The Boys Consider the Pitchfork Music Festival and New Technologies!

It's well-known that hippies love to bond in large numbers at music festivals, such as Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Wakarusa (at least before the latter festival was kicked out of Larryville and banished to Arkansas where the hippies will be made to squeal like pigs and/or picked off one-by-one with a bow and arrow by someone named Bobby Joe).

But do hipsters have a similar event? Well, rarely, primarily because any band capable of drawing such major crowds is no longer hip. But the Pitchfork Music Festival is an exception, allowing hipsters to bond over their mutual derision of half the bands they've paid money to see.

This year's opening night bands--Built to Spill, Yo La Tengo, Tortoise, and the reunited Jesus Lizard--have supposedly agreed to play nothing but requests submitted on-line to the festival site, allowing hipsters to feel even more important than they usually do (even though hipsters generally do not like making requests, as we have studied here in previous entries, and will certainly only request rarities and B-sides that the bands themselves have long forgotten how to play).

Richard: "Wow. This will be Jesus Lizard's first show in ten years! I'd love to drink a PBR while witnessing that."

Chip: "What's a Jesus Lizard?"

[random notes: On a recent evening, Richard found himself at the Replay watching local hipster icon Suzannes Johannes perform. Between her shoegazing songs, Ms. Johannes took dainty sips from a Schlitz at her feet, leading a local Sunday School teacher in the crowd to wonder aloud whether the local hipster beer of choice, PBR, might ever give way to something equally shitty and cheap. Perhaps. But it will likely take more than Johannes' subtletly. In fact, this reporter thinks it will require nothing less than the Transmittens themselves telling us what to drink].

---

According to the NY-Times, Microsoft is hard at work on software for a "personal virtual assistant" called Laura, who will appear on-screen as a talking head capable of organzing your appointments and booking your flights and such. The article points out: "Instead of being a relatively dumb terminal, Laura represents a nuanced attempt to recreate the finer aspects of a relationship that can develop between an executive and an assistant over the course of many years."

Chip: "One thing that tends to develop over the years in this sort of relationship is sex. And until I can fuck this "Laura," somehow, I'm uninterested."

Richard: "There's no question that porn is the number one reason people use the web and I predict that, within a few years, most PC's will come equipped with a 'special' port that you can stick your weiner in."