Walking into BGR early Wednesday night, the music was Springsteen, and I was sold. Playing was Tunnel of Love. Next up was Rosalita. I'd never heard that double-shot before in my life, and chances were this was the first time it had occurred outside of New Jersey since 1989.

Born to Run hung on a wall between Prince and plasma. 'Nough said.

The burger place, subtitled "The Burger Joint," next to The Italian Store — Lyon Village is so very declarative — was still working out the kinks. The kitchen was overcrowded, and orders were slow, even to the beer tap and back. The burger itself was decent, not yet of Elevation or Five Guys quality. The music was too loud to talk easily when we came in.

But they fixed the volume shortly. The bun and the toppings — lettuce, tomato, BGR-ordained mojo sauce for me — were delicious. The beer, while slow, was "Come back for refills" because there were no pitchers yet. (Sold.) The kinks were there, but in the words of The Animals, the intentions were good. The staff — some to stay, some to head back to the Alexandria franchise, some due for a coming Baltimore franchise — were uniformly friendly. I was glad to have them in Arlington for now.

I like the idea of it. Drive to Lyon Village shopping center, stride across the parking lot and road abutting those stores and ask oneself, staring at two doors, "Good Italian or good burgers?" How can one go wrong?

So, good stuff. A return visit is going to happen. In the restrooms, the music was the the Schoolhouse Rock take on the Preamble. Good stuff.

After, Emily and I made it to 31 Cent Scoop Night at the Baskin-Robbins up Lee Highway, 15 minutes before close. It was a good cause, aiding the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. The line had been out the door until an hour earlier, the clerk said, and he was smiling but beat. We got scoops and talked about the firehouse up the highway. When staff urged us out the door soon after, we left happily, without issue.

But a question. In BGR, there were two pictures we couldn't identify. I e-mailed four music-loving friends for their guesses, with no luck. How about you? Midnight Oil — Beds Are Burning — was a guess on the first, but there seem to be one too few people. Just who are these people?

Even the people who love it the most (and fight our wars). When his less-than-glowing quote appeared in the Times this week, the NYer line jumped to mind. It had struck me at the time as progressive, an example of how to use an app well. But you attend enough briefings…

New Yorker, September 2008:

Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman's rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: "It's how you communicate big ideas–to communicate them effectively."

New York Times, April 2010:

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is "just agony," nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

But is there pride involved? Outside the watch of the Times, he's still presenting enthusiastically, the 92nd Street Y shows this week.

I had to present a Powerpoint deck this week. I printed it out.

(Sorry, trees.)

1972, "5 Days Inside St. Elizabeths: Anguish, Boredom, Despair." The methods could give a 2010 journalism ethics a semester-long debate. Karlyn Barker was about four years out of school and a year into what would be a lengthy Post career when she wrote this fierce expose. She had committed herself to the deeply troubled D.C. mental hospital and reported from inside, under mandatory sedation. Read it here (PDF).

2006, "The Peekaboo Paradox." Before he nabbed two Pulitzers, Gene Weingarten wrote this article, which probably should have taken the award too. The piece covers "the extraordinary life and times of the Great Zucchini, Washington's No. 1 preschool entertainer," a far more complicated and powerful story than you'd ever expect. Read it here.

2010, this past Sunday, "Blending in, standing out." My all-time favorite baseball writer (and Marah fan) Dave Shenin looks at Nationals savior Stephen Strasburg's life in AA baseball. No pun intended, but the lede is pitch-perfect. "It always starts with a gasp." That kind of contextual storytelling makes it an instant, modern sports classic. Read it here.

I've never met or spoken to Sam Novey. While I'm friends on Facebook with his sister Beth, we've only met a couple times. But Sam is among select company, appearing briefly but indelibly in my News Feed, and whom I now know for no other reason. Others? Laz's National Anthem-singing wife. Cory's precocious kids. Joel's musical theater self. Beau's girlfriend Mary, until I met her at Easter. Meghan's brother and Casey's brother, except on Tumblr. Marcel's band of trouble. The list goes on.

