George Carlin

If you've got the HBO on your teevee, this is on Saturday night @ 10:00

Prison Break

I'm sure that everyone saw this over their morning cuppa joe today. I was going to post something about it and thought better of writing it myself after reading something as comprehensively well crafted as this piece from Hullabaloo.

So just go read it.

Just another drop in bucket in the end of the experiment called america.

Friday Random Ten

It's A Mistake--Colin Hay
White Girl--X (John Doe played this last week)
Two Of Us--Aimee Mann
In The City--The Jam
Fatally Beautiful--T Bone Burnett
Another Round--Foo Fighters
Stop Your Sobbing--The Pretenders*
We Love--Screamin' Jay Hawkins
How She Lied By Living--The Posies
Got Ma Nuts From A Hippie--The Fratellis

Bonus Track:

Jericho Road--Steve Earle


*Greatest Rock chick ever

70's TV Chimp

No, not Lancelot Link...it's Steve Autism

Wolcott

Big, snobby, erudite, Upper West Side Jim Wolcott weighs in on the passing of W.F. Buckley.

Excellent points are made throughout.

Talking Points

For the life of me, I do not know why either of the Democratic candidates aren't pounding these kinds of data points into the heads of our fair electorate.

We are fast approaching the 5th anniversary of the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation and still NO ONE is questioning the legitimacy of that event in any way; much less from a fiduciary perspective.

No, no, let's instead ask Barack Obama what cologne Lou Farrakhan wears or if Hillary is still mad at the Clenis for his fellatio related behaviours.

Man, what a fucked up country...

Stay Classy, George

With all the hub-bub over the big debate here in the Cleve, several of you may have missed the Chimp's comments yesterday to the World Series champion Boston Red Sox.

Now you know how I feel about the fact that the Tribe lost all of those games straight to the Bo-Sox last year, but there is absolutely no excuse for what he said about Manny Ramirez.

What a douche bag George W. Bush is. Unbelievable.

Clear Channel in Cincinnati

Juan Cole weighs in in his typically eloquent way. Me?

Not so much.

Go tell these fucksticks what you think of their little radio show in Hate Town.

The death of Conservatism

Bill Buckley died today.

My apologies for the Mr. Fish cartoon which, in actuality, is far more representative of what the Right looks like these days.

Besides being excellent fodder for Rich Little and a host of other lesser impressionists 40 years ago, Buckley was an icon. Regardless of the politics behind his message he was a smart guy and at the end of his life saw the Neocons for what they were.

In his late teens

I hadn't realized that the Chimp had sunk below 20% on his economic approval ratings as of last week.

These are epic numbers folks. Can single digits be in the offing before the end of the reign of Mayberry Mafia? I remember just a couple of years ago when a drop in the 40 percentile range was considered historic. How any sentient being could possibly align themselves with the GOP these days is beyond me.

It'd be like cheering for John Wayne Gacy to stuff more boys in his crawlspace.

Are we not men?

Here's the intro to Idiocracy. I always hoped that Jerry Casale and the boys might be wrong. Turns out I was mistaken.

Just sayin'...

Go rent the movie.

Steve Bell

I had somehow missed this one last week. That Steve Bell is a real pistol.

Frank Rich

Smart guy looks into crystal ball. News at 11:00

Ever get the feeling you're being cheated?

Because you are.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no big fan of American Idol. It's nothing more than a protracted 20 week advert for Coke and Ford autos.

But this is just shameless even for the grease stains that are teevee execs. But just keep watching kids, it's exactly what your government wants you to do. And don't forget to eat that KFC and take your Xanax and Viagra either. We're gotta keep on with our fat zombie fuckin' until what's left of Rome has completely burned.

For the life of me...

...I don't know why I read this guy first thing on Monday mornings when he posts his weekly diatribes. I guess I'm just a cockeyed masochist.

Mr. K spreads his love.

Muqtada Watch

Once again, the elephant in the room is this guy. As I've said for 4 years now that Muqtada holds the key to our "winning" in Iraq. If he decides to let the US slide outta there, nice and quiet, it won't be like the fall of Saigon.

However, if the winds change and he deploys a million guys with a million Kalashnikovs, we're righteously fucked on the road back to Kuwait.

Now of course the Council on Foreign Relations will tell you it's only 100, 000 dudes, but we all know how well informed they've been in the past.

