Is there anything more obnoxious than having to pay for something where you don't have an alternative? If your apartment is too expensive you can move. If you don't want to pay a fortune for Von Dutch jeans you can buy something else. But if don't want to pay $100 to have your passport renewed you can just go suck it and then never be able to leave the country again. So obviously I coughed up the green and cursed the police department and pretty much everyone else to heck all the way home.

I can't believe it costs that much to make a new passport. Why is there a 1000% percent mark up on something everyone needs and you can't get anywhere else? The obvious answer is - because they can!, which is like if they suddenly created a gravity tax and you'd either have to pay up or float off to Mars. It bites and the only good thing about it is that I no longer have a passport with a picture of me looking like an 18 year old dork (insert your own joke about my looks here).

Yesterday, we combined watching José "Gypsy King" Reyes beat Chelsea with planning our trip to London, which is definitely on now. We got different plane tickets than first expected, so we'll be arriving Monday before noon and leaving Thursday night giving us four days of London fun. The only planned activity so far is Fountains of Wayne at Astoria, but I think we'll pick up a Time Out when we arrive and try to find a concert or two to go see. So if you live in the London area and have any recommendations feel free to shoot me a holla.

I didn't see these valentine's cards until today, so I guess I'll have to wait a year before I can send them to people [via Catherine].

A new show premiered on MTV here yesterday called This is our Music, and it was surprisingly good. In the first episode they visited Fife, Scotland and Fence Records and interviewed a lot of the musicians, who release their records on the label. The bands all had that acoustic neo-folk thing going on, so they sounded a bit like Badly Drawn Boy and what I heard was actually pretty good. If you live around here there's a rerun tomorrow night at 22:00 and the next episode, which is on New York, is aired on Sunday at 22:00. And if you don't live around here there are a bunch of clips at the website, which should be worth checking out.