Even a simple taste of alcohol fills your brain with sweet promises of incomparable delight, which explains why even that bottle of Cynar will eventually be empty.

A bunch of us have been using Flattr recently. It’s a goofy but sweet European company that allows you to set a budget for micropayments that get delivered through social media services: Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Github, App.net. You favorite a thing? Part of your monthly budget goes to that favorite.

This was going semi-well. One problem was that Flattr isn’t that widespread yet, though it had to start somewhere. So payments tended to be a bit circular. I made about 7 Euros in the last month, and I spent about 15 Euros. A lot of this, it looks like, was just money sort of equally changing hands.

But, in the spirit of paying for content, it was a nice transitional step. So much of our day-to-day Internet is just people giving things away for free so that we can be constantly engaged advertising data for corporations. Now Twitter has decided that Flattr violates terms of service.

Flattr was getting a commission, and so they dropped that. But that didn’t satisfy. What did Twitter say?

“Our API Terms of Service state that you cannot sell or receive compensation for Tweet actions or the placement of Tweet actions on your Service. This includes compensation attached to a Tweet Action sent to either a service or through a service to another user.”

I would not call that excellently rendered English.

They clarified, to explain how micropayments could still work:

“If your service compensates content creators … in a manner that is not attached to Tweet Actions, this would be in compliance with our API Terms of Service.”

“To favorite somebody,” Flattr explained, “is considered a Tweet Action.”

So you’d have to have an interface with Twitter… that was unrelated to Twitter… to make a micropayment. That just doesn’t work.

There is, according to Twitter, no way to engage the idea of payment into any kind of Twitter interaction. Besides, of course, Twitter users viewing advertising, and being data for advertisers. Their motivation is understandable, and I can see the ways that monetizing “tweet actions” could be used for ill purposes. This wasn’t an ill purpose, and it’s too bad. It’s a step backward for a more just Internet.

“An earlier version of this post [“Here Are The Massive Boston Globe Web Traffic Numbers From Yesterday”] mindlessly used the verb ‘explode’ to describe the sudden rise in traffic. This was poor judgement on my part and I deeply apologize. “

“You know what? I love Morrissey. And he has a point about Hitler, the British and tea.” [Via]

“Sex makes us happier as long as we think we’re having more than our neighbours, according to a new scientific study.”

More young Canadian kids smoke pot than any young kids from any other country, according to a recent Unicef study. This will not surprise anyone who remembers Len.

When I first heard this song, I was kinda bummed out. I don’t think we need any more of our beardy folk artists buttoning their vests up and, like, twirling canes around while they sing songs that would not sound out of place in the Great American Songbook. Those Monsters of Folk guys seem to have that pretty well covered. But the more I listen, the less I am able to resist. Old Sam Beam is just a fantastic songwriter. This one reminds me of Sgt. Pepper’s-era Paul McCartney. And the video, directed by Hayley Morris, matches its liquidy psychedelia just perfectly. The new Iron and Wine album, Ghost on Ghost, comes out today.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
 — One of the greatest documents in the history of this nation was released 50 years ago. Take some time to read it.

Events: Renata Adler reads tonight at the Center for Fiction; the Danielson Famile plays at Knitting Factory; Gilbert Hernandez is at Housing Works.

★★★★ Pear blossoms spread up and out, anticipating the forces that will some future day split each pear tree apart. The light was precise. A truck crane’s red arm stood out against the blue, over a crew working on a roof. Stains surrounded the newly emptied trash cans. It was chilly, not too chilly, no matter which jacket you wore, or if you wore none at all. Carnegie Hall shone pink in its slot among buildings, and the smell of carriage-horse dung carried down from the Park. Motorcycles blared their way through the echoing facades of Midtown. People flowed through the streets, out in the day. Almost no one looked, in Broadway just below Columbus Circle, into the little space between the back of the first ambulance and the front of the second ambulance. The paramedics worked at a measured, disinterested pace, almost unnoticeable in peripheral vision. The signal changed and the pedestrians crossed behind the ambulances without turning their heads and kept going. On the circle, sunlight found the explorer’s face and shoulders, high above the shaded tulips. At night, on the desolate end of 34th Street, a fuzzy crescent moon and Jupiter looked down on the line of passengers waiting for the delayed long-distance discount bus. The air was tolerable still for standing around in, save the reeking smoke from an opportunistic kebab cart. Off to the right, over the bulk of the Javits Center, a meteor flared — short-tailed and green — and was gone.