John Fogerty

Speaking of relevant music, here's a clip from Letterman a while back of John from his new record. He merges the two songs on this performance which are full out stompers on the record, but I think you get the point.

GO. BUY. THIS. CD.

It's urgent, it's loud, it's angry and it's a fuckin' blast.

Friday Random Ten

Coming at you with some rock steady grooves on a snowy day in the Cleve...heh, double up on Spoon too.

I Don't Mind--The Buzzcocks
Senses Working Overtime--XTC
Reinventing The Wheel--Glenn Tilbrook
I'm Happy Just To Dance With You--The Beatles
Beer, Gas, Ride Forever--John Doe
Long Dark Night--John Fogerty
What About The Baby--Wyclef Jean and Mary J. Blige
Small Stakes--Spoon
Believing Is Art--Spoon
David--Nellie McKay

Bonus Track
Yankee Bayonet--The Decemberists

By the way, a bunch of us will be diggin' the popular sounds of Wilco tonight at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium. Mr. John Doe is the warm-up. Color me amped.

Hot Septuagenarian monkey love

Yeah, um, no reason to look further than here for quality snark on the whole McCain kerfuffle.

Heh.

Tom Engelhardt

Tomgram brings everything into focus yet again. Never you mind about that man behind that curtain kids. He's not up to anything important...

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby

No, not those lads from Leeds, The Kaiser Chiefs song.

Nu-uh, I'm talking about this news item from earlier in the week which was really a big fat nothing but it provides with an excuse to post this marvelous bit of photoshopping.

Tres bon!

Are you experienced?

There has been quite a bit of winger noise out there the last couple of days telling us that Barack Obama doesn't have the background or experience to be President of these United States.

Sure, he's green but I don't recall any grand examination of W's accomplishments when he ran in 2000. All I recall was that Miserable Failure had run several business ventures into the ground, been handed a baseball team by his father's friends and had put more people to death than any other sitting Governor in the history of the US...and he was only in office for less than 6 years! Nice C.V.

Anyway, one of the talking points I had heard in wingnuttia was that from an election standpoint, Obama was a lightweight as the only person he had bested on a national level was one Alan Keyes for the Illinois Senate seat that Obama currently holds. Now everyone, including the boneheads on the right, agree that Alan Keyes is a wacko , (he was actually roommates with Bill Kristol!!) and never had a chance to beat anyone.

Why then did the GOP prop up Keyes to make Obama's victory such a cake walk? Oh, that's right I had forgotten about this guy. Had you? Jack Ryan was the golden boy of the right until he fell from grace and they had to bring in a stiff like Alan Keyes on in the 11th hour of the campaign.
I mean, c'mon, they even tried to run Ditka for the seat, remember?

Ah, yes, the Grand Old party of Hypocrites...here's an excerpt from Jack Ryan's wikipedia entry:

Campaign demise

Ryan married actress Jeri Ryan in 1991; together they have a son, Alex Ryan. They divorced in 1999 in California, and the records of the divorce were sealed at their mutual request. Five years later, when Ryan's Senate campaign began, the Chicago Tribune newspaper and WLS-TV, the local ABC affiliate, sought to have the records released. Both Ryan and his wife agreed to make their divorce records public, but not make the custody records public, claiming that the custody records could be harmful to their son if released.

On June 22, 2004, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider agreed to release the custody files. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public.^[1] The decision to release these files generated much controversy because it went against both parents' direct request and because it reversed the earlier decision to seal the papers in the best interest of the child.

That's Frantz, not France...

**

While I'm on the topic of the odious gasbags on Clear Channel/Faux News station WTAM, I thought I'd take a minute to provide a profile on this tool.

He was spewing some bile this morning about Michelle Obama's comment about not feeling proud to live in the country. They then went right into an Obama for prez ad. Super programmer director over there at WTAM. I know that they can't refuse the political ads, but they can pick when to air them. Idiots.

Bob Frantz can be counted on to bloviate on standard issue boilerplate rhetoric on any conservative issue; guns, Dennis, war on drugs, bashing Cleveland, hating evil liberals, calling the Democratic party the Democrat party, blah, blah blah.

Is anyone under 75 actually listening to this dreck and if so why?

