Hydrate Yourself...With Water!

John Darnielle made me laugh out loud this morning.

In other Mountain Goats news, last night I found the old issue of the The Believer that he was interviewed in (July '04, which also features an interview with Slavoj Žižek--how can you not love a magazine that successfully juxtaposes a pair of interviews like that!). He's interviewed by Daniel Handler (known to many, including myself, as Lemony Snicket), and, between the two of them, there's so much warmth and humor and fascination with the oddities of the human condition in the exchange that the pages fairly radiate. Check it out if you have the means.

Chris Walla interviews Sarah Vowell on Salon this morning. It's like the journalistic equivalent of your two favorite friends from two separate social groups finally meeting and hitting it off and holding hands kind of shyly and embarrassedly while they're walking down the street, wearing slightly battered hoodies and soft, faded jeans. Love it.

Now that I finally got around to downloading (legally! from iTunes!) The Mysterious Production of Eggs, I am so, so disappointed in myself that I blew off Andrew Bird's CD release show at the Metro earlier this month. I'm, obviously, still digesting the album, but I bet he's fucking phenomenal live. I have a deep, irrational aversion to the sound of people whistling, so obviously that's a bit of a stumbling block for me in some of his tunes, but he uses his many musical gifts so tastefully and so sparingly that there's plenty of other stuff for me to relish.