I just noticed today that Kina Grannis, who I know from USC, released a new album this year, Stairwells. I’ve been listening to it, and it’s great.

Here’s the description from iTunes:

By focusing on simple arrangements and melancholic pop melodies, Kina Grannis cracked the Billboard charts in 2010 with this full-length release. Stairwells is her first album since 2008, the year Grannis won a Superbowl songwriting contest and claimed an Interscope recording contract as her prize. Although she left the label one year later without releasing any material, Grannis’ time at Interscope was still influential, and Stairwells shows strong similarities to albums by Vanessa Carlton, Michelle Branch, and other hitmakers. Grannis sings with breezy grace, occasionally backing her vocals with gauzy strings but more often sticking to light percussion and acoustic guitar chords. When she’s at her best, she mixes her Top 40 melodies with a sense of coffee house ambiance, and her status as an independent musician — one who spent two years recording this album on her own dime — sweetens the deal.

You can listen to some of the songs free on her Myspace music page. My favorite of those is “In Your Arms.”

Here’s a cool video about a computer program that will be competing on Jeopardy in February. As an added bonus, the program is being developed at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Laboratory, where my parents both worked and where I spent a significant chunk of my childhood:

So for my birthday today I asked folks if they could rate my podcast over at iTunes. Seeing as I have 454 Facebook friends, I was expecting maybe one or two of them would actually do it, as prior experience has taught me that, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, persuading people to open up iTunes and rate a podcast is about as difficult as getting them to eat live scorpions.

Anyway, I actually had three people rate my podcast today, so I guess that exceeded expectations. So thanks you three whoever you are. Thanks also to Matt Squires and MythReindeer, who wrote actual reviews in just the last few days. Today’s lone and much-appreciated review comes from John Oliver, who writes:

Great Find of 2010. I’ve been listening to this show from the beginning, and I absolutely look forward to every episode. John & Dave’s humor punctuated by great interviews with a variety of people in the geek-o-sphere. This is the best variety geek show around. Not to mention my regular dose of King’s Quest references each episode. Tell your friends. Tell your hamsters. Tell io9.com. Everyone needs to know.

Thanks, John! In other news, last night I stayed with some friends in San Francisco, and today we went over to the de Young art museum. Definitely the coolest thing I saw there was this cathedral-shaped reliquary which contains an actual human spine and which is made entirely out of bullets and gun parts.

So tomorrow is my birthday. If you want to do something nice for me for my birthday, why not fire up iTunes and give 5 stars to my Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. (Here’s a link.) Thanks!

Juhan writes: “Hey, what exactly do you mean by the ‘polished up’ version? I mean: I love the podcast (both the old at Tor and the new one at io9) and I totally dig Bacigalupi’s work, but hell, I don’t want to listen to the same thing twice. How exactly are these ‘new’ versions better? And will you keep re-making all of them? Thanks.”

Hi Juhan. Our deal with io9 is to do new episodes twice a month. We also decided it would be good to repost all our old episodes from Tor.com on io9, so that all the episodes will be together in one place. In order to maximize the number of people who notice the posts, we decided to post one rerun at a time, in the off weeks between new episodes. When we started doing the show, John and I had zero experience with podcasting or audio editing, and I had zero experience interviewing people over the phone. When I re-listened to our first episode, I thought it sounded pretty bad: long stretches of dead air, abrupt cutoffs, loud inhalations, volume fluctuations, awkwardly delivered questions, etc. There’s a limit to what I can do to fix it at this point, but I fiddled around with it as best I could and rerecorded a few of the lines. The new versions don’t include any new content, so you’re not missing anything if you skip them. They’re mostly for io9 readers who never heard the episodes the first time around. I don’t know yet how much editing work I’ll do on the other old episodes before reposting them. I’ll evaluate it on a case-by-case basis.

Sounds like you want to avoid Tea Thyme and Lavender in Portland, Oregon. Author Mary Robinette Kowal just had her car towed from their parking lot and was charged $252. Even though she has a receipt showing that she shopped there less than an hour before her car was towed, the business refuses to refund her money and has been unacceptably rude in dealing with her. Perhaps they should consider changing their name to Tea Thyme and Larceny.

Nifty! Ron Gilbert linked to our interview from his Twitter account. We always appreciate it when people do that.

And here are two nice comments:

Dr-Doomsayer writes: “Great podcast as always, guys. It was like traveling back 25 years into my past — and then back again! As always, the best geek podcast online.”

And nbd9000 writes: “Perfect timing! I just started working my way through the Monkey Island games again, introducing them to my wife, and this was a nice easter egg! On another note: about the Infocom version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The trick was to not do anything! If you tried to actively solve puzzles, you would inadvertently die, but if you mirrored Arthur Dent’s complete lack of action from the book, the game would actually beat itself. It was sort of an in-joke, and the only Infocom game that would do so.”

