All the cool kids are doing it! Without further ado, a variety of statistics about my iTunes Library (music only):

Number of Songs: 25,991
Number of Albums: 2,951
Number of Artists: 2,292
Total Playing Time: 65 Days, 9 Hours, 19 Minutes, and 59 Seconds
Total Size on Disk: 131.19 GB
Most Recently Played Song: “Kodachrome®” - Paul Simon
Most Played Song: “Mr. Fancy Pants”- Jonathan Coulton
Artist Appearing Most Frequently in My ‘Most Played’ List: Cut Chemist
Most Recently Added Album: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead - John Wesley Harding

First Song Alphabetically: “A”- Barenaked Ladies
Last Song Alphabetically: “ZZ Top Goes to Egypt”- Camper Van Beethoven
Longest Song Title: “The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, ‘I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!’” - Sufjan Stevens
(iTunes truncates this at 256 characters)
Smallest Number in a Song Title: 0 - “England 2 Colombia 0” - Kirsty MacColl
Largest Number in a Song Title: 1,000,000 - “1,000,000” - R.E.M.

Shortest Song: “Raspberry (a)”- Sammy Burdson (0:03)
Shortest Song That's Actually a Song: “Fingertips - 11” - They Might Be Giants (0:04)
Longest Song: “9 Beet Stretch 2.1” - Free Manifesta (1:23:07)

First Album Alphabetically: A - Pan Sonic
Last Album Alphabetically: Zungguzungguguzungguzeng! - Yellowman
First Album Numerically: #1 Record / Radio City - Big Star
Last Album Numerically: The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T - Various Artists

First Five Songs That Pop Up on iTunes DJ:
“La Iguana” - Los Lobos
“Leap Frog” - Les Brown & His Orchestra
“Walking Away” - Sugar
“Balìa” - Enzo Gragnaniello
“Sleepy” - Grey Eye Glances

Five Songs iTunes Claims I Have Never Played:
“Groovin‘ High” - Dizzy Gillespie Sextet
“Speak My Language” - Laurie Anderson
“No Quarter” - Led Zeppelin
“The Blues Are Still Blue” - Belle & Sebastian
“Limnandi Evangeli” - Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Big news this morning:

Eastman Kodak Company announced on June 22, 2009 that it will discontinue sales of KODACHROME Color Film this year, concluding its 74-year run as a photography icon. Sales of KODACHROME, which became the world's first commercially successful color film in 1935, have declined dramatically in recent years as photographers turned to other films or digital capture. Today, KODACHROME represents just a fraction of one percent of Kodak's total sales of still-picture films.

It's interesting to me that Kodachrome had almost the same run as analog television.

Update: I love the title Gizmodo gave this story: Kodak Discontinues Kodachrome Film Amidst Barrage of Terrible Paul Simon Jokes.

I'm sure I've mentioned before just how much of a Lego household we've become of late. Charlie has Lego, Henry has Lego, and yes, I have Lego. Lego, Lego, Lego.

Anyway, I've been keeping an eye on the great stuff coming out of Brickstructures recently. They've partnered with Lego to produce a special Architecture series of Lego sets. First came the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center, then the Empire State Building and Space Needle. These sets are pretty cool, but they've outdone themselves with their latest.

The next two sets in the series are a pair of Frank Lloyd Wright classics: The Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater. They're gorgeous. Fallingwater, in particular looks great in Lego, though I do wish they'd gone with grey bricks for the vertical element; the contrast between the horizontal cast concrete and vertical cut stone is one of the really striking things about the original.

Now, if they would just release sets of some of their big models! (via Boing Boing Gadgets.)

Yes, I know that neither the Guggenheim nor Fallingwater are really Prairie School buildings, but the headline was irresistible.

It's People's Choice time again over at Kettle Foods. For the last few years, our favorite salty snack company has been rolling out a selection of strange new potato chip flavors—available in limited quantities on their web site—and allowing customers to pick the winners that go into full production. We've been a little disappointed that the Voice of the People hasn't agreed with our own tastes (the Chinese Five Spice chips were awesome!), but it's fun anyway. This year, there's doing things a little differently. Instead of a sampler box of new flavors, they're making a "Create-a-Chip Kit" containing seven spice blends and four bags of unseasoned chips "to use as a delicious, crunchy canvas." Hmm. We'll have to give it a try.

It's been a while, but I think it's time again for me to close out all those open tabs cluttering up my newsreader. This time, I have a very special all-video Tab Sweep for you. Pop up some corn and settle in...

I've mentioned this one before (at least on Twitter and Facebook), but it's worth another mention. Nina Paley's brilliant animated film Sita Sings The Blues is now available absolutely free. It looked for a while like the movie would spend eternity in Copyright Jail, but now it's free, free, FREE! Yes, I'll be the first to admit that an "animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw" doesn't particularly sound like a winner, but it is.

