This is necessarily brief, as other typing demands have absorbed a great deal of the day. It is a conference submission day, you see, and these papers must simply get out the door. I could write about writing, but so many people do that with greater flair.

I could also write about the literature review I proofed or, even better, the abstract I crafted this afternoon. It was an interesting one, I thought.

There was rhetoric, too, and that’s always fun. Again, you can get far better rhetoric elsewhere, I wouldn’t presume to impose my qualitative limitations upon you.

So that was pretty much the day, yeah. Until Pie Day, where …

… that isn’t supposed to be on the menu.

We returned to Byron’s tonight, because they have delicious beans and potatoes. They slice the potatoes across the width and do nothing special to them when they cook them, but they are delicious. They were out of chick and ribs tonight. Apparently you have to get to these places early.

We sat in the romantic Punt Bama Punt corner:

The barbecue there is good, but Byron’s, a converted Dairy Queen, doesn’t have pie. So we visited Publix, picked up an apple and brought it home. We concluded our date night by watching Date Night. At just 88 minutes it felt very short, but that’s probably about the right length.

There was enough humor in the story. Steve Carell was Steve Carell and Tina Fey put on a wig and looked like Rene Russo for a while. You get the sense that about 80 percent of the movie was ad lib, which works well for the premise. There are plenty of one-liners in there. No doubt they are all aimed at a generation of people who grew up reciting movie lines in place of having a real conversation.

“He turned the gun sideways! That’s a kill shot!”

One of my family friends is a now retired police officer. He tells a story of responding to a shots fired call where two guys emptied two clips shooting at one another from nearly point-blank range. Nobody hit anything. Investigators figured that the two gang members had turned their guns sideways for that cool movie “kill shot.”

I’ve tried it with a water gun. I can’t hit the cat for anything with the thing turned sideways.

Time once again for YouTube Cover Theater, where we surf the popular video site and look for people paying tribute to their favorite artists and showing off a significant talent of their own. (I like covers.)

I randomly picked Guster this week, which turned out to be harder than it should have been. They’re a pop band, after all. So two of these videos are from seriously aspiring musicians, which goes a bit against the spirit of this concept, but they still work here.

Here’s Demons:

Just two guys, Vanderbilt students I think, strumming along at in the breakfast nook at home, nicely done.

Here’s a Pennsylvania group, The Vulcans, that asks “Am I trying to hard?” The guy running the camera says “You’re in an art studio, wearing a vest and Aaron is already playing a guitar. We’re trying too hard.”

The sound is nice though, it almost has that disembodied, music hall quality to it that is hard to reproduce in a stereo. Plus, I really love that song:

What happens when you take a Massachusetts band and turn them into bluegrass? I had to find out:

I think they’re just a group of guys that named themselves after a river in Illinois, but they have a lot of videos.

Speaking of videos. And of Google Instant — we were speaking about that yesterday, remember? — here’s a Billy Joel visualization:

Good luck getting that out of your head before the night is over.