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"FacebookPinterestLawn Darts.png\n\n Here in New York, we didn't get the snowpocalypse we were promised this weekend\u2014sorry, D.C. and Philly\u2014but it still feels like goddamn Hoth outside, so if you need us, we'll be lightsabering open a Tauntaun and listening to this free winter-themed mixtape curated by the folks at Passion of the Weiss. Seasonally-affective jams by Bjork and the Walkmen, a little artificial sunlight from the Doves and Real Estate, and a few well-chosen East Coast hip-hop songs by guys who rap like the wind is freezing their feelings, including a Wu-Tang song (salvaged off The W, which we're starting to think we should revisit) that suits today's like-a-knife-through-your-bubblegoose conditions the way Will Smith's \"Summertime\" does barbecues. You know those people who say they could never move to Southern California because they'd \"miss seasons\"? Those people are on Team Cold.\n\n Speaking of Southern California, though: Beck! (We are available to teach blog-segue at J-school.) The \"Record Club\" feature over at Beck.com is a strong argument in favor of what the Rock Snob's Dictionary once called the Heavy Friends Approach to rock\u2014Beck and a rotating cast of hipster luminaries cover an entire classic album (they've done the first Velvet Underground record and Songs of Leonard Cohen so far) in a single day, then release the results on a one-track-a-week schedule. Past participants include MGMT, Binki Shapiro from Little Joy, and Devendra Banhart; click here for the Club's take on Skip Spence's burnout-folk classic Oar, which features Feist, members of Wilco, Jamie Liddell, Nels Cline, and legendary session dude James Gadson. Detail we hope is a hint of things to come, rather than a joke: The Velvets were chosen as the inaugural Club selection \"after lengthy deliberation and coming close to covering Digital Underground's Sex Packets,\" which we'd really like to hear. That, or Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which is both Prince's favorite Joni record (supposedly) and the album Charlotte Gainsbourg's sultry-weird, Beck-produced IRM most reminds us of.\n\n Haven't had a nightmare about Terminators since you were nine? The BBC is here to help, with a story about the ethical debate surrounding automated battlefield technology (read: potential rogue murderbots) like the EATR, which \"can refuel itself on long journeys by scavenging for organic material\u2014which raises the haunting spectre of a machine consuming corpses on the battlefield.\" Its creator, Dr. Robert Finkelstein, swears that EATR is \"mostly vegetarian.\" Great, we're mostly not terrified of becoming an ED-209's PowerBar. Read on for dissenting opinions from scientists like Professor Noel Sharkey of the awesomely-named International Committee for Robot Arms Control, whose insistence that you can't program ethics and accountability into a killing machine will make not a damn bit of difference when the frakkin' toasters come for us.\n\n More superweapons: Lawn darts, the deadliest backyard fun-time toy of the '80s, banned in 1988 because, y'know, kids died, are back. A company in New Jersey is selling something called \"Soft Tip Sky Darts,\" touted as \"a new, safe, redesigned, indoor/outdoor product that is safe for use on all surfaces.\" The press release that punctured our inbox this morning attempts to trade on the stabby outlaw allure of original-dangerousness-level lawn darts by mentioning their 20-year absence from the marketplace, but a cursory Google search reveals that you can still buy the genuine article, unassembled, from the Mainway Toys-like death-merchants at lawndartparts.com. We're off to check eBay for a used Happy Fun Ball.\n\n Oh, and apparently, you can't throw a zombie dance party in Virginia, even if you've obtained a permit to do so. At press time, vampire weekends and werewolf bar mitzvahs=still OK."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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