Some things just put a spring in your step. It thrills me the way these high school kids responded to a protest of their school by an intolerant extremist group. (And it’s a refutation of today’s generation as either slackers or thugs.)

Now that I’ve ended my day of internet silence — and thank you again to everyone here who joined me in helping to make the internet more available to everyone, especially those struggling with slow connections — I thought I’d share this great news. The previously lost Beckett play, “Attack the Day Gently,” has been found! Here are the details.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for alerting me to this!

In which David Byrne talks about his love for music, and his opinion that lyrics are overrated.

As someone who has been listening to Byrne’s lyrics for more than 30 years, I agree with him that it’s often the sound of lyrics (his lyrics, anyway), that’s more important than the meaning. That’s because the songs he’s done both with and without Talking Heads have been largely connotational rather than denotional — they connote a certain mood or situation, most often: a rootless anxiety. (Or, sometimes, a quirky sort of hope.) This displacement from his surroundings puts him squarely in the tradition of postmodern artists where, of course, meaning is less important than immediate impact. Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf and William Burroughs and Donald Barthelme were usually more interested in transmitting a feeling than telling a story. And that sounds like a close approximation of what David Byrne does in his songs.

Thanks to Paul Crist for alerting me to this video.

Interesting — and quick — reading, from LATimes.com:  Six prominent technophiles tell how they think the tablet computer will fare.

Much as I love the current delivery system — books, magazines — I couldn’t help noting in my most recent travels last week that I was lugging around three books and five magazines with me and that, perhaps, an electronic replacement would be more efficient….

Most notable comment in this piece, from the editor of Wired magazine:  “You could do many things right with the Web, but not magazines. Tablets will allow us to do digital magazines that are intelligently designed, flow correctly and have the artistic intent preserved.” What he’s saying is that there won’t be just a portability advantage, and an advantage thanks to linking, but also an artistic advantage. That interests me. Of course, it’s also being said by the editor of what was notoriously the hardest-to-read magazine of last decade. The screaming fonts and colors and the incomprehensible layouts were guaranteed to give you a migraine.

I can’t think of any single cause more worth supporting tomorrow than Blank Screen Day. It asks very little of us — just that we turn off the internet for one hour during business hours — and in exchange it helps potentially billions of people around the world get online and get back to the important work of rebuilding the world economy.

Please join me.

Here’s a link to the site. There’s more information on the G.I.V.E. Initiative, the organization behind this, there and on the Blank Screen Day Facebook page. I’m proud to be involved in this very important cause.

Happy to say I’ll be attending THE conference of the year:  Stark Expo!

At other times, he behaves like this. (Everyone needs to wind down, even the caped crusader.) My seven-year-old turned me onto this video. He and his friends have watched it even more times than the Joker has broken out of Arkham.

Another reason Batman always beats Superman: Batman inspires new technology. And he’s insistent.

In other tech news, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Verizon iPhone is probably coming out this summer. According to this site, the new 4G iPhone will probably include a front-facing camera. Which means you’ll be able to email photos of yourself looking delighted to no longer be on AT&T. My contract will be up just in time.

You may have heard that small businesses are banding together in class action lawsuits against the site Yelp, which allows users to rate businesses they have patronized. They claim that Yelp is essentially extorting them by offering to remove bad reviews in exchange for buying an advertising package (which Yelp denies). I’ve met one of the plaintiffs in one of the three lawsuits already in process. I don’t know much about Yelp, but he had my sympathy when I learned that somehow all the positive reviews of his business have slid away, but the awful ones, often posted by people who know each other, remained.

To learn more about the charges against Yelp, click here. Relevant excerpt:

In a complaint filed in San Francisco Superior Court March 12, the owner of a 17-year-old San Francisco business called Renaissance Furniture Restoration claimed Yelp deleted his business’s positive ratings after he declined to buy advertising.

In July, Restoration had 261 Yelp page views and an overall rating of 4.5 stars out of a possible five. The suit alleges that two days after he refused to pay “at least $300 a month” for advertising, six of seven 5-star reviews vanished from the site and his overall rating sank to 3.5 stars. (Read the 15-page lawsuit here.)

The ho-hum rating cost owner Boris Levitt big time. By August, the number of page views driven to Restoration’s website fell to 158 and his revenue dropped by 25 percent.

“People wouldn’t click on a business which only had a 3-star average rating, and I started to lose business,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

As of Thursday, the company had 4.5 stars again, but just three reviews: two five-star recommendations and a four-star review.

That seems bad enough. But coming your way next week:  a Yelp for people. That’s right, a site that allows people to individually rate individuals the way Yelp allows them to rate businesses. Here’s the story on that.  Do you have the dirt on any enemies? Here’s your chance to spread it around. Or — if the system functions anonymously, like Yelp — you can just make some up. No one will know it was you (until, I guess, the lawsuit).

Every once in a while I think back to the novel 1984 and ask myself, “How did Big Brother gain that power?” And  the answer is clear:  We gave it to him. Willingly. Eagerly. But why go to the bother of developing an all-powerful Big Brother when, instead, anonymous rating sites can turn us all into Little Brothers, spreading lies and innuendo with abandon?