Feel free to weigh in and provide some ideas as to how to get these asshats off the airwaves. Seeing that I'm STILL not working, I'd love to make a full time job of smothering the local hate speech here in the Cleve.

Funnily enough, it appears that he's looking for a foil. Perhaps I'll apply and try to encourage him to actually form complete sentences on his show for a change instead of of saying "you know" every 15th syllable.

It could be kind of a Bob vs. Bob thing...

**actual photo of Bob Frantz

Dennis!

They're really gunning for Dennis Kucinich this time. Outside monies are propping up Joe Cimperman, prolly not a bad guy, cause the banks, suits and wingers are tired of Dennis being a thorn in their side and he's a truth teller.

With the help of this fat fuck, they might just get DK knocked out of the primary.

Give what you can, if you can, here.

And if you're unsure as to why to give, read this piece.

Hulk Smash!

The smartest guy in the room, Lew Lapham brings his brilliance to the page again in this months Harpers. He takes the details behind the baseball steroid hoopla and lays bare the essential problems behind our 'Murkan society.

I know it's a mega long post. Read it anyway, it's good for you.

Mudville
By Lewis H. Lapham
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

—Ernest Lawrence Thayer

It’s been three months since former Senator George Mitchell published his 409-page report confirming the use of illegal drugs by many if not most of the players in Major League Baseball, and we’ve yet to come to the end of being told sad stories of the death of kings. Somewhere the bands are playing for the season’s presidential candidates, and in Florida the sun presumably is shining bright, but in the stadium press boxes the hearts are heavy and no birds sing. The makers of tabloid romance paste asterisks into the record books, rule the noble Clemens and the mighty Bonds ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, declare the national pastime corrupted, the hallowed ground despoiled. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the elected keepers of America’s moral accounts entertain the prospect of stricter laws and harsher punishment, baseball players to be put on the endangered-species list, subjected to more rigorous inspections of their blood, their urine, and their souls.

The judgments are un-American and behind the times, the anguish unwarranted and overwrought. What else is the American dream if not the theory and practice of self-invention? How otherwise define the American way of life if not as a ceaseless effort to boost performance, hype the message, enhance the product? Deny an aging outfielder the right to inject himself with human-growth hormone, and what does one say to the elderly philanthropist who steps out of an evening with a penile implant and a flower in his lapel? To the lady in distress shopping around for a nose like the one she saw advertised in a painting by Botticelli? To the distracted child restored to his study of the multiplication tables with a therapeutic jolt of Ritalin? To the stationary herds of industrial-strength cows so heavily doped with bovine-growth hormone that they require massive infusions of antibiotic to survive the otherwise lethal atmospheres of their breeding pens?

In one of the New York newspapers toward the end of December, I came across a letter to the editor from a reader henceforth unwilling to let his young sons participate in competitive sports for fear of exposing them to an environment polluted with unnatural additives. I admired the parent’s resolve but wondered where in the society he could find it safe to take the kids. Not to a nearby hospital, or to a local supermarket stocked with chemically preserved applesauce and genetically modified chicken potpie; not to the neighborhood Cineplex presenting computer animations programmed to act like movie stars and movie stars made up to look like robots; not into an Internet chat room frequented by jaded algorithms and naked avatars.

The voices of Christian conscience in our midst still like to draw a medieval distinction between what is “natural” (the good, the true, and the beautiful) and what is “artificial” (wicked, man-made, false). The distinction no longer exists. For better or worse, in one way or another, and to a greater or lesser extent, the whole of our environment—skyscrapers, highways, emotions, orchards, oil wells, terrorists, icebergs, tomatoes organic and inorganic, aquatic plants and Jason Bourne, pigeons, dogs, the smog in Brentwood, and the mountain dew in Colorado—is a virtual reality, fabricated by the hand and mind of man. We shape our tools, and our tools shape us. It’s a fair and free exchange, our technology a process of evolution by accelerated means, machines reconfiguring their capacities and states of consciousness in ways comparable to those by which dinosaurs become birds and apes change into Mormon choirs. Vice President Dick Cheney’s electronic heartbeat is born in Mudville together with YouTube, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Richard Wagner’s Parsifat. The road forward to a better tomorrow is no farther away than the next generation of microchips or the nearest all-night pharmacy.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the consolations of philosophy or the joys of motherhood, but how else is Heaven made if not with artificial sweeteners—with the elixir of Cialis and the embalming fluids of celebrity? Given the society’s order of merit and measure of value, the hope of salvation is a transformed self somehow worth its weight in gold. Consider the revelation in the desert vouchsafed to the minor-league third baseman, age twenty-two, traveling on a monthly pittance to Texas or Alabama towns so poor or so closely monitored by Jesus that the motels don’t sell hard liquor or provide the courtesy of an adult film channel. The young man knows that if in this or next year’s season he can hit another fifteen or twenty home runs, lift his batting average by thirty or forty percentage points, his pay maybe will rise to $1 million a year, his travel upgraded to first-class accommodation at an altitude of 30,000 feet, his name and shoe size the stuff of legend among the girls at Scores. A variant promise of redemption appears as if in a burning bush to a thirty-four-year-old relief pitcher who knows that if he can keep his curve ball breaking across the corners of the plate, he stays for another two or three seasons in the big money, long enough to make good his mortgages on the property in Puerto Rico and maybe find himself transported into a broadcasting booth at NBC or ESPN.

