The American Heart Association calls for chest compressions to be given at a rate of 100 per minute in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). “Stayin’ Alive” almost perfectly matches that, with 103 beats per minute. [...]

In a small study headed by Dr. David Matlock of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, listening to “Stayin’ Alive” helped 15 doctors and medical students to perform chest compressions on dummies at the proper speed.

Good thing the Bee Gees didn’t go with one of the earlier suggested titles, like “Buried Alive” or “Saturday Night” (according to VH1 Pop-up Video). Not that it would’ve affected the beat, but I think it would’ve been creepier to hum while doing mouth-to-mouth.

I now want to see research on how awesome Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Right Round” is. It doesn’t relieve vertigo or anything, but come on, that song is awesome.

* Make Downloadable Content backwards compatible. Harmonix has said that all your existing DLC will be compatible with *Rock Band 2* (I’m not sure, but that also suggests that anything you buy in *Rock Band 2* will be compatible with *Rock Band*). No need to buy “More than a Feeling” twice. Phew.

* Battle of the Bands: Gen suggested a battle of the bands mode where you could assemble your own band and compete against other bands online. It seems Harmonix will hold regular battle of the band contests, though they don’t spell out how it works.

* Online World Tour: finally, thank god. This was the single biggest missing feature from *Rock Band*, so it ought to be at the top of the list. Online quickplay was fun, but lacked much of the charm of world tour mode. They’ve also tweaked the mechanics of world tour to allow you to switch instruments and kick players out of your band, which have been sorely needed.

* Import original *Rock Band* catalog: okay, so this isn’t confirmed, but it’s been rumored in a couple of different places. It would be great if you could somehow play the original songs in *Rock Band 2*. Some have suggested it will all be available as free DLC, while others say that there may be a way to transfer it from your disc to your hard drive. Either way: that would be killer.

Of course, that’s not all that *Rock Band 2* is going to offer. They’ve also redesigned the guitar (*hot*) and drums, added mini-campaigns, a drum trainer program, and 80 new tracks, all of which are master recordings. This has quickly become *my* number one anticipated game of the year.

Now comes the tricky part: with redesigned drums and guitar, do I just buy the game, or do I buy an entirely new bundle? I’m still in need of a separate guitar, and the new drums are *wireless* in addition to being quieter and sturdier—how can I resist? And if I’m going to buy drums, game, and a new guitar, then it should be cheaper to just buy the new bundle.

As for the music itself: Gogol Bordello was appropriately crazy. The matching dancing/screaming girls were a nice touch. Vampire Weekend was fun enough, but their reception and appearance both made me uncomfortable. Last time I checked, this was an obscure hipster band, but today, they turned out to be preppies surrounded by throngs of adoring college girls screaming, “I love you!” Also, I think I might be old enough to be the lead singer’s father. Overall, I would have just said to nuke the whole festival were it not for the saving grace of Mates of State. I would happily pay money again to see a couple that cute (with a toddler that cute) play charming music for us all. It brought a smile to my crooked lips.

So, in no particular order:

“All Along the Watchtower” – Jimi Hendrix

A) it’s a classic with a kicking drum line, lyrics by Bob Dylan, and Hendrix on guitar. There is no B.

“I’m Shipping Up to Boston” – Dropkick Murphys

Okay it’s a little short, the lyrics are pretty limited, and you’d probably need some extra instruments for the full effect, but man is that an adrenaline-pumping song.

“A Certain Romance” – Arctic Monkeys

For the opening drum and guitar riffs alone, this song would be worth rocking out to. Barring this, perhaps “Fluorescent Adolescent.”

“The Bleeding Heart Show” – The New Pornographers

There’s already one track by The New Pornographers on the disc; why not add a second one? I can’t help but play air drums when I’m listening to this song anyway. Plus, it’s catchier than the common cold.

“The Beginning of the End” – Guster

Guster’s probably my favorite band, and I’d love to see something from them on the song list. “The Beginning of the End” is an easy song to rock out to, but “The New Underground” would be acceptable, as would their cover of Talking Heads’s “(Nothing But) Flowers.”

