If you’re going to be in NYC this weekend and feel like bobbing your head, check out the Tripnotica night at Galapagos, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tripnotica is an on-going series focused on downtempo and chillout music, the perfect antidote to a hot summer night. This time around there will be seven live acts—including Puracane, an old favorite of ours—as well as multimedia artwork to further the mood. Astralwerks records is sponsoring the party this month, too, and they’re giving away copies of the new LP from Digitalism, a German duo with a cool, Ed Banger-like sound. The bar is at 70 North 6th Street in the WB. Tripnotica kicks off at 10pm and rolls til close, at 4 a.m.

Bill Gates went on the Today show and showed off a seriously nifty table that just arrived here from the future. (Although we couldn’t help but think his photo choices needed an upgrade.)

We’re just glad our future has more naked women in it than the icrosoft founder’s does.

The LA band Low Vs. Diamond put out an EP in the UK in February called Life After Love. Despite their west coast origins, their music is a melancholic take on the cool New York guitar rock of the past five or so years. Picture the Strokes really bummed out, or the Bravery with far fewer keyboards and effects. Another clue as to the quintet’s sound: the Killers’ manager was so taken with them he signed them. Soon the EP will get its US release.

The title track has deceptively fast percussion, which helps keep the moodiness from bogging down the tune. Like the Strokes, the band creates a dense, churning rhythm section while eschewing cheesy guitar pedals that would make it muddy. And singer Lucas Field hits the perfect tone, evoking longing without stooping to maudlin bathos.

The other three tracks are mellower, one (“Stay Awake”) using a mellotron and another (“This Is Your Life”) a heavily reverbed guitar twang to echo the forlorn messages. But this is not self-pitying Emo or the histrionic woe-is-me of the Killers. The sound cranked out by Low vs. Diamond owes as much to classic mid-1960s teenage symphonies (there is, for example, a slightly Kinks-like quality to the title track) as to any of that. And the band’s use of dynamic shifts maintains interest even when the quartet stretches a song out to four minutes.

Somehow, though, Low vs. Diamond sounds like a throwback. With the developments in the indie scene in the last year—the return of krautrock, shoegazing and psych as major influences, for instance, or the continued popularity of DFA-pioneered dance-punk and the proliferation of diverse, experimental variations on it—a band with obvious similarities to the Strokes and Killers (ah, the old days!) seems inescapably nostalgic. Luckily the music is good, so the nostalgia comes across as soothing rather than derivative.

The next time anybody tells you that elections don’t matter, remind them of yesterday’s decision by the Roberts Court.

By a 5-4 decision, the Court said that workers may not sue their employers over unequal pay caused by discrimination that happened years in the past. The Court found that Lilly Ledbetter, the lone female supervisor at a tire plant in Alabama, may well have been discriminated against throughout her career, but did not file her lawsuit in the timely manner specified by the law. The Court held that Ms. Ledbetter had 180 days from the time when the act of discrimination took place—in other words, from the moment she received the first paycheck that was lower than a male peer’s—to file her suit.

Of course that’s ridiculous. It can take a very long time before an incident of discrimination becomes apparent. People are not accustomed to asking about, or sharing, information about their salaries. The Court has elected to render the law meaningless, and moved Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to take the unusal step of reading her dissent from the bench. "In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination," she said. Ouch.

Look for Congress to make clear to the Court how errantly it interpreted the law.

If you think it’s awkward to have The Talk with the boy, try to handle the Sex Tape Talk with two boys. A single mom named Pam Anderson has some advice. Hey, it was going to come up some time.

Odin is one cool Cali cat. The six-year-old Bengal tiger lives at the Six Flags near San Francisco and has learned to dive for dinner to the amazement of all. Click here to see more pictures and watch a video of Odin taking the plunge.

