by Brian Lam

When my friend had his Apple iCloud account hacked, the hacker wiped his phone, iPad and laptop remotely. You can read more about how that all happened here. But the worst thing is that my friend, tech writer Mat Honan, did not have a recent back up of his computer. Along with various pieces of work, he lost about a year’s worth of photos of his daughter that he may not ever see again.

In Mat’s words, this was stupid. In my words, this is an easy thing to prevent.

Don’t be like Mat. Learn from his mistakes.

Backing up your computer can be painless and if you lose your hard drives like Mat or like I have twice, you won’t lose more than a few minutes of data if you just take a few minutes to do the right thing. Just do this. Read the rest at The Wirecutter.

★ Dingy and bleak. A good day if it were happening in Beijing. Not here, in the land of the post-industrial economy and the Clean Air Act. A brownish pall hung over the airport runways and cargo cranes, over the open Turnpike, over a corn field, over the flat, cost-optimized facades of executive parks and extended-stay chain hotels. Above the brown, a dull jumbled colorless sky. There was no setting at which the Mazda’s air conditioner could hold the thick incoming air at a comfortable temperature. A sign in an open green field, with trees behind it, invited drivers to Picture a New Town Center Here. It was all too easy to do just that: the brick veneers, the studied irregularity, the extra cars backing up on Route 1 under thicker and thicker brownness to come.

Weather ratings range from zero to five stars.

“Conspicuous persons, in my motherland, are most seriously advised to lead a private life denuded of all color and complication. They should also, if they are prudent, have as little as possible to do with America — seen as the world HQ of arrogance and glitz. When I and my wife, who is a New Yorker, entrained the epic project of moving house, from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, I took every public opportunity to make it clear that our reasons for doing so were exclusively personal and familial, and had nothing to do with any supposed dissatisfaction with England or the English people (whom, as I truthfully stressed, I have always admired for their tolerance, generosity, and wit).”
 — Martin Amis writes in The New Republic

about relocating from Britain to the States. Meanwhile, Kate Bush is reportedly going to perform at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics on Sunday. Kim Gavin, the artistic director of the ceremony, has said that it will be “an elegant mash-up,” wherein the London Symphony Orchestra will play along with rock and pop stars. Besides Bush, brace yourself for seeing George Michael, The Who (sigh), Adele, and the reunited Spice Girls rapping the lyrics to “We Will Rock You” with the three surviving members of Queen.

If you are working on Fridays in summer, you are a tool. That is the truth. But if you ARE working on Fridays in summer, and wondering how to change your life, well, we have the answer for you. Perhaps you spotted Flint Beamon, extolling the virtues of “not really working on Fridays” in the Styles section troll-a-thon today. It went like this: “Scanning the [Thompson Hotel] scene closely was Flint Beamon, 36, a director of events and lifestyle brands for a public relations company [N.B.: That firm is called PR Consulting] that gives its employees Fridays off in summer. He was there to network. ‘People here are usually in the upper echelons in their industries,’ said Mr. Beamon, who is a regular. ‘I’ve struck business deals by the pool.’” So the real money, if we can tell you the secret, is Facebook spam-scam survey pyramid schemes. THE MORE YOU KNOW.

But seriously, young people. You know how you don’t work on Fridays? JUST LEAVE. Close your laptop. Tell your boss you have “a thing.” Unless you’re paid by the hour, nobody should work on Fridays in summer, it’s NOT AMERICAN. Stop cracking the whip on yourself for your boss, you’re being a fool. JUST GO WALKABOUT. You’re only young once, and winter is coming.

Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley, have you heard? B.O.B. made a song that’s not for the birds. I am surprised. I strongly dislike pretty much every song I’ve ever heard by B.O.B. But this is great — and made much, much better, of course, by a routinely phenomenal guest verse from Andre 3000. (Who’s gearing up to play the guitar like the greatest guitarist who ever played the guitar in the Jimi Hendrix biopic, All Is By My Side.) Also sounding great upon first listen, a new song from Andre’s Outkast partner Big Boi. This one, which will be on Big Boi’s upcoming album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, features the Swedish electronica band Little Dragon — which allows for a nice, dorky D&D; joke, since Outkast’s Atlanta-based music collective is known as The Dungeon Family.

It’s called “Mama Told Me,” and Big Boi joined Little Dragon onstage Tuesday in Austin, Texas to perform it live.

“NYPD statistics show 292 biking accidents occurred in the city in the first seven months of this year — 65 in Central Park alone,” says today’s Daily News shocking cover story. Did you know that bicyclists are literally exceeding the speed limit in Central Park by 4 and 5 miles per hour???

That’s 41 bike accidents a month in New York City! Gosh, and to think, only 293 bicyclists are run down by cars each month in the City! Only 148,571 cars are involved in accidents in New York City each year, killing 270 people a year! And only 24,673 pedestrians are injured by cars in the City a year. So yes, let’s all freak out about bikes. Going fast. In a park.

Also there were only 1,014 misdemeanor assaults and 385 felony assaults… IN THE LAST WEEK OF JULY ALONE. How can the City go on when bikes are clearly the number one menace!