Where is the dilemma? How not choose the sportsman’s path to glory? The Mitchell report framed the questions on a losing premise.—”The play- en who follow the law and the rules are faced with the painful choice of either being placed at a competitive disadvantage or becoming illegal users themselves. No one should have to make that choice.” Why not? Was not that the choice stoutly made by the builders of America’s railroads, by the Minutemen at Concord and General William T. Sherman marching from Atlanta to the sea? Our television commercials speak of little else except the gaining of a competitive advantage—cell phones equipped with applications as omnipotent as were those available to Zeus on Mount Olympus, headphones piping Mozart symphonies into the ears of six-month-old infants already enrolled on the waiting list for Harvard.
That steroids bring with them an element of risk is a fact that must be faced. What true American would want it any other way? Too easily we forget Marine Corps Sergeant Dan Daly at the Battle of Belleau Wood, leading his men into a storm of German machine-gun bullets with the
heroic cry, “Come on, you sons of bitches—do you want to live forever?” How often do we hear the phrase “visionary risk-taking” in the speeches of our A-list business leaders (to explain, among other things, the brief but brilliant blowing of the subprime-mortgage bubble), read the message emblazoned on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, see it shining in the moonlight over Las Vegas?

The bull market for prescription drugs amounts to the sum of $249.3 billion a year; add to it the money spent on illegal drugs (at least another $63 billion), as well as the capital lost on state lotteries and legal gambling ($85 billion), and we find a strong majority of our fellow citizens bent on the quest for immortality. Visionary risk-taken one and all, willing to take their chances with a surgeon’s knife, to buy a mansion in Arizona with non-existent credit, bet the marriage on the jack of diamonds, dance to the music of Ecstasy. How does one say to such people that the game isn’t worth the candle, or that the candle can’t be burned at both ends?

.1% s with most other questions of interest to the society, the answers follow the money, and when carried with the bats and halls into the locker rooms of Major League Baseball, they move up in grade from the temporal to the spiritual. The product is entertainment, but the brand is the democratic ideal made flesh, Adam at play in the fields of the Lord before partaking of the contract with Steinbrenner, the belief that America in 2008 is somehow just the way it was in Chicago in 1907, when the Cubs were tossing the baseball around the diamond from Tinkers to Even to Chance. The performance-enhanced memory sells tickets and souvenirs; as with most other forms of modern poetry, it needs a little help from its friends. Exceptional talent is as rare among ballplayers as it is among bond traders and politicians, and if the sandlots don’t grow Rousseau’s noble savages in an abundance sufficient to seed and staff the myth of America’s idyllic boyhood, what happens to the gate receipts?
The chance of rain in the forecast threatened to delay or call the game during the early 1990s, when Major League Baseball was extending its franchise to twenty-eight teams eager to build luxury skyboxes overlooking the fields of dreams. To cover the spread between the expectations of the newly enfranchised fans and the shortage of number 2, 3, 4, and 5 hitters up to the standard of the immortal Babe Ruth, the owners narrowed the strike zones, shortened the distance to the outfield fences, sent scouts to tap the gene pools in South Korea and Japan. The players made chemical adjustments.