Here’s one of the scariest and most riveting articles I’ve read recently: “The Shadow Scholar” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s a sampling:

“For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?”

“Let’s be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn’t get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.”

“Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph. I’ve also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: ‘A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come.’ Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment’s instructions.”

“With respect to America’s nurses, fear not. Our lives are in capable hands­ — just hands that can’t write a lick. Nursing students account for one of my company’s biggest customer bases. I’ve written case-management plans, reports on nursing ethics, and essays on why nurse practitioners are lighting the way to the future of medicine. I’ve even written pharmaceutical-treatment courses, for patients who I hope were hypothetical.”

Well, I’d rather be back in the Top 10, but I have to admit this is an oddly fitting ranking for the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy:

So several people in my Facebook and Twitter feeds mentioned that Disney’s Tangled (a retelling of Rapunzel) is surprisingly good, so I decided to give it a try, and yeah, I thought it was terrific. Check it out.

Weird dream I just had:

I was trapped in a supermarket with a bunch of other people and we knew that a monster attack was imminent. We were all huddled on the floor in the corner of the store that was felt to be the safest. We somehow knew that Coca-Cola might help us survive, but most people were reluctant to move from the “safe” corner to go get any. I made my way to a different corner where the Coca-Cola was and got myself a two liter bottle, and a few other people were doing the same thing, and then I returned to the safe corner. As I sat there listening to people’s nervous chatter, I started drinking my Coca-Cola. Then I stared at the bottle and noticed that I’d already drunk half of it, and I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking to start drinking my Coca-Cola when it was the key to surviving a monster attack. I realized then that I was a little confused about how exactly Coca-Cola would help you survive a monster attack. Did it repel the monster? Or did the monster really like Coca-Cola, so therefore you could use it as a peace offering or a distraction? Then someone said, “Or maybe it was orange soda…” and not Coca-Cola at all, and I lost confidence in the efficacy of Coca-Cola in this situation.

I raised my hand and asked someone in charge whether we were expected to sit here or if we were free to go find someplace else to huddle helplessly, and he said no that was fine, so I started hurrying down the aisles looking for a hiding place. I climbed over a counter and opened a cabinet, but it was too small for me to squeeze into, so I kept looking. I found a place where there were these sort of Mayan temple/modern art pillars, and I thought I could climb them to a ledge, so I did. On the ledge was a trapdoor, but when I opened it there was just a shallow depression there that was also too small for me to squeeze into. Then I realized that the ledge I was on was actually in a field outside the store, so I climbed down and started making my way across busy streets and away from the supermarket. Now that I was out of there, I started to feel pretty confident about my chances of surviving.

I made my way up a hill to a large Mount Kisco Medical Group office building, and went inside. I knew the place had massive labyrinthine underground archives, and for a moment I debated whether heading downstairs or upstairs would be safer, but I settled on upstairs. As I made my way up the stairs, there were a group of women ahead of me, and one of them hadn’t heard yet that the city was being attacked by a giant monster, so one of the other women was explaining the situation to her, and mentioned that the monster could leap miles and shred concrete as if it were paper, which made me a little more nervous again. I made it to the top floor and peeked out a window, and I could see the monster splashing around in the harbor below and causing devastation. The monster was giant and green and had two massive tentacles with fins at the ends that trailed along behind it.

Then, to my horror, the monster leapt straight at me, like a head crab from Half-Life with its round toothy lamprey-mouth, flying miles and landing on the building I was in. I tried to run, but it smashed through the wall and gobbled me up, but somehow I was still running away, still trying to escape. I was on the roof of a different building now, a luxury apartment complex with stairs linking various rooftop levels, each of which had a pool, and young people in swimsuits were thronging the pools and having parties and hoping that the monster would attack their parties. As I ran past, with the monster in pursuit, one guy said to the monster, “Hey monster, why didn’t you come to my party, man?” (In my dream the monster had a normal everyday name, but I don’t remember what it was.)

I started to realize that this was all a dream, that in fact it had turned into a parody of Cloverfield — one criticism I heard of Cloverfield is how ridiculous it is that in a city the size of New York the main characters keep running into the monster wherever they go, almost as if it’s following them around. In my dream that was actually the case, and the monster was following me around and gobbling me up and spitting me out repeatedly. As the monster closed in on me yet again, I turned and noticed that he was somehow both a giant monster and also a handsome reality TV star with wavy dark hair. I screamed, “Why do you keep attacking me?” and he said nonchalantly, “Because I like you.”

Then I woke up.