Tonight is the grand opening of Singularity and Co., New York City’s first and only scifi bookshop! 18 Bridge Street in Dumbo, 7 p.m.! (iTunes)

Everybody talks about it all the time and it is supposed to be the boringest thing to talk about, conversationally, and it means you are Dead Inside or have Given Up or whatever, but the Weather is totally Trending, man, and not just because it happens every day and there are Weather Reports and Traffic-&-Weather-Together-on-the-ones and stuff on the radio when you are driving your car in the traffic, and Weather, together.

Think about it, seriously, when you go Outside, you are stepping out into The Weather. Some of The Weather still manages to get inside your house and there is nothing you can do about it. You need it. You would die if you didn’t have some weather leaking into your castle.

We breathe the stuff it is made outta. The Weather is in you, and worse still, it is in me. It permeates me with Barometric Pressure and Relative Humidity. The only place I’m safe from it is, like, under the Ocean or something, or in one of those silos out in North Dakota where they (and you know who They are) say there aren’t any more Atomic Missiles, in the silos, because all the Atomic Missiles are in Submarines, and they are where? Exactly.

Besides the Sun, which will totally explode outta the sky at any minute, you know not the Day nor the Hour, The Weather is like, the Most Important thing on Earth that can become really Bad. It’s as powerful, if not more powerful, than 99% of the phony made-up Gods out there in Religion. There can be only one! You live inside The Weather just like some people tell you they live inside the Love of The Lord, but The Weather isn’t that nice Jesus-y cheek-turning The Lord, it’s the Old School hardcore I AM-type The Lord, making rules you don’t understand but need to Obey. Severe Thunderstorm Alert! Tornado! Surprise Derecho comin’ at ya, Traffic & Weather together! Aiieee! You, me, and everyone we know with a brain cell left has said or thought or saw DERECHO more times in the past month than in all of Recorded Time & Temperature.

Why don’t people worry more about The Weather? You should be afraid of that shit all the time! It can kill you any time it wants, that goddamn Derecho can snap a tree in half and bonk you on the head or, worse, bonk your car on the head while you are driving it, exclamation point. Or drown you with a flash flood. Weather can shoot a lightning bolt at you while you are busy trying not to get wet with your puny umbrella. A Bolt of Lightning! Out of the sky! For you! That’s God-stuff, man. Except you don’t have to Believe it. It will Electrocute you for just standing around minding your own business. Respect!

Why aren’t there more churches that do Weather? I’m totally starting one, and not just for the tax deduction and cool robes and hats or whatever (no Ritualistic underpants, though. See: Robes), I’m getting out in front on the Fear! Obey Ye Weather! Hide in the Temple of Weather-fear with me for reasonable weekend rates, late checkout available, free Home Box and a copy of the National Edition of USA TODAY, but only if they put Larry King’s column back in, otherwise you get an inkjet printout of the home page of Huffington Post, which sucks, because they don’t tell you The Weather, man. More importantly, they don’t even know how to review it properly.

All I’m saying is you need to get your mind right about The Weather, really wrap your brain around it. We don’t live with it, we live in it, and that is why we have to declare a War on The Weather before it decimates us. That’s the only way the stupid fucking politicians will get behind all the stuff we gotta do to Save The World. From The Weather!

Ask yourself which of those politicians out there pretzeling their Soul for your vote doesn’t even wanna talk about The Weather, and which politician will talk about it, and also at least say they will try to fucking do something about it. Like in China. Say what you want about the country (OK, probably not when you’re actually there), but they refuse to let The Weather happen to them, man, they were shooting cannons and stuff at The Weather to make it behave when they had the Olympics last time. Yeah! The Chinese went to War with The Weather! There’s no tomorrow in the Five-Day Forecast! Weather? We will fight you! That’s the kind of can-do attitude that made America famous, except now it’s in China. Don’t hate! They (as in the People’s Republic) will probably figure out a way to deal with the morning Derecho and the weekly El Niño or whatever that will be fucking up traffic and making the bus late, or way early, because there’s almost nobody out waiting for it anyway, so the goddamn bus driver decides to set the landspeed record for not picking up any passengers and you’re standing there ten minutes later in the effing Derecho and stuff getting electrocuted. Let’s get behind this War on Weather before the icebergs melt any faster, OK? Thank you.

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias. Photo by Adnan Islam.

“Space tourists are usually high-income earners whose survivors can use high-powered lawyers — insurability for private space travel flights is a big issue at this time.”
 — Space lawyer Doug Griffith talks to Fast Company’s Neal Ungerleider about the growing field of space law.

★★ Harmless and unmemorable. A scrim of high clouds reduced the sky to an undifferentiated white, like a stage lighting rig preset for generic daytime. A neutral warmth prevailed — summer was exhausted, but no replacement was handy. People seemed to be out of ideas about what to wear. The only moment of interest came when the sun edged below the sheet of clouds, illuminating it in undulating bands, champagne and pewter, on the way to an ordinary night.