results here.

I write trivia questions for a company called NAQT, which sells them to Microsoft's Sports Trivia and other places. You can play Sports Trivia here in the MSN gaming zone.

A few years ago, law enforcement officials were afraid that Russian mobsters would become a big problem in the United States. But "large-scale, highly structured Russian groups rivaling those of La Cosa Nostra, . . . have yet to materialize in this country". As this New York Times article explains, one reason is that Russian mobsters don't trust each other.

Follow this link to watch a kung fu action movie using Flash animation. It takes a while to load, but it's worth it.

The same people, who seem to be called "ziao ziao", have also made a first person shooter game that reminds me of a John Woo movie.

For some real computer fun, click here.

In this DVD review, Slate's Bryan Curtis suggests skipping the new Fellowship of the Ring DVD, and waiting until the Platinum Series Extended Edition is released in November. He also calls the new Cat People DVD "perhaps the worst film ever to arrive on DVD with a director's commentary."

I would not advise you to go to law school. It's a mistake I won't make again. But if you must, it might be a good idea to take the advice of Slate's Dahlia Lithwick in her Letter to a Young Law Student.

One of the signs that football season is approaching is the return of my favorite football column, Tuesday Morning Quarterback. This year TMQ has left Slate and moved to ESPN's page 2. In this installment TMQ discusses offseason low-lights including Ryan Leaf's career quarterback rating, Deion Sander's lake, and the top 3 transactions of the year.

Greil Marcus writes a column for Salon.com called Real Life Rock Top 10. In the exerpt below from a recent column, Marcus discusses why an annoying Subway commercial shows that "finally, George W. Bush is making himself felt in culture."


"3) Subway commercial for Dijon Horseradish Melt (Fox Sports Net, July 13)

One "Jim" ("a Dennis Miller-type of guy who tells it like it is," says Subway publicist Les Winograd) pulls up to a burger joint in a car full of buddies. He's about 40, tall, well-exercised: "Turkey breast, ham, bacon, melted cheese, Dijon horseradish sauce," he says in the drive-through, exuding an aura of Supermanship all out of proportion to the situation. "That's, like, not on our menu," says the young, pudgy, confused person taking orders. "It's not only not on your menu," Jim says, "it's not on your radar screen!" "Do we have a radar screen?" the clerk asks a supervisor as Jim peels out. "Think I made that burger kid cry?" Jim says to his pals, all of them now ensconced in a Subway with the new Select specials in front of them.

It seems plain that, finally, George W. Bush is making himself felt in culture. The commercial takes Bush's sense of entitlement -- which derives from his lifelong insulation from anything most people eat, talk about, want or fear, and which is acted out by treating whatever does not conform to his insulation as an irritant -- and makes it into a story that tries to be ordinary. But the story as the commercial tells it is too cruel, its dramatization of the class divisions Bush has made into law too apparent. The man smugly laughing over embarrassing a kid is precisely Bush in Paris attempting to embarrass a French-speaking American reporter for having the temerity to demonstrate that he knew something Bush didn't. (Real Americans don't speak French.) Even someone responsible for putting this talisman on the air may have flinched at the thing once it was out there in the world at large, functioning as public discourse, as politics -- the last time I saw the spot, the final punchline had been dropped."

When they took office, George Bush's administration was full of M.B.A.s and successful businessmen. Whether you agreed with them or not, they seemed to know what they were doing. But lately the Bush team's aura of competence has begun to erode. In this Washington Monthly article, Joshua Micah Marshall discusses "Why does the myth of Bush administration competence persist after ample evidence has emerged to show that it simply isn't true?"

You can now email me by clicking on the Email Blogenheimer link below the archives list.

Raymond Chandler's books have been reissued in new editions this summer, causing new articles on Chandler to appear. In this Salon article, Allen Barra discusses Chandler's place in American literature. The official Raymond Chandler website is here.

Chandler had a knack for turning a phrase. Some examples:

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun." Farewell, My Lovely (Chapter 34)

and

"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."--The High Window (Chapter 5)

For more examples, go to the Chandlerisms web page.

The New York Times' Maureen Dowd thinks this year's election for governor of California is boring. But in 2006 she predicts there will be a much more interesting race between actors Rob Reiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Prepare yourself for the epic battle of Meathead vs. the Terminator

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, argues that Bush's victory is part of the formation of a new Republican majority. The authors of this New Republic article think Rove has it backwards. They see the formation of a new Democratic Majority in the United States.

So let's say you are someone who really liked The Lord of the Rings and you have some extra time on your hands. How do you fill that time? Well you could make your own custom Lord of the Rings Fisher Price People. Of course, if you really have a lot of extra time you could dramatize The Lord of the Rings in Lego.

I'm not a big fan of New York Times columnist William Safire, but this is a very interesting column. Safire gives evaluations of various spies and intelligence agencies around the world based on his sources in the intelligence community. For example, "In the Middle East, individual Spook of the Year is Gen. Saeb Khier of Jordan, though no panel member is willing to say why."