I’m generally ok with people playing music, or generally performing, in public for money. Most of them are fairly talented, or at least not terribly annoying, even the guys who are just drumming on empty buckets. But seriously, there is a limit.

Lately I’ve been encountering this guy who plays guitar and sings at the 50th Street uptown 1 station around 6 or 7 o’clock. Now, I’m on the downtown side going home from work, so I’ve never actually been up close to him. And this is probably the only thing that’s kept me from beating him to death with his own guitar. This guy has absolutely no talent for singing. That doesn’t stop him though; he just yells the songs. I say songs because there are, after all, two of them. He starts with the worst rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody ever defecated into the air, and then transitions into an equally bad version of House of the Rising Sun. And then he starts all over again. I wish I was making this up.

This has been going on for weeks now. Learn a new fucking song. Or actually, don’t. No need for you to defile another piece of music. Just quit. Sell your fucking guitar, never open your mouth in an attempt to sing again. Maybe take up bucket drumming. Because, seriously, I will come over there.

Whenever I read the phrase “Your an idiot” somewhere on the internet, I immediately think of this:

Intellectual superiority: you’re doing it wrong.

This strikes me as not such a great idea:

The $99 WikiReader. All of Wikipedia in your pocket with no Internet connection required. Works in bright sunlight. 3-button interface. You can update the information in the WikiReader either by mail (they ship a microSD card) or by downloading a 4+ GB file. [Slashdot]

Do you really need yet another portable electronic device? First off, this thing is probably not going to sit that comfortably “in your pocket.” Take an iPhone, make it as wide as it is long, and then stack two of those on top of each other. Then shove it in your pocket next to any other junk in there. Yeah, probably not.

But then ok, assume you’re not supposed to carry this around on a regular basis (which is already sort of fail, random access to knowledge from anywhere is the interesting use case). Where do you keep it? At home? Next to your computer? Which is hooked up to the actual Wikipedia, which has “automatic” updates and pictures and such?

For $150 or so, you can get a refurbished iPod Touch, and download this offline wikipedia app, and also pick up any other app in the app store. Maybe at half the price, this would be an interesting proposition. As it is, there are just too many “neat gadgets I can hold in my hand” to make this one useful.