Britons in America and Album Dates

I found a very funny article by a BBC corespondent that had just moved to a new assigment in America. There is some stuff about politics that is pretty standard, but he has some funny things to say about self help books and American portion sizes:

On self help books:

When we changed planes in Chicago midway through my never-ending New Year's Eve, I found myself lingering in the self-help section of the bookstore, puzzled by the sort of advice for which Americans are prepared to pay.

I now own copies of God Wants You To Be Rich and You're Broke Because You Want to Be.

If I ever disappear from this programme for a few months, you can assume I will be holed up somewhere writing a self-help book called something like: God Knows Why I'm Broke.

On bacon:

Bacon is no longer really a meat; it has become a garnish served alongside or on top of other foods, as though it was a kind of porcine salad vegetable.

Occasionally it even comes ground up and sprinkled over your dinner like a kind of dark, meaty snow.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to be born on the other side of the pond. I would appreciate 6 weeks of vacation a year, a healthier lifestyle, and a countries with world cooperation as a foreign policy goal. However, I'm happy here with near universal air conditioning, suburbia, and people who shower daily. You have to give up something to get something.

I've been trying to spend more time at the library to expand my horizons now that I'm not formally in school anymore. The tricky thing when you are in a library (or bookstore) is to have some heuristic to decide which book/CD of two you should rent/checkout/purchase. I know you can't judge a book by its cover, but can you use other facts about a CD to determine which one is going to be 'better'?

Some things I look at are artist, date published, and track listings. Obviously, if I've heard to the artist that is the top node in the decision tree. If I've heard of any of the tracks on the CD, the more power to it. However, most of the tracks you know on a CD are the "made for radio" garbage that lacks the potential to have a great album. I'm really looking for great albums when I get something because if there is one song on an album with a great hook, you can get it on iTunes. Finally, I try my best to ignore the picture on the cover and look for published date. Amongst two articles by the same artist, I always try to get the first published album, with the assumption that for almost every artist, the early stuff is better. This of course is the most flawed approach, but if its the library, then the cost of failure is another trip to the library to get the other album.

I thought the previous paragraph would be a lot more interesting when I started to write it, but the only real point in it is the great moral dilemma of "is a typical artist's early or later work better?" The jury is still out on that.