Just about ten years ago, on June 27, 2001, I saw the first of what would become many Radiohead shows, at the Shoreline Amphitheater in San Jose. My friend May and I had fantastic seats—3rd row, I think—and it remains one of the best concerts I’ve seen. It was so face-meltingly awesome, in fact, that I screamed at the top of my lungs every five minutes for the duration of the show.

How do I recall that detail?

Soon after, a friend gave me a recording of said show. My 21-year-old enthusiasm is audible for the entire three hours of the recording. We’re talking about a 22,000-person stadium, and while you do hear a low sustained pitch of thousands of people screaming in the background, ringing out clearly above it all is my lone, nasal shriek. Maybe it's 'cause of how close we were to the stage. READ MORE

I suppose when a man has been struck by lightning six times it is only logical to ask him if he has any idea why it happens so frequently, but it still kind of feels like blaming the victim a little. [Related]

1. Before we proceed, we might all need to take a moment to acknowledge that we've reached the point in our culture where former editors of the New Yorker are writing fanfiction. Publicly, I mean; who knows what William Shawn scribbled in his most private notebooks, and in some sense who wouldn’t want to know, how many miles to Babylon, etc. But still. Fanfiction, in a “news magazine.”

2. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with fanfiction qua fanfiction. I’m not into it myself, but I read serial killer profiles at 3 a.m. when I can’t sleep, so no judgment. But the communications scholar Henry Jenkins has an awfully neat way of looking at it: “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk.” I’m skeptical of the “free culture” ethos that informs this kind of argument, mostly because I have absolutely no idea who this “folk” is or, concurrently, in what other time “myths” were “owned” by said population.¹ And I’m also (and probably more importantly) unclear on the precise causal connection between folk-ownership and the production of really good art. Whatever, it’s good that people are writing; it’s good that people are reading. And it’s certainly plausible that a hundred thousand people typing away on the Internet will eventually produce a better "Supernatural" story arc than the writers are capable of doing.

3. But try to apply Jenkins’ quote to what Tina Brown’s been up to. I’ll wait. READ MORE

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow! As they so often do, the guys at Ego Trip have discovered something amazing.

In 1918, Lulu Hunt Peters’ Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories introduced Americans to the concept of “calorie counting,” and the modern diet was born. Realizing that counting calories was no fun, America took the concept and turned it into a game to see who could promise the best results for the least effort in the shortest amount of time—while also making the most money off it! You know, the American way. Dieters in this country spend $40 billion per year on weight loss programs, many of them fad diets. Here are some of the most questionable to have appeared along the way; if any of them strike you as particularly whack, blame Lulu. READ MORE

"I'm ready to give up my old thoughts/I'ma move past what a saw/I'ma do what a want and be happy/I'm not gonna rob or kill to survive/Everything I seen was a lie/I'm not ready to die/I love myself..." — Lil B, "I Hate Myself."

"Evolve already," said the button Dan Savage wore to a Gay Pride reception at the White House last night. Well? Oakland rapper Lil B, at least, seems to be listening. His new album, I'm Gay (I'm Happy) came out yesterday on iTunes. I've been listening to it this morning, and it sounds really good. READ MORE

Perhaps you know him best as the whimpery gay dude in rehab in the bizarre Sandra Bullock vehicle 28 Days? Perhaps you know him as the creepy murderer in television's messy yet underappreciated scifi body-swapper mystery "Dollhouse." Or maybe you know him most from the very best episodes of the very best TV show, "Strangers with Candy," when he played the leader of the cult that wanted to "sit at the welcome table." As Steve the Pirate in Dodgeball? That dude from "Firefly"? The pedophile on "CSI"? I would call him the man of a thousand faces but he really has just one face and it's magical! Oh, Alan Tudyk! His latest role is that of an insane and likely Austrian and definitely repressed computer hacker and reformed assassin and probable homosexual in Transformers: Dark of the Moon and he achieves the feat of being the one actor who openly mocks this hideous and outrageously expensive-looking film from within. YOU WIN, Alan Tudyk! You are the best.

And the competition is tough: there's a spray-tanned John Malkovich going real big; an absolutely bonkers physical comedy endurance routine from Ken Jeong; Frances McDormand vacillating between phone-in and terrifying commitment as a chief spook; a big and effortlessly campy John Turturro splatter-painting of a performance. That is a lot of actors trying things without much supervision and, to be fair, they're all winners in the losing battle of man versus machine. READ MORE

Tonight at midnight, the three-year contract at the Village Voice expires, so Voice workers held a strike benefit at Williamsburg's Public Assembly last night. The bands were really loud and the crowd drank a lot.

The crowd was heavy with, yes, Village Voice staffers and their friends, as well as a handful of former-Voice employees there to show their support. Ex-employees in attendance included: Zach Baron (who left The Voice for The Daily back in March), Foster Kamer (of the New York Observer), and Tom Robbins (the influential writer who left the paper after the departure of long time columnist Wayne Barrett). Robbins' appearance was perhaps the biggest "screw you" move of the night and was a reminder of the ever-more-corporate Village Voice. As was the arrival at the paper of Nick Pinto from the Village Voice Media's (the parent company of The Village Voice) Minneapolis weekly City Pages.

Back in March, Pinto wrote the nationally printed and murky Voice cover story "Women's Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study Is Junk Science." The story defends Village Voice Media's ownership of the classified site Backpage.com.

Backpage.com allows "adult ads" to be posted; last year a 15-year-old sex trafficking victim sued VVM for aiding and abetting prostitution. This week's piece, by Martin Cizmar, Ellis Conklin and Kristen Hinman—which doesn't have a lot of fans on the staff—was called "Real Men Get Their Facts Straight." Billed online as "The Truth Behind Sex Trafficking," it targets Ashton Kutcher's "Real Men Don't Buy Girls" campaign against U.S. underage sex trafficking. READ MORE

Back in 1940, some bars and nightclubs began replacing their jukeboxes with a newfangled contraption called a Panoram that could play short musical videos. Patrons couldn't choose the order of the movies they saw; they'd plunk in a dime and whichever of the eight three-minute videos was next on the reel would be projected onto the machine's two-foot screen. Although the reels sometimes featured sketch comedians, most of the movies showed quite literal enactments of a pre-recorded song, some by musical greats in their prime like Louis Armstrong, others by artists who were then still on their way to stardom, like Duke Ellington, Doris Day, Lena Horne and a young Liberace (if you can imagine that).

Called 'Soundies'—as Time noted for its readers, there's an "s" on it even when referring to the singular—these videos were produced until 1947. Today they're three-minute time capsules, revealing a nation preoccupied with WWII and stuck on stereotypes. It was also an America where pop artists were still figuring out sex appeal and how to use a camera, and who didn't have lip-syncing quite mastered. Some of these Soundies are still fun to watch, others, less fun. Here are some of the best to be found on YouTube. READ MORE

"I was sitting in the bathroom reading one day, and I was sitting there for about an hour, and I realized that I was more comfortable on my toilet seat than I was on my bike seat," says the guy who invented the new bike seat you see here. What have you done on the toilet recently? Tell us in the comments!

Previously: Man Takes Expensive Leak