Tony's still on fire

Possibly the best, and certainly the funniest thing Anthony Bourdain's ever done on TV — in any event, now I definitely know why he's moving to Vietnam. At least make sure you catch the Island of Mr. Sang episode.

The doctor is in

Full patient compliance is expected.

Strange Bridge

I just realized why, whenever I play the Chameleons' "Tears" (from Strange Times), I always play it two or three times in a row: it ends on a bridge. Can you think of any other songs that end on a bridge? I can't.

In my book, "Tears" is an darned well-titled song, as it often gets me all choked up. As with most Chameleons songs, this has more to do with the mood of the song than the lyrics, but it was still something of a revelation when I read the following quote this morning from Mark Saunders on the Chameleons web site:

"A few months prior to starting 'Strange Times' I'd lost a very old and dear friend to cancer. At that time it was the hardest blow I'd ever been dealt and I wanted to write something specially, the idea 'Tears' originally 'Tears Are Not Enough' seemed perfect for it. I think it had been earmarked as a single by both the producer and the label from the word go, hence the first 'rocky' version, which I liked up to a point, but it didn't quite capture what I'd had in mind and so I argued and eventually got, an alternative treatment. The studio was residential but the producer chose to commute each day from nearby London. We chose to continue working into the night and it was the band and the engineer that put the track together, the producer then coming in on the mix. Personally, the night we recorded it was one of the highlights of the album."