You see, Sam is the Burgerman. Combining two of my favorite things, burgers and doing something ridiculous while doing something normal, he wears a burger costume while running. Doing so, he raises money for Citizen Schools after-school programs. A local burger joint helps.

How's it going? This month, he ran the Boston Marathon in the suit.

When we started the Kindness community last fall, what we sought to expose more than anything else were wild new approaches to giving. Sam, aka Burgerman, certainly fits that bill. Donate to his cause here.

After reading the McSweeney's interview with a truck driver about his job, I clicked through a couple dozen more interviews. The highlights:

With a Central Park gondolier:

Q: And you sing I assume?
A: I have five songs that I sing. Four are in Italian. Even though I don't speak a word of it.

Q: How did you learn the songs?
A: I listen to Pavarotti on YouTube. You should check him out–he's really good.

With a certain kind of reporter:

Q: What's your job title?
A: Paintball Journalist. It's possibly the most fun you can have with a Liberal Arts degree.

With a fire-eater:

Q: You don't have insurance?
A: I don't. I'm one of the millions of Americans without health insurance.

With a certain kind of animal catcher:

Q: Then how do you go about catching them?
A: I catch by myself or with my girlfriend. I also have an Iraq-war veteran who's done really well. My girlfriend is a partner in the business, and she's a pro at flushing the prairie dogs out of the hole, but she doesn't like to touch them.

With a research scientist:

Q: This job is unbelievable.
A: I know. I used to tell people at parties that I knock people over for a living and no one believed me. Every now and then, after a team meeting, I would be struck by how absurd it was that we'd just spent 30 minutes in a brainstorming session on new or better ways to make people fall down.

Q: Do you get used to the screwy hours?
A: It takes a while … Sometimes my body still isn't used to it.

Q: Does your butt ever get sore from all that sitting?
A: It's an air-ride seat, so the seat will bounce. The seat rides on air and the truck rides on air.

Maybe as a child I overdosed on Richard Scarry, but I love learning what people do all day. I don't know how anyone could find it less than fascinating. So, upon discovering McSweeney's (apparently begrudging) Internet Tendency's Interviews series, I'm entranced.

"Interviews with people who have interesting or unusual jobs" is the series' full title, and Jess has introduced me to it through "I haul your booze: An interview with a trucker," here. On top of learning about people's jobs, I also love trucking — again partly because of children's books. Big Joe's Trailer Truck stands as one of my 10 most-loved picture books ever. It's among the few books from early childhood to remain on my shelves at home. I pick it up every now and then when I visit.

One blog nails a memory I could almost draw now: "My favorite scene takes place in a truck stop diner, where Joe sits with his pals. One of the other drivers eats eggs and the picture always cracks me up. Don't ask me why, but you will have to see it for yourself, as words don't do it justice…." Life on the road, in faraway spots, running into friends and sharing a hot meal, all of these scenes are everyday magic to a kid.

It's nice when the magic doesn't wear off. Note to my future children, whenever they show up: Welcome to Busytown, population YOU.

Indulging my LivingSocial addiction and dangerously within days of an expiration date, Hilary and I caught up for a couple hours at Tacklebox tonight. Along with the normal life updates (Jeff, you got the haircut!), we celebrated Hilary's return to blogging.  We got to talking about the sometimes-compulsion to write out one's head, or — inside one's head and never written — to simply hit upon a moment of understanding.

The moment for me last night came somewhere past midnight, at loose ends without the thunderstorm and not yet sleep. I picked up Stephen King's On Writing, yet again, and arrived at this passage in his chapter on theme. I read, felt more happy and sleepy and soon went to bed.

I was astounded at how really useful "thematic thinking" turned out to be. It wasn't just a vaporous idea that English professors made you write about on midterm essay exams ("Discuss the thematic concerns of Wise Blood in three well-reasoned paragraphs — 30 pts"), but another handy gadget to keep in the toolbox, this one something like a magnifying glass.