In anticipation of this year’s BookExpo, New York ran a series of pages on authors, debuts and unheralded novels that should be more widely read. We were happy to see some contributors and friends pop throughout the section. J. Robert Lennon and Sam Lipsyte, who have written fantastic short stories for Playboy, were mentioned for their respective novels Mailman and Homeland. (Lipsyte appears again in his role as a writing teacher at Columbia). Other sages with connections to us, Daphne Merkin and Jason Epstein, weigh in as well. However, it’s on page 66—And the Last Word Goes To…Five Writers on How They Get By With a Little Help From Their Friends (And Playboy) by a certain Boris Kachka—where, obviously, Playboy receives the most attention. The piece covers a night of drinks and food shared by Akhil Sharma, John Wray, Gary Shteyngart, Suketu Mehta and Ray Isle as they talk about trying to survive as writers. At one point, Wray credits the worldwide book audience for talented Americans as a godsend. Then comes the following:

"Playboy is another blessing. Wray is about to write the magazine an essay about reuniting with an ex-girlfriend; Shteyngart has already done a version of that Playboy staple. "My last agent told me not to write for Playboy because it would turn off my female readers," says Mehta. "But my female readers don’t pay me seven bucks a word."

While we’re always pleased to be associated with gifted authors—a hallmark of our 50-plus-year run—it’s hard not to be rankled by the gratuitous knock: “…that Playboy staple.” Mr. Kachka, apparently ignorant of what we publish and by whom, saw the opening and took it. For god’s sake, who would believe that Playboy publishes anything but the most rote, throw-away dreck by serious writers? Never mind the fact that we are one of the last mass-market magazines to publish fiction every month (a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by ASME judges this year) and that we don’t ask writers who should know better to scribble crap on napkins as part of a gimmicky nod to literary appreciation (as did one of our competitors). Or that Shteyngart’s piece was on a break-up (assigned and secured before his front-page review in the NYT Book Review), or that Wray’s second piece for us (his first, about a trip down the Mississippi on a raft, was shelved thanks to the force of nature known as Hurricane Katrina) is actually a profile of an alluring female singer. (Apparently Wray and his subject were romantically involved; what we know is that he was in her band for a time.)

Then, the cherry on top: $7 a word. I wish. We pull in the names we do because of our audience size, and because writers feel honored to join a publishing list that in the last few months alone includes Denis Johnson and Barry Hannah.

Boris, you caught me on a bad day. Typically, this kind of toss off—admittedly, a not particularly egregious soiling of my shoes—passes without mention. Not this time.

Are you an adrenaline junkie? Does watching racecars burn around an oval track give you a rush? Well, that’s like taking in a soapbox derby compared to the Red Bull Air Race. The international challenge pits the most skilled pilots in the world against one another, the clock and physics as they navigate a slalom obstacle course at ludicrous speed. We talked with ace pilot Kirby Chambliss:

Playboy: What’s it like going that fast in an airplane?
Chambliss: It’s a huge rush. Things are just whizzing by and you’re only missing the gates by a few feet. Couple that with the tight turns, throw in the aerobatics and the vertical element and it is a much different contest than an F1 or a NASCAR race. Our track is 3-dimensional. All of a sudden the ground is coming up on your face and you’ve got to pull ten G’s to miss the ground at the last second--it’s pretty exciting stuff. Imagine being just a few feet off the ground when you’re going 260 miles per hour.

(You don’t have to imagine. Take this onboard flight with Chambliss.)

Playboy: Is there room for error?
Chambliss: If you hit a bridge, that will be it for you. The biggest difference between our racing and car racing is that if a person driving an F1 car makes a mistake and hits that soft wall, 95 percent of the time he gets up, throws his helmet at the car and walks away from it. That doesn’t happen in a Red Bull Air Race. You make a big mistake and 95 percent of the time you’re going to die. If you blow an engine in a racecar you pull over to the side of the road. If we blow an engine over water, we’re going to get wet. And we are going to get wet at 85 miles per hour.

Playboy: Has there been a fatality during a Red Bull Air Race?
Chambliss: Not yet. There have been many pylon hits and a couple of close calls. Eventually it will happen, but so far thankfully it hasn’t.

Playboy: What’s your insurance policy like?
Chambliss: I guess it could be worse.

The next race over US soil…err…water, will be September 22 in San Diego when planes take off from the USS Midway.

