James Mercer (of The Shins) and Danger Mouse forming a band

This is cool news:

To be clear, this is not just a "produced by Danger Mouse" one-off thing. Mercer and the Mouse are apparently in it for the long haul and already have plans extending past their first album. The pair recently collaborated on the Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse album Dark Night of the Soul. Our review hailed the Mercer track, "Insane Lullaby", as "one of the finest moments on the album."

ANd if you want to hear Insane Lullaby, you can listen to it here (just right click and save for the mp3).

Casinos are everywhere

Nate Silver wrote a very interesting piece in Esquire about the explosion of casinos and how states maybe shouldn't count on gaming to help their state budgets. And it got me thinking...

First, there was one thing jumped out at me:

We have now reached the point at which residents of seventeen of the twenty largest metro areas are within a three-hour drive of a blackjack table. And Washington, D. C., will make it eighteen once Delaware permits blackjack, leaving only Dallas and Atlanta. Just about everyone who wants to gamble in the United States is already a morning's drive away from being able to do so; with the possible exception of isolated Texas, states that open new casinos will mostly be stealing customers from one another.

Between those 18 metropolitan areas (once Delaware approves their gambling), there will be 102,470,600 people -- just in the largest metro areas -- within a three hour drive of gambling.

From where I am sitting right now (in the 59th-largest metro area), I can be at one of four casinos that have blackjack within an hour -- Santa Ana Star Casino, San Felipe Casino Hollywood, Sandia Casino and Route 66 Casino. Put it at three hours, there are probably fifteen casinos that I can hit -- maybe more.

According to the American Gaming Association, there are five racinos (race tracks with slot machines) in the state, one of which is within an hour drive (The Downs Race Track and Casino).

The American Gaming Association says there are 21 tribal casinos in New Mexico. This is the seventh most in the country, behind Oklahoma (96), California (66), Minnesota (31) Washington (31), Wisconsin (29) and Arizona (24).

Three other states have more commercial gambling casinos: Nevada (266), Colorado (40), South Dakota (35, in addition to 11 tribal casinos), and Mississippi (29).

Of those states, only South Dakota has a smaller population than New Mexico. According to the 2008 census estimate, New Mexico had 1.98 million people, while South Dakota had 804,000 people. Nevada, in case you were wondering, had 2.6 million people.

So Nevada has one casino for every 9,774 people.

So what does it all mean? Well, mainly that I have too much time on my hands. And that if I had any money, I could gamble pretty easily.

38-Year Old catcher staying in the major leagues -- for health insurance

A sad, sad tale from Sports Illustrated:

Two years ago, just when Fasano was thinking of finally retiring, his wife, Kerri, gave birth to the couple's third child, a boy named Santo. He was born with hypoplastic heart syndrome, a condition in which the left side of the heart is underdeveloped. "It was devastating, of course," Sal says. "Your son is helpless, and there's not that much you can do."

There was one thing Sal could do -- find a way to remain in the major leagues. Although baseball diehards who salivate over the perks of the game tend to speak of cathedral-like stadiums and million-dollar paychecks, of fancy travel and high-profile endorsements and red carpet fame, an element they tend to overlook is the major league health plan. If you are a ballplayer, and you spend so much as a second on a major league roster, you are entitled to a year of coverage that, says one major league executive, "takes care of pretty much everything you can think of."

He didn't make it to the major leagues this year, and with just a handful of games left, it doesn't look like the Colorado Rockies are going to call him up.