New album by Sigur Ros releases September 13th. Love them. This one's sung in actual Icelandic, instead of the made-up Hopelandic.

Peeved by the attacks by L'Equipe, Lance hints that he might come back and kick some butt in the Tour again next year. If so, he needs to make up his mind soon.

I've watched Felix Hernandez pitch a few times now. Awesome. Wicked stuff, especially that movement on his mid-90's heater. In 51 innings he's struck out 50 batters and walked only 10, giving up only 31 hits. Lefties are batting .129 against him. I hope he stays healthy and drug-free for many years.

Okay, so most of the last season of Six Feet Under left me cold. But the last few episodes, after you-know-who dies, were quite good. The last montage of scenes in the last episode moved me.

What happened to summer?

James and Angela and I ate at Angelica's Kitchen, an organic vegan restaurant, on Monday night, and we sat next to Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend (wife?), both of Super Size Me fame. I guess he hasn't relapsed since his McDonald's days. In a way, perhaps it's healthy that he just gorged himself for a month on that stuff. He'll probably never have a hankering to eat a burger at McDonald's again. The best dish was Angela's tofu sandwich.

I like Google News, but I thought they were going to weight their news sources with a bias to more reputable, big-name sources. The biggest problem with Google News and Google News Alerts is all the random stories from small town papers, many being repeats of the AP Wire story. That problem still exists.

Oh dear lord do I miss DirecTV. This season they added an optional NFL Ticket SuperFan add-on package that includes over 100 games in HD, a Red Zone channel that switches automatically to any game where a team enters the opponent's red zone, a Game Mix channel where 8 games are broadcast on one screen, and a Short Cuts feature showing commercial-free replays of games in 30 minutes or less. It's like crack for a fantasy football player, and it's not available to me b/c I can't get line of sight to the DirecTV satellite from my apartment in Manhattan. When I was a DirecTV subscriber in Seattle, I didn't mind that DirecTV had basically a monopoly on showing all the NFL games, but now I'm ready to break into the roof of the nearest skyscraper to set up a satellite with a mile long run of cable to run through my front window. Time Warner Cable stinks.

More than 400 million watched the finale of "Super Girl", an American Idol-esque Chinese reality tv show. That's about the same number of people as live in the United States and Britain combined. The winner was Li Yu Chun, a tomboyish Sichuan native (a video clip of her final performance can be found here). The show only allowed female singers, and the official show title was "Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest." The show was touted among Chinese youth as a triumph of democratic voting, as anyone could pay 1RMB (about $0.12) to vote via text message.