One of the Christmas gifts I received this year is Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles. As you might guess, it’s the authors’ attempt to rank the 500 greatest singles in the long history of country music. As all of these lists are, it’s more a beginning than an end, but the essays that accompany each selection make the book a must have for any fan of country music. As a Texas music/alternative country fan, my favorite singers and bands get little mention, but that makes sense in the context of a list of best singles, rather than of best songs, singers, or performances. One nice thing about the book is that the authors take an expansive view of country music, so songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” take their place alongside country classics like Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back to Tulsa.” Even if you disagree with every choice on the list, you’ll understand country music better after reading it, and you’ll hear new things in the songs that are listed. Great book.

For what it’s worth, the reviews at Amazon.com are what I expected. The book pays little attention to country music since 1990, and really, since 1980. That may not seem fair to some reviewers, but it seems right to me, since it’s hard to place recent singles in a proper historical context. Besides, I find that the value in all such projects is less about how the works in question are ranked and more in the discussion of the items that are included. In that regard, the book is excellent.

If country music isn’t your thing, you may like Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, the book upon which Heartaches by the Number is patterned.

One further note: one’s appreciation of a book like this is much enhanced by the availability of online music stores like the iTunes Music Store. The ability to find many of the songs on the list and listen to them at the drop of a hat is incredible. Sadly, I think that you’d have more luck with the Dave Marsh book than Heartaches by the Number; the selection of classic country music available throught iTMS is not that deep.

Every once in awhile you encounter an observation so revolutionary and yet so obviously true that you have to catch your breath. I’ve recently started reading March Schmitt’s weblog, The Decembrist, and was rewarded with this:

I do think that the backlash against the Medicare bill is not long in coming, and No Child Left Behind is already one of the most locally unpopular federal initiatives in a long time. But as I’ve written before, it’s not easy for Democrats to find centrist language that shows how they would do things differently, that goes beyond the liberalism of “more.” As it is, I suspect the backlash against this crappy, lazy, irresponsible legislation will not be a call to improve it, but simply another backlash against government. “Look at this Medicare mess,” seniors will say: “government can’t do anything right!” And when Americans are pissed off at government, who do they call? Republicans.

Revolting, but true. Read the whole thing. He elaborates further here.

I love Firebird unreservedly, but I’ve been plagued by a particularly annoying bug recently. For some reason whenever I click on a page, a blinking cursor appears just as if I were editing the page. I haven’t had much luck searching Bugzilla, so I’m going to try reinstalling. I wonder if something was corrupted, because I’ve been using Firebird 0.7 for awhile and this bug has only recently cropped up.

Update: Simon Willison points out that it’s a feature that you can turn off with the F7 key. According to this page, it’s called caret browsing. It’s designed to be the ultimate in mouse avoidance, apparently, enabling you to move around on the page and select text without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Here’s a table of Linux equivalents for Windows software. In this world, Linux has more of everything!

I’m no lover of Halliburton or this administration’s relationship with the company, but it seems clear that Halliburton isn’t making money hand over fist in Iraq, as is frequently alleged or implied. That still doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be giving a lot more work to Iraqis or at least competitively bidding jobs out.

Wikipedia, like many popular and growing Web sites, is short on hardware. They need $20,000 to upgrade and keep things running smoothly. As I’ve noted before, this is a project worthy of support.

Dave Johnson writes about the fundamental problem we face with Bush’s core supporters. They’re rich and they don’t have any empathy for people who aren’t. I’ve often said that the fundamental difference between most hardcore conservatives and the rest of us is a lack of appreciation for the old bromide, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The inability to put yourself in the shoes of people worse off than yourself, or just different than you, period, is the enabler for what passes for modern conservatism. Just my two cents. Along these lines, see Jon Carroll’s latest call for people to give to the Untied Way.

The Valerie Plame affair has not been in the media much of late, but the investigation continues. Oh, and people at the CIA say that the White House is still leaking classified information in order to damage or discredit Joseph Wilson and his wife.

Donkey Rising provides a preview of the new retirement program that the Bush administration is going to propose:

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It’s wonderful news that Libya has decided to get rid of its stocks of antique chemical weapons and its “nuclear weapons program,” but I’m highly skeptical of the suggestions that this is the direct result of our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Much has written about this elsewhere, so I’ll keep it short. First of all, Khaddafi is no idiot. He knows that the US military has been badly overextended by the invasion of Iraq, and that he’s certainly not next on the list of countries Dick Cheney would like to invade. Realistically, Libya wouldn’t make it into the queue anytime soon, and he could weasel out at his convenience before then. Secondly, Khaddafi has been seeking rapproachement with the West for years, and as a secular Arab nationalist, has his own serious problems with Islamists. He’d like nothing better than to see al-Qaeda taken down, just to relieve himself of one of his own headaches. Khaddafi in recent times has even done his best to distance himself from Arabs, period. According to his own statements, he’s all about Africa these days. The timing of this is convenient for those looking for new justifications for our extended stay in Iraq (since the old ones haven’t quite worked out), but the Iraq-Libya connection doesn’t hold up under significant analysis.

Actually, there is one way where this does make sense. Libya has been looking for a deal to get out of the dog house for a long time — that’s why they coughed up the money to pay off the families of the people killed in the Lockerbie bombing. The US has been reluctant to let Khadaffi off the hook. These days, the administration really needs some foreign policy wins, especially some that make Operation Iraqi Freedom look like the right thing at the right time. At this time, Khadaffi and Bush both have something that the other needs, ergo, a deal.