The Mitchell report notes the exemplary degree of cooperation between management and labor (“Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades . . . shares to some extent in the responsibility for the steroids era ...but instead of giving credit where credit is due, the former senator from Maine downgrades the sure-footed teamwork into “a collective failure,” observes that the commissioners, the club officials, and the Players Association somehow failed “to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on.” The suggestion is insulting. Nobody was quicker to recognize the problem than the owners in need of crowd- pleasing spectacle to sell at increasingly spectacular prices; nor were the players slow to grasp the fact that a ninety- five-mile-an-hour fastball, no matter what its immigrant status, is always a well-paid wonder to behold. Together they brought joy to Mudville, and with it the sound of music and the sale of caps.

Together they kept pace with the broad technological advance occurring elsewhere in the society—with the computer-generated trades breeding money in the credit markets, with the miracles of modem medicine being implanted in the bodies of widows and orphans as well as in the throats of New York real estate tycoons and the hearts of Arab oil sheiks. That Major League Baseball continued to score game- winning profits despite the fears and suspicions noted in the margins of the official program (more players seen to resemble inflatable beach toys, mandatory and more frequent searches of antisocial urinary tracts, more path-killing balms and ointments added to the roster of illegal contraband) testifies, as did Karl Rove’s marketing of President George W. Bush, to the patriotism of the nation’s sportswriters and the resilience of the American spirit.

The new season’s presidential candidates speak of breaking old barriers and crossing new frontiers, of riding boldly into the future on the eagle wings of change. Let the proprietors of Major League Baseball do likewise. They say they wish to “level the playing field,” to bring to a close a “troubling chapter” in the history of the game, above all else to “move on.” The fulfillment of their desire lies as close to hand as a note from the friendly team physician. Supply the locker rooms, free of charge and in every color of the rainbow, with the best and brightest that the pharmaceutical industry has on offer, with or without prescription, performance-enhancing, and recreational. The competitive disadvantage disappears, the level playing held regains its egalitarian state of grace. Spread the good news to the paid attendance—Lucy in the sky with diamonds sold with the beer and hot dogs at prices referred to Medicaid—and great would be the joy in Mudville.

To mighty Casey at the plate the ball looks as big as a grapefruit; infielders rigged with silicon circuits in their heads turn double plays at broadband speed; the game might last for three days, running up bonus points for extra innings and providing its fans with the benefits of an extended stay in paradise.

All present in the stadium come fortified with self-improvements both chemical and surgical, fit for service aboard the Starship Enterprise. To the children suffering attention deficit disorder in the distant bleachers, the foul lines become as plainly visible as the replays on the JumboTron; the senior statesmen in the stands, growing hair as strong as Donald Trump’s, unafraid of heart failure and immune to the risk of erectile dysfunction, bask contentedly in the glow of usherettes copied from designs in Playboy. Rich in equal opportunity and re-engineered with biofuels, the national pastime recovers its footing as America’s foremost source of independent energy and strength, once again embodies, in reconstructed bone and re-integrated marrow, the ever-evolving truth of America’s immortal dream.

Here's more news

Heavens to Betsy, we haven't had a good ol' Republican appointee drag queen scandal in a while around here have we folks?

Never one to disappoint, I give you this juicy tibdit.

And just to review, this is just another buttress in that mighty fortress of lies, deception and hypocrisy that is our current administration.

Party on, dudes.

RIP Jim Jones

For all you avant garde rockers out there 'tis a sad day indeed. I got word this morning that Jim Jones passed away last night after a long illness. (That's Jim, 5th from the left next to crazy Dave).

Here's his bio from the Ubu Projex web site.

James E. Jones, b. 1950 in Cleveland, Ohio. Graduated from Mayfield High School in 1968. He played baritone sax in the MHS Marching Band, alto sax in the concert band, and discovered an affinity for tape manipulation while in charge of the high school language lab. Jim attempted two quarters at Cuyahoga Community College in '69, but his interest in music won out.

He formed the short-lived band, Lazarus, and worked as a clerk/buyer for Leo Mintz's Record Rendezvous retail chain for the next fifteen years. Jim started his own record shop, Platter-Puss Records, in '84. He sold the business in '87 after joining Pere Ubu. Jim got his first guitar in 1965, and taught himself to play in a self-devised open tuning. He was/is profoundly moved by music in nearly all forms, especially Indian music (thanks to George Harrison), 20th century classical & experimental, 50's thru 60's pop and mood music, and of course "rock" in it's many forms.

