B-sides from Garbage:

Lick the Pavement [mp3]

I learn to bribe, I learn to say please
Oh wont you lick the pavement for me?
I learn to bribe, I learn to say please
I like you best when you’re on your knees!
Oh won’t you lick the pavement for me, please…

Never Be Free [mp3]

I shiver underneath your skin
A brazen thief who walks right in
I’ll be your master heroine
Your mother’s milk, your adrenaline
Are you a hunter just like me:
A lot of heart, a little crazy?

Begging Bone [mp3]

What can I do?
I can’t keep you on a leash
Can’t make you perfectly suspicious of the world
Can’t teach you lessons
That you never want to learn

Pray that they come through,
Of course they never do
Pray that they come through,
Of course they never do
Of course they never do..

I taste, I love… I come, I bleed enough
I hate, I’m not… I was, I want too much

Is it any wonder I can’t sleep?
All I have is all you gave to me
Is it any wonder I found peace through you?

It’s not enough, just a touch
It’s not enough, just a touch
It’s not enough…

‘Blank and White’ is censored even on uncensored versions of the album with the line “or the President of whatever” removed (replaced with a beep) from “Let’s shoot up the mall/The school/or the President of whatever/or whoever wants to fight”.

Because I’m awesome, I dug up a version that’s not beeped out:

Give me a picket sign
Make it blank and white
Like all those stupid teenage girls
We’re gonna need ‘em where we’re going tonight

Let’s make sure the music’s loud enough,
Let’s make sure the music’s loud enough,
We won’t even hear it end!

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

My Republican opponents, they don’t like to talk about efficiency. You know, the other day I was in a town-hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year in energy efficient cars, and a new electricity grid and all this.

Somebody said, ‘Well, what can I do, what can individuals do?’ So I told them something simple, I said:

“You know what, you could inflate your tires to the proper levels, and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper levels, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil that we get from John McCain from right below his feet there, whatever it is that he was going to, wherever he was going to drill.”

So now the Republicans are going around—this is the kind of things they do, I don’t understand it—they’re going around, sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea as if this is Barack Obama’s energy plan.

Now two points. One, they know they are lying about what my energy plan is. But the other this, they are making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4%. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

You know, they think it is funny that they are making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework, because this is serious business. Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference.

• Regrettable Bedfellows
• Errors in Check Bouncing
• Foods That Taste Good When You’re Hungover
• Guys You Meet in Dive Bars
• The Crushed Pipe Dreams of Recent College Graduates
• 1,001 Excuses to Avoid Going to the Gym
• The Perils of Having No Health Insurance
• Drunk Jenga

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Video of address.