In better news, Yo La Tengo is touring again, including a trip to Durham in September. Here's a free MP3 from their upcoming album.

Amazing concert, best of the three Springsteen shows I've been to. The whole band was in a good mood and for whatever reason they've decided that Greensboro is a great venue for them (probably has something to do with all the transplanted Jerseyans). Everything rocked.

We were close, too; deep in the Pit, just a row or two back from the stage. Enjoy a few pictures at Flickr from my very bad camera phone.

Here's the setlist, courtesy of Backstreets.com:

Badlands
Radio Nowhere
Outlaw Pete
No Surrender
Working on a Dream
Seeds
Johnny 99
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Raise Your Hand
Seventh Son
Hang on Sloopy
Growin' Up
I'm on Fire
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Human Touch
Kingdom of Days
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born to Run
Cadillac Ranch

ENCORE
Hard Times
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Land of Hope and Dreams
American Land
Glory Days

Then, at the end, Dave Michaels caught Bruce's sponge.

Ticketmaster learns you don't F with the Boss.

Monday midday.

* Followup on the Google-search climate crisis: Google says it's just not so. (via)

* The top 11 compounds in your drinking water.

• Atenolol, a beta-blocker used to treat cardiovascular disease

• Atrazine, an organic herbicide banned in the European Union, but still used in the US, which has been implicated in the decline of fish stocks and in changes in animal behaviour

• Carbamazepine, a mood-stabilising drug used to treat bipolar disorder, amongst other things

• Estrone, an oestrogen hormone secreted by the ovaries and blamed for causing gender-bending changes in fish

• Gemfibrozil, an anti-cholesterol drug

• Meprobamate, a tranquiliser widely used in psychiatric treatment

• Naproxen, a painkiller and anti-inflammatory linked to increases in asthma incidence

• Phenytoin, an anticonvulsant that has been used to treat epilepsy

• Sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic used against the Streptococcus bacteria, which is responsible for tonsillitis and other diseases

• TCEP, a reducing agent used in molecular biology

• Trimethoprim, another antibiotic

So gross. (Via Boing Boing.)

* Johann Hari in Slate considers environmentalism's great divide: the romantics vs. the rationalists.

* Bruce Springsteen is playing a free concert in DC one day before I get there for the inauguration. There is no justice.

* And Hendrick Herztberg notes in The New Yorker that the Bush years offer, for the first time, a precise measurement of the number of people who can be fooled all of the time: 27%.

The President-elect’s performance can’t fully explain the public’s welcoming view of him. Part of it, surely, reflects an eagerness to be rid of the incumbent. A gangly Illinois politician whom “the base” would today label a RINo—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

(Via Matt Yglesias.)

Greensboro's Fox 8 has excerpts from the first few songs Bruce played last night. Via Shankar.

Clips from last night's Springsteen show are starting to show up on YouTube.

American Land / Finale

Saint in the City/Trapped



Both these songs were unexpected highlights, though unfortunately the sound quality on the clip isn't all that fantastic. There's also a nice story about Danny Federici before the music starts.

I'm hoping to write something short for the Indy about Bruce this week, so I'm outsourcing my morning-after report entirely to the very good people at backstreets.com:

Charging out of the gate, they set the tone for a high-energy performance, the best of this Southern swing so far.

Well, all right! If I'd had my druthers, I might have been to the Charlotte show on Sunday night instead, if only to have seen that encore: Thunder Road, Kitty's Back, Born to Run, Dancing in the Dark. But still, our setlist was pretty crazy awesome itself:

Roulette
Don't Look Back
Radio Nowhere
Out in the Street
The Promised Land
Magic
Gypsy Biker
It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City
Trapped
Because the Night
Darkness on the Edge of Town
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
Mary's Place
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands

ENCORE:
Backstreets
Bobby Jean
Born to Run
Ramrod
American Land

I don't see any video yet, but there's some video from Charlotte up at YouTube. If you say your prayers and eat your vitamins and squint your eyes you can just make out my buddy Shankar in the Pit losing his mind and saving his soul (keep your eyes above the YouTube logo):

He's right at the right edge of the screen—a woman bumps into him at the 2:40 mark, but you can see it doesn't faze him a bit.

Bruce is coming to Greensboro tonight, and I've got tickets, so all is right with the world. It's my first Springsteen concert since Summer 2000, which is much too long to take the sacrament.

* The New York Times goes inside the world's last pinball factory.

* The British science fiction series I've always wanted to see, Blake's 7, is going to be remade a la Battlestar Galactica.

* Who is Tom Bombadil?

* Elizabeth Edwards takes on the media for its shoddy coverage of the presidential primaries thus far.

* Few people are writing more cogently about George Romero's zombie movies than this post at The Pinocchio Theory.

* And I'm trying hard to think of a movie I've seen this year that was more fun than Air Guitar Nation.