Yes: the new New Pornographers single “Crash Years.” Dreary band name, but there’s a sweet and subtle hook in the chorus, an Americana twist on the Wilco-ish alt-pop of Belgian band dEUS at its best (1999’s The Ideal Crash). Quite a step away from the jittery, yippy clip of earlier songs like “Twin Cinema,” but this soft parade ain’t no soft rock.

No: the Great New Sound of ’10, Treats by Sleigh Bells. Cute voice? Check. Advanced minimalist guitar heroics? Check. Trendiest hip hop beats, seemingly effortlessly appropriated and repackaged for ultra-indie eardrums? Check. So what’s the problem? There’s everything to like, but nothing to love. Like certain pieces of conceptual art, one glance is all it takes to ‘get it’. After that, there’s nothing to get.

Hi All, let’s get down to business. We had Carly Fiorina over to our house the other day. We spoke for over an hour. She seems like a reasonable choice for Ca. Senator. We have to get rid of Barbara Boxer. Carly took the lead in the polls recently, what do you think?

Okay. Let’s discuss the devastation of an eco-system, an economy and a damn pretty place. Why is Obama hanging all his hopes on BP and not turning to every oil company who has had experience in capping and containing oil spills? There’s certainly enough of them. This could turn from catastrophe to triumph for him. Even the liberal blogs are asking these questions. He’s acting more like an “oil man” than that “oil man” who last resided in the White House. Someone illuminate me.

Ah, heaven for New York Post readers like myself: a budding Kennedy scandal, a true-blue royal one, and the French Open.

I’ve managed to watch exactly zero minutes and zero seconds of LOST, the supposedly gripping series which has, apparently, now come to an end. Lest I seem anti-TV, let me emphasize that I’ve made time in my life for The X-Files, Deadwood, Project Runway, and many other shows great and small. I’m susceptible to hype. I’m inclined to trust my friends’ judgments. But I never felt even a shiver of longing to dip into Lost. And with reactions like this coming in from trusted sources, I’m feeling certain of my final verdict on the end of Lost: no big loss.

Okay, so I did that thing where I forwarded an email and the chain went with it. I had written something dopey — and a little snotty — early in the chain. I feel pretty bad about it. Do I try to apologize? Ignore it and hope no one bothered to scroll down through boring emails to see the one incriminating one? No state secrets involved. Just might make my child’s teacher think I’m a little selfish. *Sigh* Not the best Monday morning.

Yes, says Nick Carr, in a forthcoming book. Russell Arben Fox has deep thoughts:

we become habituated to viewing all information — literature, science, journalism, scholarship, whatever — as something to be “strip-mined [for] relevant content” (p. 164), and rather than thereby supposedly refining our ability to recognize (in classic marketplace of ideas fashion) good information from bad, in fact our capacity to make learned judgments is physically undermined.

“This book,” Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, “is about…the larger forces…that have left Europe…enfeebled….The key factors are: 1. Demographic decline; 2. The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state; 3. Civilizational exhaustion.” Today, four years after the publication of America Alone, the New York Times confirms the enfeeblement of Europe in every particular. Excerpts:

In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70….”