His board term expired, and another board member has created a bureaucratic logjam that make it difficult to re-appoint him or appoint a new member.

These images are really dramatic, but, as with all protest porn, I have to wonder if the editorial and shot selection distorts the extent and violence of the riots.

I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s.’

-Naomi Klein

Profiles: Outside Agitator: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

Chinese Democracy is pretty much the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context—it’s the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of that.

Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy at The A.V. Club

At first blush, I’m inclined to agree, but if Klosterman were giving a job talk, I would have a barrage of questions. I presume that he’s limiting this assertion to mainstream, major-label records, so the artisanal indie-rock artists that come to mind probably don’t count. I’m sure “rock artisans” will continue to make albums or digital song cycles for generations to come. However, I do think there are still musicians that are touchstones for the Baby Boomers or Generation X that still have the cultural and market power to put out an event album. If Bob Dylan releases another album, I suspect it will be greeted with substantial media fanfare and physical CD copies will fly off the shelves. I’m at a bit of a loss to think of figures for my generation: Kurt Cobain is dead and Trent Reznor has wholeheartedly embraced digital distribution and unbundling. Two album-oriented bands come to mind, The Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, but I’m not sure how to gauge how mainstream these bands are. What I do suspect is that rock is only a niche audience for generations younger than mine, and Klosterman is right – pop music going forward will largely be a matter of discrete hip-hop or electronic tracks bought over the cloud.

Here’s the text of the ad:

Mens 15 speed Glacier Point Magna. Put road/hybrid tires on it, but will include set of trail tires with the sale. In very good condition. Used it in my first triathlon - time to move up.

For readers unfamiliar with bikes, Magna bikes are almost exclusively sold at discount stores like Wal-Mart for less than $100. It’s absolutely ludicrous that our friend in Buda would ride a Magna in a triathlon. Shoot, riding a mountain-style bike in a triathlon would be torture, let alone a heavy, poorly-adjusted bike from Wal-Mart. I see a lot of folks dishonestly trying to sell poor-quality bikes on Craigslist, and they all seem to come from outlying suburbs like Buda, Round Rock, or Kyle. What do they put in the water out there? Do they think so little of people they think they can get away with lies like this?

Anyway, be skeptical of bikes sold on Craigslist and watch out for slimebags in the burbs.

I just heard a story on KUT that suggests the city plans to phase out parking meters in favor of multi-space kiosks. Under this scheme, motorists walk to a kiosk that serves several spaces on a block, the kiosk prints out a pass, and then the motorist walks back to her car to display the pass on her dash. It sounds like a hassle to me, but the story suggests drivers prefer it, perhaps because the machine accepts credit cards.

What does this have to do with cycling? Well, the parking meters are going away. I’ve read that cyclists in Washington and other jurisdictions have complained because they lose a lot of posts for locking their rides. Since bike parking is scant in several areas downtown, like Sixth Street, I wonder what impact this will have on cycling downtown.

Rather than stand in the way of progress, perhaps this is an opportunity to get more bike racks installed downtown. They have to do something with all those stump poles or holes in the ground, so why not install racks when the meters go out?

Does the city have a plan for replacing these bike parking spots when the meters come out?

But what I will always remember is as I was leaving that party in 2003, I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn’t know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect.

WSJ.com: Before He Was President, Mistaken for a Waiter: a 2003 Obama Meeting