Maceo Parker and his band

I'm sorry, I have no words. Do yourself a favor and carve out 20 minutes for these videos. No, really. Do it.

"Let's Get It On" (The guitarist's intro alone might bring you to tears.)


"Shake Everything You've Got" (Check out the vocal jam before the drum solo.)


If anyone could figure out where these videos—obviously produced and from the same set—came from and find me a copy on DVD, I would love you forever and ever.

UPDATE: I did a little more searching, and it appears that these cuts are taken from the 1994 DVD "My First Name is Maceo," which very happily was re-released a few years ago and is available from Amazon! You better believe I'm buying that!

Three reason to use Safari

If you're a Mac user, there are essentially three major choices for your browser: Safari, which is the default; Firefox, which is the one Windows users tend to prefer when they first switch because it is familiar; and Camino, which is like Firefox with a better, faster interface but without add-ons (a.k.a. extensions). Without getting into the browser wars, here are three of the many reasons I think Safari is the best browser in the world:

1. The contents of pages in Safari's history are accessible via Spotlight. Which means that if you know you read something on the Internet two weeks ago about the Dharma Initiative being a metaphor for ABC's television censors, but you have no idea where you read it, you can easily and quickly find the page in question.

2. SnapBack. Both the address bar and the search field have this handy feature, which returns you to an "anchor point"—either the original site you visited, or the original results from your latest Google search. A similarly useful feature in Safari (call it reason 2.5) is that you can right-click the title of any page to navigate the hierarchy of that site.

3. Because it was written in a more modern programming language, Safari has access to all kinds of OS X services that Firefox and Camino do not. There are many, and lots of them are obscure, but try this: mouse over a word in Safari and press Control+Command+D to get a pop-up dictionary listing for that word. That kind of thing doesn't work in the other browsers.

As I hinted, there are more reasons than just these three, which are intentionally somewhat obscure, but hopefully this is useful in spite of its brevity. Happy surfing!

A book everyone should own

If you've ever discussed food with me, you know that I often refer to The New Food Lover's Companion, which is one of the most fascinating—not to mention actually useful—reference books ever written. Long used by professional chefs to settle back-of-house restaurant debates, The New Food Lover's Companion is an indispensable inhabitant of my kitchen bookshelf. If you've ever found yourself wondering what the difference between dark and light brown sugar is, or the best way to store grapes to prevent spoilage, or what chutney is—or really, if you've ever had any question about food—you should buy a copy of this book. In the age of Google and with easily accessible libraries all around us, I do not usually recommend purchasing books at all, especially reference books, but this is one that is well worth the twelve bucks it costs at Amazon. It is both small enough and sturdy enough to slip into any drawer or corner of your kitchen.

Here are a few facts I've learned from the NFLC over the years:

The eggplant is not a vegetable— it is actually a berry.

Croissants (crescents) were created by some Austrian cooks to commemorate their thwarting of a Turkish raid.

Whereas Americans typically pair rhubarb with strawberries, the Brits prefer it with ginger. (Ew.)

Saffron is so expensive because each ounce is made from 14,000 tiny stigmas from a purple crocus—each of which only produces three stigmas.

Enjoy!

Walk the Line Between Pleasure and Pain

Artisan Church is in the middle of a music-driven series called "Walk the Line." It kicked off two weeks ago with one of our bands doing songs from the civil rights movement to raise the topic of walking the line between silence and violence. Then last week another of our bands brought the music of the Black Crowes, and we tackled the very challenging (sometimes controversial) topic of walking the line between what is sacred and what is secular.

Which brings us to this Sunday, when my band, which is called Saint Brigid's Lake, will sample several songs from the Over the Rhine catalog. I'll be interspersing a message in two or three parts entitled "Walk the Line Between Pleasure and Pain." I'll use passages from the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes—two of the most fascinating books of the Bible. But the focus will continue to be on the music. I'm quite proud of the work the band has done in preparing for this week, and I hope you'll come check it all out on Sunday at 10:00 a.m. or 5:00 p.m.

Yeah, I'm probably not going to watch it

Here's another pop culture critique graph for you to ponder.

Yeah, I'm probably not going to buy it

Some facts are best represented visually. The following isn't one of them, but I thought it would be fun to make a chart anyway. Click to enlarge it if you can't see the text well enough. Enjoy!

Why iPod killers are harmless

John Gruber gets it: "Apple doesn’t wait for someone else to knock one of their hit products off its throne or slowly run it into the ground (cf. the Motorola Razr)—they do it themselves. For six years pundits have been declaring that competitors would 'soon' catch up to the iPod, but the iPod has never been a static target—over the same six years Apple has released significant new iPods every year."

Let's hope Apple also continues to be their own best competition on the personal computing side (yes, yes, I know, the iPhone is a personal computer)—because those are the products that matter most right now.

Fixing Safari's final flaw

Not too long ago, I wrote somwehere that the addition of the "double-click tab bar for a new empty tab" feature fixed my second-to-last remaining complaint with Safari's usability. The last complaint, as you may recall, was the lack of a "single window" mode in Safari: a preference by which a user could force links that are coded to open in a new window to open in a new tab instead. Both Firefox and Camino have this feature accessible via their preferences window, but Safari—my browser of choice—does not.

[Aside. Web developers: please stop using target="_blank" unless you have a phenomenally good reason. With the ubiquity of tabbed browsing, it should be up to the user to determine what he or she wants to do with your links. Forcing links to pop up in a new window is endlessly frustrating and causes needless clutter. Even worse is when the user presses Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) to open it in a new tab and is overridden, and the link opens a new window anyway. Google, I am looking angrily in your direction.]

Well, it turns out that Apple added single window mode to Safari (on the Mac, at least) in version 3.1; they just chose not to make it a visible feature accessible via the preferences window. Why it is not deemed important or useful enough to be a preference, I do not know. But you can enable it by a very simple Terminal command, as articulated by the nice people over at naquah.net.

For those disinclined to follow that link (which, I promise, will not open in a new window regardless of your browser preferences), here's what you do.

1. Launch Terminal. Use Spotlight or navigate to Applications > Utilities.

2. Paste this command into the window and press return:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

3. Restart Safari.

Now, whenever a link is coded to open in a new window, Safari will stop it in its tracks and direct it neatly into a new tab in your current window. Brilliant!

(Via Travis Prinzi via Twitter.)

You gotta feel for the one dude in the front row

Curious about why Apple's stock is so high (both literally and figuratively)? Look no further than this photo.

Course, these kiddies are all followers. I had one, like, five years ago.