Tomorrow's Parties

 Oprah be damned. Jonathan Franzen won the National Book Award.

 I. Am. So. There. All Tomorrow's Parties LA 2002 (March 15-17) has Aphex Twin, Sonic Youth, Boredoms, Cat Power, Sleater-Kinney, Wilco, Malkmus, Stereolab, Unwound, and more. (Three days = $100.) Here's quite a find: a downloadable video of Sonic Youth's entire set at last year's event. (This year, they're the curators.)

 The big day is Friday. Iron Chef USA launches. It has an official site now. It tells you who will be the four Iron Chefs, the first two challengers, the three announcers, the four celebrity judges, and of course the dish on Shatner. This unofficial page has some spoiler info. (Shout out to Barb for the link. [That was just an excuse to link to her new funny picture.]) My friends are debating whether this will be good. It could be another great Shatner moment (he sorta is karaoke incarnate), or it could be Hollywood Squares with food.

 Meg of Megnut.com recently did a presentation on Weblogs as Peer-to-Peer Journalism at the O'Reilly P2P & Web Services Conference. What, you missed it? She put the notes online. (I like that the subtitle is Subverting Traditional Media. In good deconstructive twisting, saying it and striking it out is important.)

 I'm glad there's a webzine dedicated to cereal: EmptyBowl.com. I'm particularly fond of Top 10 Milk Substitutes.

 Good god. There's a Minnesota Geocaching league. How did I not know this? Who are they? Where are they? Time to start hunting. (What, you ask, is Geocaching? The Geocaching FAQ should show you the way.) Wait. There's two more: MN Geocachers | Kingboreas Geocache Info. Great, just what I need, another hobby.

 "If Don DeLillo was right in saying that Mick Jagger's lips represented the anus of a culture, then what part of our society is the face of Michael Jackson? Because the truth is, there's not really much face left in Michael Jackson's face. But fossils of it remain all over pop culture." For more, check out Salon.com's piece on Michael, The Face.