Since my revelation on the road concerning the bomb in the closet, I have never hesitated to ask myself, either before starting the second draft of a book or while stuck for an idea in the first draft, just what it is I'm writing about, why I'm spending the time when I could be playing my guitar or riding my motorcycle, what got my nose down to the grindstone in the first place and then kept it there. The answer doesn't always come right away, but there usually is one, and it's usually not too hard to find, either.

… you're balancing your video-conference on Cheerios boxes. Halfway to work this morning, rolling down 123, I realized I'd left my webcam at home, and I needed to talk with friend Alissa's DePaul journalism class on Skype this afternoon. Fortunately, the afternoon sked was light. Put the hammer down all morning (Tumbling Dice on repeat helped), raced home and determined the only wall in my studio apartment that wasn't a couch, bed, kitchen, or bathroom. Whew. The class was great, asking smart questions and tweeting along the way at #socialmedianation.

The best video I've seen this month, I can't embed here. The reason, for once, isn't that rights holders have prevented the embedding. The reason I can't embed is that there is no physical video. What? Yes.

The Johnny Cash Project is an amazing Web project that builds a video for Cash's Ain't No Grave with your help. Fast Company explains: "It's easier than it sounds: Koblin created a drawing tool for the site, which randomly assigns you a frame to draw. Using a series of paintbrush tools, you just trace over the original video footage. When you're finished, you just click 'submit,' and your drawing is dropped into the video. Think of it as the 21st-century update of the Take On Me video."

Viewers rate the frames, and you can watch the constantly assembling video in different ways — top-rated frames, latest, different art styles, etc. The effect is mighty, with thousands of hands painting on a black-and-white palette, interpreting a slice of a Cash's look and intention as his music plays. Rick Rubin and the Cash/Carter families back the site.

See the video using the top-rated frames.

Two elements that subtly stay on your mind afterward? The flashes of writing or drawing some contributors have added to the frames, and the split-second darknesses between frames. Both remind you of the video's diverse assembly, and to an extent they question your focus.

They remind me of a passage from Cash's autobiography (Cash). With the book first published in '97, there's no talk of computers or digital. But Cash does begin to touch on the modern surge of information and, in his own way, how he worked at sorting frames to find the potential.

Adding a couple paragraph breaks for easier Web reading:

I don't feel any shame about my past today, but I do have some regrets about the time I've wasted, and one of the ways I work on that is to have a Bible next to me when I turn my TV on. I'm a channel surfer, so I flip through whatever's on, looking for something that grabs me — usually on A&E, CNN, PBS, the Discovery Channel, or the History Channel. But I've trained myself to turn the TV off right away if I don't find anything and pick up my Bible, either the old King James or the New International Version.

I find a passage in one version that intrigues me and pick up the other to see how it's worded there; then I chase it down in one or more of the commentaries until I find what it really means. Once I learned what the Bible is — the inspired Word of God (most of it, anyway) — the writing became precious to me, and endlessly intriguing.

Every scripture has a realistic interpretation, but finding its spiritual interpretation is truly exciting. Sometimes, I'll suddenly understand that something I've been hearing all my life has a deeper, more beautiful meaning than I'd ever realized. That's a thrill, and more: usually at such moments I've just learned something new about how we humans are, and how to live in this world.

Somewhere in between deep-fried deviled eggs and Thomas Jefferson beer, Emily and I got to talking Friday about how Big Wheels were cool toys. We'd segued from talking about how large cardboard boxes were cool toys. Good theme. Anyway, what neither of us had owned as kids were battery-powered kid mobiles. We couldn't remember their name.

Thanks to the guy above, the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Mustang Daily and friend Greg, who posted this video on Facebook… Power Wheels.

What do you think, TJ? "I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be."

Hmm. Also on the Internet: "Did Thomas Jefferson invent electricity?"

Random post, I know. Random night. Where's that thunderstorm?