Obviously I could go on, with songs from other favorite bands like Jimmy Eat World and Motion City Soundtrack, but the point here is really that I want to be able to play along with any arbitrary song I choose. Harmonix has already come up with a system somewhat like this for their iPod-based game, Phase. I’m sure adapting it to Rock Band would be a non-trival task (that’s programmer-speak for “not gonna happen unless there’s some serious money”), and I can see why they wouldn’t want to do it, unless there was a way of making some cash on it, but I still hope that some day, some day, my music library and I will meet in a virtual rock concert that will shake the house to its foundations (advance apologies to my downstairs neighbor).

You know, there’s no better illustration of the problems with the Hollywood studio system than this: one of the major reasons that the studios have agreed to resume talks with striking writers is that they’ve now had to suspend production on a film. And not just any film, but Angels and Demons, the forthcoming sequel to The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown’s bestselling novel.

My feelings about Brown and his writing are a matter of record—this is the man who wrote a sentence so ridiculous and nonsensical that it ought to be enshrined in the Hall of Bad Sentence Fame. And I’m relieved to know I wasn’t alone in those feelings, with no less than British writer, actor, and comedian Stephen Fry backing me up:

Dan Whatsit and his preposterously awful Leonardo book are actually relevant to our theme. I usually last longer with any best-selling novel, however pathetic, than I did with his. But in his case I knew from the very first word that this was a writer of absolutely zero interest, insight, wit, understanding or ability. A blunderer of monumental incompetence. The first word, can you credit it, is ‘renowned’. ‘Renowned symbologist Henry Titfeather ….’ or something equally drivelling, that’s how this dreadful book opens. How do you begin to explain to someone that you just don’t start a fictional story by telling your readers that your character is ‘renowned’?

But The Da Vinci Code and, presumably, Angels and Demons are fiduciary bovines for the studio industry. Heck, even I saw The Da Vinci Code, despite loathing the novel (the movie was marginally better, but that’s largely because the book is kind of written to be a movie).

Back to my starting point: I’d wanted to write something about the strike. The problem is that it’s such a huge issue, not to mention one that’s been so well-covered, that I didn’t feel like I necessarily had anything to contribute to the discussion. My views are pretty straightforward: on the issue of paying out residuals on new media, I think the writers are right and the studios are wrong—it’s that simple.

The studios have concocted all sorts of nonsensical arguments about why they can’t pay the writers what they want; normally discussions this preposterous would only be found in the worlds of Dr. Sesuss or Lewis Carroll. They claim that they don’t make enough money on online media (despite the fact that they sell advertising for it, which implies that they’ve determined a rate of worth), or that they haven’t yet to be able to determine the value of online media (despite, as this clip from the writers of The Daily Show points out, that earlier this year Viacom sued Google for one billion dollars because their content was being uploaded to YouTube). Come on: you expect us to believe that an industry that’s all about the bottom line, whose bread-and-butter are budgets and box office returns, hadn’t come up with a price tag for online content?

The studios are scared, and rightly so: when it comes to technology, they’ve seen what happened to the music industry. Earlier this week, Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. admitted that the industry had made a mistake by prosecuting a war on their customers:

“We used to fool ourselves,’ he said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

To be clear, the music industry is still making money, and it’s not like they’re about to go out of business, but cracks are starting to show in their facade. Creators are starting to realize that they don’t necessarily need to get a deal with the record companies to make music and, more importantly, to make money making music. And the record labels want nothing more than to maintain their hegemony in the music market.

The film studios will outlast the music industry if only because, despite the impressive advances in filmmaking technology, there’s still a particular type of movie (the blockbuster) that is hard to make without the immense amount of money that Hollywood can bring to bear. Given enough talent, one person with a computer can record a track that is virtually indistinguishable from much of what gets churned out by the recording industry. While one person with a computer and a camera can make a very impressive film, they’ll be hard-pressed to compete with mainstream Hollywood fare, most of which features instantly recognizable actors and special effects by houses comprised of thousands of people, to name just two factors.

