What Barack Obama and Stephanie Meyer have in common

1. I don't care what music they like.
2. Evil conspiratorial marketing forces are trying to make me care about the music they like.

Well, maybe "evil" is too strong a word. How about useless? Seriously, I spend enough time unsubscribing from all my political newsletters now that they've been overtaken by Obamamania; every senator, MoveOn cause, or any group that ever thought of having Democrat-like leanings has proudly allowed its newsletter to be used as the mouthpiece of Obama and I am sick of seeing B.O.'s name in my inbox, so every time it happens I promptly unsubscribe. (And in the "please tell us why you want to unsubscribe" space I do precisely that.)

But now even my totally apolitical newsletter from a heretofore chill concert venue in Massachusetts -- a newsletter to which I continue to subscribe because they have such great musicians there all the time that I glean information and regularly learn about great new artists -- has gone to the dark side. Tonight's subject line promised that B.O. knows great music when he hears it, and it proceeded to tell me about the Kenyan-American cooperative band Extra Golden. For whom, I might add, B.O. himself apparently "pulled some strings to make sure they got their visas and work permits to play in the states." (So says the newsletter.) I suppose I could refrain from pointing out that if Dubya and his cronies pulled such strings for their friends everyone would be up in a snit about how shady that behavior is ... but when B.O. does it, it is suddenly saintly.

As for Stephanie Meyer, if you don't know who she is, I am jealous of you. She is the author of some silly young adult series about vampires and who knows what all. If I recall correctly, she's a housewife who is or used to be or hangs out with some Mormons or something until she realized she had stories to tell that are dark and yet uplifting about some vampires that take up residence in human brains ... I don't know, none of this is the point. The point is that the latest book in her series-of-young-adult-fantasy-books-whose-covers-are-indistinguishable comes out this Saturday, or, if you're in the desperate retail bookselling business, Friday night at midnight at a party to include games! trivias! wristbands! a chance to win the raffle prize of -- first place in line to buy the book at 12 a.m.

Well, as part of the attempt to make Harry Potter out of a sow's ear, Borders has all kinds of displays promoting the book and the series and the Twilight calendar and included among them is an endcap display of "Stephanie Meyer's playlist." The tunes that inspired her as she wrote the Twilight series ... or so they say. UGH.

I'm surprised no one thought of that for JK Rowling over the years. Or maybe she didn't listen to any music to inspire her as she wrote the HP books because of course we all know she started writing them in a cafe with her young children clamoring for her time/attention/money because had you heard she was a struggling single mother? You must have, it's got to be the most often recited pop culture sob story of the last couple decades, either that or Jewel's homeless-in-a-van-that-made-me-a-poet crap.

See, this is what happens to me when I get this annoyed. Run-on sentences.

But just for good measure, you know who else's opinion means nothing to me? All the middle-aged men in my neighborhood who like to say things to me when I go running. Are you listening, thirtysomething to sixtysomething men of Greenpoint, whether you be smoking, chatting with your friends, up on scaffolding building something, or just generally standing around being useless? Well, listen now: I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU. I'm not going to look at you, I'm not going to return your greetings, and I don't know what on god's green earth inspires you to whistle and shout pleasantries and random "woo-hoos" and "go girls" at me when I run by. Shut up, OK? Why would someone actually stop and respond to you? Double ugh.
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.