My four tokens to the general usefulness of things today:

• I graded a lot of things.
• I prepared a bit for my comps defense.
• I read a lot about Libya, the slow-motion thing that can’t be stopped, with fascination.
• And I built a mobile version of my website.

The world really needed that last one. Someone poked fun that I didn’t have a mobile version to the blog yet. But late this evening I added a plugin for that too. So you can easily see this drivel anytime.

I tinkered with this one for a while, but couldn’t make it go. So I found another one to build from. I’m on the fence about it, but what do you think? The mobile site is here. The mobile version of the blog is … well, found on your phone.

It is a curious thing, but I like that particular mobile theme on a friend’s site, but I’m not sure it works here. When these are the problems in your life you’re doing OK, though, so I won’t be too upset about it.

My comps defense is rumored to be next week. So I’ve been consolidating a few ideas I’d like to incorporate into that conversation.

On Libya, these types of stories are always good reading, and the reporting here is fine:

“This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values,” a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.

It will be interesting to see how long this shiny spin on things remains in place.

“In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook,” said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. “The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one.”

So the next few weeks should be interesting.

Baseball this evening, Auburn hosts Arkansas this weekend, but dropped the opener 6-5 in 11 innnings. The bullpen is still working itself out and Auburn stranded eight runners on base and seven of those were in scoring position.

We had pizza after the game at Mellow Mushroom. We noticed that Moe’s Original Barbecue is now open downtown. Finally, our style of ‘cue. Now we just have to become regulars.

YouTube Cover Theater is a little feature intending to point out the art of people making music in their homes to their video camera. There’s a lot of talent out there, some of it is more than worth sharing. I hurriedly picked REM as this week’s featured cover act. It didn’t seem the best pick at the time, but now I’m glad of it. Their music seems to have a lot of room in it for others to play. Unfortunately none of these particular three covers have been seen by more than 2,000 people.

Doug McKenna is an independent artist, but unfortunately his site has been neglected. Nevertheless, Sweetness Follows is a good tune and he does a nice job here:

My favorite REM song, and it is a shame this has only 59 views. Unfortunately there’s not much biographical information about the guy here, but his treatment of Driver 8 is good fun:

In a different career on those rare times when I had to play music at radio stations I’d always end my shift with this song, so we’ll end this post the same way.