Infinitive Splitter

I have a weakness for female singers (as in Rilo Kiley, the Cardigans, Brazilian Girls, and the Dixie Chicks, to name a very few), and for female British singers especially. So I was very pleasantly surprised to come home on Saturday night in time to catch Lily Allen (whom I had never heard of) perform “Smile” and “LDN” on “Saturday Night Live.”

Some investigating on Sunday revealed that her debut album, “Alright, Still,” came out last week, and I was just intrigued enough to buy it.

The album isn’t perfect, and a couple of songs are unbearable — “Take What You Take,” for instance, sounds a bit too Spice Girls — but it’s a pop album, so standards must be adjusted accordingly. The best songs, by far, are the two she performed on Saturday, but “Everything’s Just Wonderful” and “Not Big” are secondary favorites.

On the whole, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like if you want to hear what Leslie Feist would sound like if she covered the Streets (as in the breakup song “Not Big”: “I could see it in your face when you give it to me gentle / Yeah, you really must think you’re great / Let’s see how you feel in a couple of weeks / When I work my way through your mates”).

Most of the songs follow a similar vein, with nasty or depressing words accompanied by totally uplifting pop music. Or, as she seems to explain it on “LDN,” “When you look with your eyes / Everything seems nice / But if you look twice / you can see it’s all lies.” There’s a disarming sweetness about it, to the extent that it’s hard to imagine even her scorned lovers (or the lovers by whom she’s been scorned) holding much of a grudge over her repeated and very personal indiscretions. It’s good enough that I can forgive her for spelling “all right” as one word in the title.

(Having written this, I now see that she has sold out her Feb. 16 show in Washington and been nominated for a whole raft of awards, so I guess she’s well known. Oh well. This is not a news-breaking website.)

The American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky alerts the internet to the one Super Bowl stat difference that matters — political contributions!

According to Kos diarist teenvote, we see that Manning gave $2,000 to Bush last cycle and maxed out ($4,000) to Bob Corker in Tennessee. The only political-checkbook-opening Bear that teenvote could find happened to be their biggest star, linebacker Brian Urlacher. He gave $1,000 to Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez. On top of that, who would you rather see happy: Barack Obama and Jan Schakowsky or Richard Lugar and Dan Burton?

Plus: Urlacher is one of the most exciting non-Steelers players to watch, the Bears’ defense gave me a strong fantasy season, and it’s fun to support a (seven-point) underdog.

Go Bears!

Congratulations to Exxon Mobil, the new world-record holder for highest corporate profits in a single calendar year! The company’s 2006 total of $39.5 billion surpassed, by $3.4 billion, the previous record, which was set by Exxon Mobil’s 2005 earnings, which one year earlier had knocked — you guessed it — Exxon Mobil’s 2004 earnings from the top of the list.

If you find these numbers difficult to visualize (as most humans do), $39.5 billion over the course of a year works out to $1,252 every second. That’s $1,252 in per-second profit — what’s left after they’ve paid for everything.

For comparison’s sake, a minimum-wage worker (an attendant at one of Exxon Mobil’s thousands of service stations, say) makes $5.15 an hour, or 14 hundredths of a cent every second. A bill in Congress right now would raise the hourly rate to $7.25, or 20 hundredths of a cent per second.

Catching up!