Speaking of Copyright Jail, musical Mashups are certainly not new (has it really been five years since The Grey Album brouhaha?), but Kutiman has a new twist: chopping, sampling, and remixing YouTube videos into original works of musical genius. (via 43 Folders.)

I love this palindromic video by Dan & Dan. Watch it forward, watch it backwards... it's all same. (via BoingBoing.)

Kottke links to a video of Danny MacAskill doing absolutely amazing things on his bicycle. It's basically parkour on a bike. If you've never seen parkour before, there are plenty of PK videos on YouTube.

Also from Kottke comes video of someone inflating a tire with starter fluid and a match. I expect to see this recreated on Mythbusters sometime soon.

One of our favorite video games of the last year is 2D Boy's World of Goo (it's great fun, give it a try!). A little while back, Kyle Gabler, the creative force behind World of Goo, release the soundtrack to the game for free. A Goo fan transcribed the music and posted the complete sheetmusic on his web site. Today, 2D Boy links to a video of a 14-minute piano medley of Goo Music by that same fan, Sebastian Wolff.

How To Make a Baby. Ah, so that's how it works.

Finally, we have a video of Raymond Scott's classic "Powerhouse" performed entirely on harmonica. So good. It's like the song was made for harmonica. Those Philharmonicas are really gonna be big, you wait & see. (via Neven Mrgan.)

I just found out that today is "Ellis Island Family History Day."

Historically, April 17 marks the day in 1907 when more immigrants were processed through Ellis Island than on any other day in its colorful history—11,747 people.

Interesting. In honor of the day, I thought I'd dig through my family history stuff and post something apropos. As it turns out, though, not many of my ancestors passed through Ellis Island. Ellis Island replaced Castle Garden on 1 January 1892, but by that time, most of my ancestors had already arrived on these shores. The Franzens and Oestmanns arrived in the 1850s, the Knuths in the 1870s, the Schoelzels, and Frandsens in the 1880s, and the Hansons and DeVrieses in 1890-1891 (though Hans Hanson had arrived back in the 1880s without his family). That leaves just one family: the Mohrs. I have yet to find any record of of the arrival of my great, great grandfather, Heinrich Mohr, though it appears he arrived sometime in 1892, so he probably did pass through Ellis Island.

In 1893, Heinrich's two eldest daughters arrived. Frances (age 15) and Thora (age 14) left Copenhagen aboard the Norge, arriving in New York on 25 July 1893 before traveling on to Chicago to meet their father.

Okay. That's cool, but it's still not one of my direct ancestors. Patience, grasshopper, I'm getting to that. Finally, in 1894, the rest of the Mohr family arrived. Heinrich's wife Ane Marie registered to emigrate on 17 October 1894 and arrived at Ellis Island aboard the SS Polynesia on 7 November. With her were Henrietta, Dagmar, Rosalie, Einar, and my great grandfather, Thorwald, age 9 years, six months.

I can only imagine what it was like for Ane. Her husband had left two years earlier to find them a better life in America. Her two teen daughters left a year later. She continued to raise her younger children back in Copenhagen. I imagine a letter arriving from Heinrich at long last: "I am settled here in Chicago and our new home is ready. Please come as soon as you are able. Money enclosed." Then a two-week journey across the North Atlantic with her five children. A quick passage through Ellis Island and onto the train to Chicago to reunite with her family. I gives me a little perspective on our one-day air journey across country with two kids.

Mmm... Baconlicious!

So tomorrow is the big day. No, I don't mean St. Patrick's day. No, not the big iPhone 3.0 announcement, either. The Hearst Corporation announced today that tomorrow would bring the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, leaving Seattle with a single major daily newspaper, the Seattle Times. This announcement wasn't really news, of course. Hearst announced back in January that it was putting the paper up for sale and that it would be shuttered if no buyer could be found. To absolutely no one's surprise, no buyer materialized. Of course, the Times isn't exactly doing so well, either. Maybe the boost they'll get from the PI's former subscribers and advertisers will tip the balance, but I doubt it.

The PI will continue online, at it's new home: seattlepi.com. Until yesterday, the PI shared it's web home with the Seattle Times at nwsource.com. Since 1983, the Times and PI have shared a lot of their infrastructure under a Joint Operating Agreement, which I always thought was a little bizarre. The PI's printing, advertising, circulation, and marketing were handled by the Times. It seems to me that made the paper ideally suited to go online-only. Time will tell whether the online version will last.

Across the country, newspapers are dropping like flies. Naturally, the sad state of the newspaper business has fostered a lot of hand-wringing (and a lot of ink, both literal and digital). The best analysis I've read comes from one of the Internet's great thinkers: Clay Shirky. His essay Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable perfectly captures the tumultuous world faced by by the newspaper business and gives some idea of what may be coming (hint: more tumult). Like Shirky, I don't particularly mourn the demise of the current model, where, as he puts it, "Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau."

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

What will the other ways be? Where will they come from? Who will pay for them? Shirky doesn't know and neither does anyone else. "The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place." And so it goes...