Bill Cherry has been a real-estate agent in Dallas for more than 40 years. He sounds like a great guy. If he sells your house or helps you find one, his agency gives 10 percent of its commission to your church, synagogue or favorite charity.

Bill has been an agent to the stars, including Andy Williams and Perry Como. Before he got married in the early 1970s, Bill subscribed to Playboy. For future reference on the Playboy lifestyle, he saved every issue from July 1962 to December 1971. Then he went further.

"I had them all professionally bound just like good books," he said. "Leatherette covers with gold lettering on the spines and fronts, sewn and glued...the whole nine yards."

Bill writes that he saved the issues because he never doubted he was the man that Playboy spoke to. "I just had a different name and was shorter than Hef. And I lived in Denton, Texas and Hef lived in Chicago. How could that really matter? I knew they were nothing more than minor obstructions to Playboy bachelor justice.” But now, he writes, “it's time for me to accept the fact that my Playboy days are over. My wife says that at 67 it's time to stop dreaming. 'It ain't gonna happen for you,' she told me.” She wants him to get rid of the collection. Can someone who knows Bill knock some sense into his head? IT’S NEVER OVER, BILL. Christa Speck just asked about you the other day.

Here’s a French commercial for a condom company. Hilarious.

The shrink from The Sopranos has a lot of experience counseling bad guys. Maybe Darth Vader should give her a call. Here’s an amusing mash-up that details the arch-villan’s crack-up.

May 26 marked what would have been the 100th birthday of John Wayne, and no doubt we will have heard by now lots of gush about what a great all-American screen icon he was. In all the sentimentality, don’t lose sight of what an arch right-winger he was. This often took shape in ways we find entirely unpalatable today, as can be seen throughout the interview he gave Playboy in May 1971. An example:

"With a lot of blacks, there’s quite of bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority … to irresponsible people.’’

Well! But that aside, it’s interesting to see how passé the Wayne model of manhood has become. His spiritual successor, Clint Eastwood, has always been a darker and more complicated figure. And as he has aged, Eastwood has become our most philosophical artist on the subject of violence. In a way, the myths that Wayne built in the 35 years of his career—of proving manhood through violence and proving patriotism with unswerving fealty—have been dismantled brick by brick by Eastwood during his.

I’d all but written off Hillary as a viable candidate for the Democratic party nomination. Not only is she a highly polarizing figure, she just didn’t seem to be loose enough to roll with the punches the candidates take in today’s political races. Her husband of course was the all-time champion of informal connection, Reagan was no slouch either, and our current president, like him or not, nailed this in his 2000 campaign (in contrast, just a quarter-teaspoon of personality could have won it for Gore).

But we’d always pegged Hillary as pretty shellacked, as someone who had a hard time walking the line between serious and heavy-handed and who would have a hard time getting a laugh with even the most slam-dunk joke. Well, maybe we were wrong. Her second video blog, in which she responds to the public’s answers to her original call for campaign-song suggestions shows she (or someone she trusts) gets how the world talks to each other now. Score a round for the lady! (Finally.)

You may not believe this, but a Playboy photo shoot doesn’t necessarily involve nude women. Last week we shot our fall suit preview with photographer Marlena Bielinska. Fashion Director Joseph DeAcetis studied this autumn’s upcoming suit trends and pulled together some of the best names in menswear for a September spread that will educate and inspire. Here's a behind-the-scenes shot of what you don't see when reading our men’s fashion pages. Check back in September for the full story.

I’ve always thought that the person who invents a reliable, safe method of enlarging the penis will be richer than Bill Gates within one week. If this doesn’t prove my hypothesis, I don’t know what does:

Last week, Janice Dickinson appeared on Jonathan Ross and humiliated Mick Jagger saying, “Mick Jagger has a very small penis.” Now film director Julien Temple reveals while filming scenes for the 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo, Mick Jagger took to the jungle and performed an Amazonian marriage ritual in an attempt to enlarge his penis. The act involved putting bamboo over his member and filling it with bees so his penis would swell to the size of the bamboo.