But if you’re paying attention, you’ll have noted the key phrase in the above scenario is this: “Given enough talent.” The one thing that you can’t fake, no matter how much money you get, is talent. Just because a guy in his garage has the technology to produce a song or a movie doesn’t mean that he should. The same applies for the likes of studios: just because they’ve got the money to throw into movies doesn’t mean they should be the ones in charge of it creatively. The idea that executive authority should be tied to the purse strings is a product of capitalism, but it has little purpose in the creative realm, any more than you’d your want health insurance organizations telling you which procedures you can or can’t have when you’re sick. These are not necessarily the people best qualified to make those types of decisions.

And I’ve gotten away from the strike again. While the studios are asking themselves “can we afford to cave to the writers’ demands?” the real question they ought to be asking themselves is whether they can afford not to cave to the writers’ demands. Late-night television shows have already been forced into reruns due to the strike, and prime-time shows are rapidly running out of time. At the very least, television has the ability to fall back on unscripted shows—read: reality TV—but the last and most powerful of the markets, feature films, has no such option. That’s why a blow to a film the size of Angels and Demons is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Entire movie seasons are planned around productions of like this—that’s why they call them “tentpoles”; they keep the studio solvent and upright, even if everything else falls down around them. While studios might have tried to outlast the writers if the strike had been limited to television, figuring—probably correctly—that the writers would run out of resolve or money first, the impact on feature films is far more striking, because studios are forced to look a couple years ahead in order to plan their calendars.

I find it likely that an agreement will be reached sat some point next week when the talks reconvene, and I certainly hope that a decision that favors the writers will be reached. Despite the trend towards reality TV, the fact is that the entertainment industry relies on writers as a house does on a solid foundation. Without writers, we’d be watching 90-minute sprees of product placement with banal, unremarkable writing—we’d be watching infomercials.

That is, if we were watching at all.

When asked what kind of music I like, I have occasionally answered with flippant things such as, “Side projects by bands you’ve never heard of.” This actually got me in trouble at least once, when I answered something along those lines with someone who is way more of a music snob than I (no offense, Caralyn).

I don’t really think I’m a music snob, though. I just crave novelty in music the way I—and most people, I think—crave novelty in other media. Sure, rereading a book is a bit more involved than listening to a song repeatedly, but I still feel like some music stands up to repeated consumption better than other music, and most pop music doesn’t do it for me. (Instrumental hip hop, incidentally, does. It makes really good background music for writing.)

So remember, next time you hear that indie kid complain that he “liked their old stuff better,” don’t feel bitter toward him, but pity him: For he is doomed with a taste for novelty so acute that his thirst for song will forever remain unquenched.

You can take a melody everyone knows and make it more danceable by putting a louder beat behind it and shouting over it in Portuguese. Thanks to Bonde Do Role for teaching me this.

If the bar is selling $1 PBR cans, don’t buy yourself a bottle of Corona. Maybe the extra $4 (plus tip) covered the really big lime they gave me.

When dancing, if you can convince yourself that smashing into the people next to you is part of the fun for both you and them, you will actually have more fun. Thanks to the people next to me for teaching me this. Sorry to Caralyn for that strategy leading to a sprained wrist and several bruises.

Make sure you’re looking at the right band’s page on MySpace. And bands: have more friends than “Tom” if you want to look like your MySpace page belongs to a band and not just a geek with a clever handle. I was all excited to see Datarock last night because I saw a poster advertising the show and noting their MySpace page, which took me to awesome songs. I was planning on leaving if the Presets sounded anything like what I thought was their MySpace page, but which turned out to be a band called Preset, which is not my cup of tea. I left the Presets’ page because my Flash blocker hid their music interface from me at first, and their only friend was Tom, so I figured they were probably not a headlining band. As a result, I also continued to call them “Preset” for the rest of the day, even as my very patient friends kept using the right name. Also, I should note that both bands were great.

Somewhat forgotten literary genres can be modified to make funny phrases. Thanks to Mario for claiming that his new philosophy is “magical nihilism,” even if he still working out what the heck that means. If the whole philosophizing thing doesn’t work out, anyway, that would be a pretty good name for an album.