No, it's not simply now that people are after. We want totality. What we want is a dashboard or control panel or start page that allows us to monitor our entire personal universe second-by-second.

Instead of taking one call at a time, or receiving the latest interjections from 20 or 30 people in a chat room, we can now follow 600 or 2,000 on Twitter. We can mix Washington political insiders with Chicago foodies, California musicians, and Australian blogging experts — all the latest information.

However, as with fat and salt, what we want is not always what is best for us.

In late June and early July of 2003, we vacationed in the South Carolina Lowcountry, staying in Beaufort and visiting Charleston, as well as Savannah, Georgia.

One of the meals we ate on the trip that we have made many times since is Frogmore Stew, which is not a typical stew at all but instead a type of seafood boil, also known as Beaufort Stew, a Beaufort boil, a Lowcountry boil, or a tidewater boil, according to Wikipedia.

The French Open (or do you say Roland Garros?) begins today on ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel, channels 29 and 113 respectively on Time Warner Cable in southeastern Wisconsin.

TennisChannel.com also offers live matches online (free registration required) and a handy TV broadcast schedule.

Last night on MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann showed Erich "Mancow" Muller being waterboarded in Chicago for his radio show:

"Absolutely torture," he says. "That's drowning," he says. If he were being interrogated in that way, he added later, "I would confess to anything." Mr. Muller lasted six seconds.

The pages all look exactly like the poorly-produced urban legends, political attacks, and religious tracts that well-meaning relatives and acquaintances frequently forward to a long list of email recipients. That presidential intelligence briefings would display the same level of sophistication is downright chilling.

Nearly all of the content is centered. Fonts are changed at random. Capitals are overused. Green captions are superimposed on light green backgrounds. Spatial boundaries are violated. Lowercase descenders overlap into graphics. Each slide shows another abomination unto all known graphic design principles.

CNN's Christine Roman is clearly a Vayniac, and Ali Velshi seems to be won over during the segment. Can you make $70,000 a year talking about The Smurfs? I don't know — but Gary Vaynerchuck seems to be doing fairly well talking about wine and now social media.

His forthcoming book, available for pre-order at Amazon.com, is called Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion.

At any rate, it's certainly a performance that grabs you by the collar and makes you take notice. I was reminded of Electric Light Orchestra at their best — which would be Eldorado. I also thought about Bruce Springsteen epics such as "Jungleland."

Amy found the singer to be "a cutie."

The following was on my desktop when I woke up this morning:

hey mark....

edwardo here....

i was watching cubs game wednesday night and brendan showed up on my screen....

so i took a snapshot of it, thinking i could come up with some sort of photoslop caption for it.....

Several notable items flowing through Twitter this morning.

A gigantic revolt has broken out in the Twittersphere.

It began yesterday afternoon with a post on the Twitter Blog, entitled "Small Settings Update."

In any case, it's a colossal blunder.

Like a sturdy heirloom piece of Shaker furniture, Neil Young: Heart of Gold is a simple, functional, and timeless piece of work from both Young and Jonathan Demme.

However, the persona depicted is only one aspect of a vastly more complex artist. Young may not be in a casket here, but he's certainly on his best behavior and all dressed up to receive the respects of friends and acquaintances. There is no hint, for example, of the irrepressible, irreverent prophet who wrote "Rockin' In The Free World." I would need at least a little of that Neil Young — and some fretboard close-ups — to really love this movie.

Dear Abby, how does one gracefully dissuade one's neighbors from drying laundry over the fence? Or is this their universally accepted prerogative?

Oh, well. I suppose we'll just smile, silently willing our junies to grow, grow, grow!

National Public Radio's All Things Considered is airing a series called "Advertising In The Downturn," and last night Amy heard their segment on Google ads.

The story, by Laura Sydell, examines how small businesses are using the powerful analysis tools of Google Adwords to target and test individual keywords and combinations of words for their performance in attracting customers to a specific product in a particular locale.

As one retailer's marketing man observes, "It's the new yellow pages."

With warmer weather comes our desire to grill — but the notion of grilling usually conjures up images of fatty pork, heavy beef or troublesome chicken. We would like to cook outdoors, but we also want to eat less meat and more vegetables, and a weeknight dinner for the two of us has to be fast and easy.

Then we remember our stainless steel skewers — flat ones, to prevent the food from spinning.

Please enjoy the classic Conan segment featuring Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog via the groovy NBC video player.

Bonus text: Jimmy Mac's rebuttal to Roger Ebert's Fanboys review.

I first heard of Chicago Tribune reporter Kevin Pang when I worked with Steve Dahl, and the two of them were involved in fish taco-palooza back in September 2007.

Late last year, I started following Pang on Twitter (@kevinthepang), and it is through his tweets that I was exposed to his CLTV program The Cheeseburger Show. Like it says, that's Episode 1 embedded above.

Here is part of what today's FDA warning says:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers to immediately stop using Hydroxycut products by Iovate Health Sciences Inc., of Oakville, Ontario and distributed by Iovate Health Sciences USA Inc. of Blasdell, N.Y. Some Hydroxycut products are associated with a number of serious liver injuries. Iovate has agreed to recall Hydroxycut products from the market.

With the beginning of May comes a new set of "50 Albums for $5 Each" at Amazon.com — including Middle Cyclone, the acclaimed latest release from Neko Case, and American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, one the the all-time classics.

Another bargain of the moment (don't know how for how long) is Learning To Flinch, the 1993 acoustic live set from the late great Warren Zevon, which includes an 11 minute, 18 second version of "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner."

For our "Belle City on the Lake," Pancake Day is the official beginning of the the warm season, the day when 8,000 or 9,000 or more Racinians formally emerge from their winter dwellings and get together downtown to see and be seen, to catch up on the latest from old friends, meet new additions, and eat about 40 or 45 thousand pancakes. Beauty queens flip flapjacks, and politicians shake hands with citizens.

In case you haven't see this yet, here's Mike Taibbi's report for last night's NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

It concerns yesterday's photo session aimed at shooting images of one of the jets used as "Air Force One" against New York City's harbor — completely oblivious to the memories that many people have of unusually low-flying jets in that area.