My two favorite XM channels are 20 and 115: the "20 on 20" pop countdown and Radio Disney. I love the way pop music sounds (they've engineered it so I will), but there's also something comforting to the soul about it. The music styles and the production values are different than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but it's still the same 10 messages delivered by the same 10 high school archetypes. As long as America is the land of the free, it'll always be this way.

Another thing I like to do is look up the bands and singers on the internet. That's how I learn how they got their start, how they were "discovered," and how many fans disowned them once their public personas were styled after the peppy cheerleaders, mysterious rebel loner boys or doe-eyed heart-scribbling female diarists that the general public easily recognizes. I believe that artists don't sell out to giant entertainment conglomerates, they sell out to audiences.

This entry takes no comments. No trackbacks, shoutbacks, pings or dings. It exists on its own, just like all the others I've written, residing entirely within its own context. Whether it's read by anybody or not, it is as real as a tree falling in the woods, and it's certainly more searchable, indexable and Googleable than one of those. What this is not, however, is interactive.

I can't find an authoritative history of website comments anywhere, but I recall seeing feedback solicitations on blog entries as far back as 1999. I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to write. "Hey, good job?" "I really agree with what you're saying?" "Me too?" If I disagreed with whatever theory was being posited, I could always post something myself somewhere and reference it via a newfangled "hyperlink." Written opinions have been traded in similar cross-referenced fashion for centuries.

But as the new century began, it was clear that people wanted the ability to elicit responses that were not only instant, but inline and attached. In my life as a developer, I was being asked to build not only blogs, but comment submission forms as well. In a relational database, this is roughly what the relationship between the two looks like.

Back when newspapers were king, in the pre-internet, pre-ESPNews era, one of my favorite parts of daily sports news consumption was the transaction section. Sports sections contained, and still do, a concise guide to signings, hirings, firings and trades, all organized neatly by sport and league. I credit my excellent eyesight to hours and years of sharpening my reading skills on that sans-serif agate type, there on the sports section's back page.

This, to me, represented the absolute root, the nerve center of the sporting world. Just as the stock and bond grids were to the financial section, those block paragraphs (team name in all caps, followed by an em-dash and a succinct description of the action taken) represented the heart of what was really going on. Most of the stories on the preceding pages were just longer versions of what was found there, colored with interviews and other flowery details.

James Kenneth McManus died today. He was 86. He was my hero.

Along with millions of Americans of my general age, Jim McKay introduced me to the beauty, the grandeur, the full width and depth of the Olympics. More than any other, Mr. MckKay ignited in me a life-long love for the Games and all they represent, in spite of the forces and elements that would corrupt and cheapen them. When drugs, bid-fixing and gigantism threaten to render the Olympic Movement irrelevant, I remember all those things Mr. McKay would say in those post-Games monologues. He'd use those few post-Closing Ceremony minutes to remind us about how those past 16 days had represented the best parts of the human spirit, how the modern Games can serve as a fleeting glimpse into a truly peaceful world, one where sport promotes cross-cultural understanding.