As you may recall from last week's letter, I was involved in an auto accident at Broad and Pike recently.

It's been a summer of much discontent. The angry town hall meetings this summer culminated in Congressman Joe Wilson heckling the president in the middle of his address to Congress last week, and calling him a liar.

"Let me know if you want Charlie Manson's cell phone number. Can't you folks do better than this?"

For better or worse, Bush's critics got what they wanted — as American troops leave Iraq, it will be all Afghanistan, all the time.

Persepolis is the program's first graphic memoir and only its second selection by a female author.

The Winnipeg filmmaker's oeuvre posits a timeline where Murnau begat Anger; silent film and underground cinema communicate across the generations, while the scratches and faded images and missing frames seem less the project of age than of being dredged from the psychic depths.

You have no idea what a character is going to do next, what the big reveal might be or how she'll wrap it up, but you don't really care because her command of language is mesmerizing.

Dance is all about existing in space and time, while cinema's gift is the ability to fragment and manipulate both, so one medium usually ends up sacrificing itself for the other.

"Think James Bond-style sexiness," says director Harriet Power, "mixed with Marx Brothers or Will Ferrell-esque banana-peel-slipping, door-slamming, madcap physical comedy."

Violent Femmes took a decade to go platinum without cracking the Billboard 200. It's hard to fathom the mass indifference that greeted songs like "Add It Up" and "Kiss Off," which would become pop-culture staples.

If nothing else, Fabolous will always be remembered for teaching a whole generation of kids how to misspell "fabulous."

If you haven't tuned in yet, get the record and let it and rattle your bones.

Meicht is recording a CD at UArts with his aptly named Big Sound Ensemble, an octet which brackets the leader's tenor with Charles Evans' baritone (which he recently showcased on a multi-track solo disc) and Darius Jones' fierce alto.

There was that drug-dealing conviction in 2000, and subsequent jail time. But since he got out last year, he's been making up for lost time.

After a couple albums' worth of sappy but snappy love songs, Miller lets more doubt and regret surface in songs like "Like Love," "If It's Not Love" and "Nobody Says I Love You Anymore."

A duo whose one and only album in 1998 revitalized conscious hip-hop.

For many of the punks of yore, L.A. hardcore punk band Black Flag was the point of entry, and tattoos of Black Flag's bars have been inked in their skin ever since. Two years ago, Stewart Ebersole set out to compile a book about the people who wear this tattoo, and to answer two questions: What do Black Flag, and the Black Flag tattoo, mean to people?

For the past 15 years, The Career Wardrobe has provided more than 50,000 women transitioning into the work force with free professional clothing, including interview suits, scrubs, service uniforms and casual Friday digs. With the economic downturn increasing demand for these services by more than 90 percent in the past year, executive director Sheri Cole has proposed a new way to create revenue to fund the nonprofit's mission.

Before blogging, there were zines — those photocopied literary pearls that drift through the underground. Amazingly, despite how popular paperless publishing is, zines still abound.

"We welcome pirates of all ages. Talk Like a Pirate Day was started by two older guys who thought it would be fun," says events director Michele DiGirolamo. "I'm sure beer was involved."

More than 100 speakers, exhibitors and solar installers will explore how people can utilize solar energy in their own homes.

Philly is celebrating its second annual PARK(ing) Day, a nationwide event where people legally transform metered parking spaces into a series of temporary, 300-square-foot parks.

After she takes down the balloons, McCloud is looking to grow her mission to create and support sustainable fashion even further.