The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

• The Pixies’ song Here Comes Your Man is the bomb. Literally.
  This

  one’s from Stacy — she links to a lyrics site where one of the

  commenters says that the lyrics to the Pixies’ oddly Beatles-esque and poppiest tune is about Nagasaki.

  Here are the lyrics:

  outside there’s a box car waiting

  outside the family stew

  out by the fire breathing

  outside we wait ’til face turns blue

  i know the nervous walking

  i know the dirty beard hangs

  out by the box car waiting

  take me away to nowhere plains

  there is a wait so long

  here comes your man

  big shake on the box car moving

  big shake to the land that’s falling down

  is a wind makes a palm stop blowing

  a big, big stone fall and break my crown

  there is a wait so long

  you’ll never wait so long

  here comes your man

  there is a wait so long

  you’ll never wait so long

  here comes your man

  The commenter’s theory that the song is about Nagasaki is based on the fact that the delivery vehicle for the A-bomb — named Fat Man — was a B-29 bomber named the Bockscar, which will have flown the mission 60 years ago this August 9th. Given lead vocalist Black Francis‘

  (a.k.a. Frank Black, a.k.a. Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV)

  predilection for odd topics and science in his lyrics, I’d say that

  this commenter could be right.

• Three Men, Three Views

  Lisa lives in Tel Aviv and writes very fascinating pieces about life there. In this entry, she talks to three men…

• An Orthodox settlement leader who lives in Gush Katif
• An artist who curates exhibitions devoted to Israeli/Palestinian coexistence
• A foreign art curator

You’d be surprised what each of them has to say.

• Min Jung Writes About the 14 Stages of Blogging

  Nobody does the funny quite like Min Jung, who’s figured out and documented the lifecycle of bloggers:

  1. “Start reading blogs.”
  2. “You start a blog.”
  3. “You become a stats whore.”
  4. “You become really personal on your site as the online and real-life worlds start confusing you.”
  5. “You faux “retire” from blogging.”
  6. “You cave back into blogging in less than 72 hours.”
  7. “You decide to “get serious” about blogging.”
  8. “You have a pseudo flirty im/blogging/flickr flirting relationship with another blogger whom you have never met.”
  9. “You decide that you must meet other bloggers.”
  10. “You take a step back and metablog about blogging and what blogging has done about your blogging.”
  11. “See step 5.”
  12. “You

      decide that as a result of step 10 and having repeated step 5 more than

      3 times in the course of your lifecycle as a blogger, that you need to

      sanitize or reinvent your blog.”

  13. “You

      either lose your job because of blogging, are afraid of losing your job

      for blogging, or join a company that builds blogging tools.”

  14. “You decide to start an anonymous livejournal blog.”

Liz “I Speak of Dreams” Ditz pointed me to a blog entry in which a missing man’s friends are asking for help:

A friend of mine, David Koch, is missing on a mountain in Canada [Grouse Mountain, not far from Vancouver], and

I’m looking for help to publicize his situation so the Canadian

authorities don’t give up looking.

Dave’s the associate publisher on DMReview,

a Thomson/SourceMedia publication. He drove from Seattle toward

Vancouver on Wednesday, stopping in late afternoon to take a tram up a

mountain he and his wife had visited years before. Apparently he missed

the tram back, and attempted to hike down. He hasn’t been heard from

since.

A search effort was organized, but it’s looking like the authorities in Canada are starting to give up.

Dave is a truly great person, and I simply can’t imagine that he

could be left on his own at this point. I’m looking for any contacts

you can suggest in the national media – NYTimes, the wires, broadcast,

etc. – who might be able to recommend a reporter who could help to

publicize Dave’s situation. If you have any ideas as to how we should

go about the process, please email me or call me any time day or night.