How About Them Phillies?

Remem­ber when I wrote this and won­dered whether or not the Phillies would make the post­sea­son? Yeah, seems pret­ty sil­ly now. I’m head­ed to see the Phillies again tonight as they attempt to sweep the Braves, who once led the divi­sion by a healthy sev­en games. The Phillies have gone on a 12 game swing since and now lead by a whop­ping five games. The mind bog­gles at the accomplishment.

Peo­ple are talk­ing about the Padres’ col­lapse? What hap­pened to Atlanta?

What the Phillies top three pitch­ers have accom­plished is noth­ing short of remark­able. Hal­la­day has won 20 games, Cole Hamels has bounced back after a sea­son that test­ed his met­tle and Roy Oswalt has been superb since join­ing at the dead­line. Can you believe Roy Oswalt is our num­ber three? Me neither!

So Pavement Sucked

Once upon a time, Pave­ment were a spe­cial band to me. That rabid fan­dom petered out since they called it quits in ’99, and ever since I’ve felt like Malk­mus’ solo career was just him navel gazing.

The reunion dis­ap­points main­ly because they haven’t learned any­thing about show­man­ship since their start­ed. Maybe that’s good for folks who were accus­tomed to them being one of the most bor­ing live acts on the indie cir­cuit, but I real­ly expect­ed it to feel momen­tous, like I’d final­ly wit­nessed a piece of his­to­ry I missed the first time around.

Does­n’t help that my friend got assault­ed, or that the words “I could kill you” were direct­ed at me, entire­ly unpro­voked. What they said about Pave­ment fans chang­ing over their course def­i­nite­ly holds. I’ll stick to those records and cher­ish the mem­o­ries I made lis­ten­ing to them.

Also worth not­ing: the Mann Music Cen­ter was­n’t near­ly as great a venue as I thought, at least not for rock music. I know that I’m nos­tal­gic for my high school days when I saw clas­sic rock fogies like Emer­son, Lake and Palmer and the Moody Blues sit­ting on the lawn, but the pavil­ion sounds real­ly noisy, espe­cial­ly toward the back. I hate to say it, but I’ve had bet­ter con­cert expe­ri­ences at the back of the Susque­han­na Bank Cen­ter pavilion.

My Problem with RSS

I found myself shak­ing my head in agree­ment quite often with this Techcrunch post about the “death of RSS.”

If RSS does­n’t make it, I’ll lay the blame at Google’s dig­i­tal feet. They came so close to so many good, plat­form-wor­thy ideas with Google Read­er. Shared items with com­ments? Tum­blr, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. I’ve felt all along that Google just has no idea how to make their prod­ucts social. You can’t even plug Google Read­er into Tum­blr and get it to ren­der prop­er­ly. I went from shar­ing and com­ment­ing on things in my read­er to bare­ly both­er­ing to favorite any­thing in the last year or so.

RSS may have its short­com­ings, but it’s far more effi­cient for some­one like me who’s con­stant­ly read­ing the web. It offers bet­ter orga­ni­za­tion than either Twit­ter or Face­book. It makes it eas­i­er to eval­u­ate the val­ue of the infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed. I don’t need to click through to read any­thing on most blogs, which is a tremen­dous help. Sure, that does­n’t help the pub­lish­ers and con­tent cre­ators hit their goals, but if you’re cre­at­ing good con­tent, peo­ple will engage it. RSS, for my mon­ey, is still the best way to deliv­er it to an audi­ence that’s con­sum­ing the most content.

I’d be sad to see it go. It’s dif­fi­cult enough to dis­cov­er reli­able sources as it stands now. If you watch Rick Sanchez I think you’ll agree that Face­book and Twit­ter aren’t improv­ing the way we con­sume news by any stretch.

I’m Going to See Pavement

I guess the only way for me to stom­ach the Mann Music Cen­ter’s out­ra­geous ser­vice charges is to buy a tick­et from a friend.

I don’t get out to shows much these days, but this should feel like jump­ing into a hot tub time machine back to my Philly music scene hey­day, cir­ca 2003. Expect to see famil­iar faces!