Every Thursday, I’m blown away by the variety of great produce that shows up in the parking lot of Borough Hall in Schuylkill Haven. Great locally grown foods at great prices… it’s what a farmer’s market is all about. It makes me love this time of year.

This week I picked up these mixed string beans, a bunch of Swiss chard, and some awesome cherry tomatoes.

1. The Wombats - Let’s Dance to Joy Division
2. The Kinks - This Time Tomorrow
3. Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros - Johnny Appleseed
4. Editors - Bones
5. The Cribs - I’m A Realist
6. The Billionaires - Eighties Movies
7. Vampire Weekend - Walcott
8. The Raconteurs - Carolina Drama
9. Doves - Snowden
10. MGMT - Time to Pretend
11. Phantom Planet - Do The Panic
12. The Hold Steady - Sequestered in Memphis
13. Tapes ‘n Tapes - hang them all
14. Nada Surf - Are You Lightning?

Edit:  Had to remove 4 songs — since last.fm doesn’t have the full tracks, you can’t listen to them on favtape.  Shoulda checked that first!

A nice haul of early tomatoes, half-long carrots, and Spanish onions from my garden. I have so many onions right now I don’t know where to put them… hopefully they will store well enough that I won’t have to buy any over the winter.  The carrots may not look like much but they are 100 times better tasting than what you can get at the supermarket.  And of course, who doesn’t love a fresh tomato, even if they are tiny early ones.

Let me know what you think about everything!

But Apple hardware aside, I have to wonder where the usability goes with the software. iTunes on Windows is unbelievably more annoying to update than any other program. Here are the major offenses as far as I’m concerned:

1. I don’t want Safari. It’s great that they have an automatic updater — Apple Software Update. But an updater is only supposed to keep software you have installed up-to-date, it’s not supposed to install new software you probably don’t even want. It’s especially offensive because if you’re not paying attention and just click update, Safari is selected by default and will be installed for you. Thankfully you can hide it from the list by selecting it and going to Tools->Ignore Selected Updates. A nice feature, but someone like my mom isn’t going to know to do that.

2. Don’t break my shortcuts every time. I have a shortcut to iTunes in the Quick Launch bar. Every time I reinstall iTunes, the shortcut breaks. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s annoying as hell. The average user might think that their iTunes has been “deleted”, which would not make them very happy.

3. Don’t put Quicktime shortcuts everywhere without asking me. The opposite problem of #2. The iTunes shortcut breaks, but Quicktime puts new shortcuts EVERYWHERE… desktop, quick launch, start menu. This is especially annoying to me because Quicktime is a program that I NEVER start manually. If I use it, it’s always by clicking on a video in Explorer. I kinda think most people do the same.

4. User License Agreement. Thanks for making me accept the agreement every time I update. I excepted it seven times already, but I might have changed my mind this time, so I’m glad you asked. Also, why does the agreement window not show up in the task bar? If I launch iTunes while any other app is running, the agreement is obscured by those apps. I have to minimize everything to get to it. More than once I’ve been like “Man I thought I launched iTunes a half-hour ago, where is it?”

5. Why do I have to restart?!? This is an age-old Windows problem that has mostly been exterminated, but for some reason Apple wants you to restart your computer after updating a goddamn media player. This is not system critical software, you should be able to update it without restarting.

If you can get through all this, iTunes is actually a really great app. With all these annoyances, I wouldn’t still be using iTunes if it wasn’t the best at what it does.

That also means I respect his opinions on food.  So when I saw this article and watched the related video over at TED, I thought he made a lot of sense.  He suggests that Americans in general eat way more meat than is necessary — or even sustainable.  He points out that nutritionists recommend we eat a half pound of meat a week…  most Americans, including myself until recently, eat that in a day. 

As a result of all this, he makes a very reasonable request – that we all try to be conscious of how much meat we do eat, and to try our best to cut back.  He’s not saying that we should all become vegetarians, or some other ludicrous thing…  he admits that even he likes a steak once in a while.  But still, until he pointed all this out, I never even thought about it.  Meat was the “center of the plate,” as he says.  That’s how I thought because that’s how I was raised.  When I would figure out my grocery list for the week, I would start by thinking “Hmm, chicken, beef, or pork?”  It’s very confining and pretty damn boring, too.

Now that I’m freed from that “obligation”, I have really been enjoying it.  Of course, Bittman’s recipes have helped a lot – I’ve made all the recipes attached to that article above (all great).  But even beyond that, I am finding myself making meals that I would have never considered a month ago.  This week I had Spaghetti Carbonara with Zucchini, with just a salad.  That was my whole dinner, no meat at all, and I didn’t miss it one bit.  Helping me along down this road are the weekly farmer’s market here in town, as well as my own vegetable garden pictured to the left.  It’s so easy to do this with all the cheap, tasty, fresh produce I can get my hands on right now.  I love taking vegetables straight from the garden to the kitchen… be it the salad of mixed greens and tomatoes I had with that carbonara the other night, or the bowl of garden peas I had for lunch over the weekend.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do when summer ends and takes the good produce with it, but at least now I’m thinking about what I eat.  Thanks, Mark.  Whether you’re skeptical or interested, please be sure to check out that article and video above.  Great stuff.

3.  Songs with police sirens in them — Man, this one is especially bad in songs that you haven’t heard before.  Talk about having your heart just drop out of your chest as you look up expecting to see flashing lights in your rear view.  The most recent offender for this would be Weezer’s confused epic “The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)“.  But there’s tons of songs that have them - Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak comes to mind.

I guess one benefit is that it makes me stop speeding for a while until my heart rate goes back to normal…