Jim joined local "underground" band, Mirrors, in '74 as bass player. Mirrors shared gigs with Rocket From The Tombs and The Electric Eels (whom he later recorded with), and later transformed into The Styrenes. In '77 Jim quit The Styrenes and took some time off from work to become a member of the Pere Ubu road crew, doing the infamous Co-Ed Jail Tours of the US & Europe in support of The Modern Dance lp. Back from the tours Jim and fellow roadie, Pat Ryan, started a two-man experimental rock band called Foreign Bodies, which released a single.

The next few years saw Jim honing his skills as a studio producer for a number of local Cleveland artists and bands, recording his own music, and composing electronic pieces for local theatre and dance companies. In 1980 Jim formed the raucous Easter Monkeys, and concomitantly became a member of Scott Krauss And Tony Maimone's project, Home & Garden. Gigs were played and recordings were released by both bands.

Having worked with David Thomas And The Pedestrians On The Variations On A Theme album in '84, Jim was asked to join David's latest project, The Wooden Birds, in 1986. A year later that group (with the addition of Scott Krauss) became the revived Pere Ubu. Jim has recorded with the band since that time, but no longer tours. He currently appears and records with local bands Speaker\Cranker, Noble Rot, and KNG NXN as mainly a keyboardist. Jim has overseen operations of the US arm of Ubutique in Cleveland since 1990.

Click here for an interview with Jim Jones.

Dave Edmunds - From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)

Ladies and Gents, I give you the pride of Cardiff, Wales.

Dave covers The Boss on this song better than Bruce could ever do it.

Exit stage leftist...

Fidel leaves with hardly a bang. * For all his huffing and puffing during his reign, he really was ultimately a non event on the world's stage save keeping 1950's cars running on makeshift parts for the last 60 years and spooking the Kennedy regime for a spell.

I'm sure however that the folks on the right will dig up Raygun's corpse and find a way to attribute the fall of Castro to the brilliant political strategy on the part of the host from Death Valley Days.

* I changed the photo due to the Redman's admonition in the comments section. I report--you decide, fair and balanced.

Oh, and by the way...

I rest my case as it relates to gun laws.

What a country.

Charles Barkley: Republicans/Conservatives = Fake Christians

Dig it!

The Round Mound of Rebound, never short on opinions, dunks one home with a tomahawk slam on the Beard's show.

Brilliant!

Endorsement

So okay, I still have my Dennis poster over on the right hand side of the page, but that's obviously nothing more than symbolic at this stage. He's still my Congressman and I loves him with a mighty ferocity.

However, it's time to pull for one side or another.

With John Edwards out of the race, my support for either Democratic candidate has been rather tepid so far, but Brother Dave from the great frozen north of Wisconsin sent me this link today and we're decided on our choice.

It's Obama time.

Ray Davies

Ray has a new record that drops next week on the 19th. He remains, IMHO, one of the finest songwriters alive.

Here's a little piece detailing the new album.

Grim Death

Another senseless shooting in America and everybody asks the same wrong, stupid questions..."How could this happen here?...What was wrong with this guy?...Is our children learning?...Was it Hollywood's fault?"

The US averages about 35,000 deaths by firearms annually. Just as a point if reference, Japan had 3 gun related deaths in 2006.

Statistically, it breaks along these lines:

Here are gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in the world's 36 richest countries in 2004:

United States 14.24; Brazil 12.95; Mexico 12.69; Estonia 12.26; Argentina 8.93; Northern Ireland 6.63; Finland 6.46; Switzerland 5.31; France 5.15; Canada 4.31; Norway 3.82; Austria 3.70; Portugal 3.20; Israel 2.91; Belgium 2.90; Australia 2.65; Slovenia 2.60; Italy 2.44; New Zealand 2.38; Denmark 2.09; Sweden 1.92; Kuwait 1.84; Greece 1.29; Germany 1.24; Hungary 1.11; Republic of Ireland 0.97; Spain 0.78; Netherlands 0.70; Scotland 0.54; England and Wales 0.41; Taiwan 0.37; Singapore 0.21; Mauritius 0.19; Hong Kong 0.14; South Korea 0.12; Japan 0.05.

Here's the answer to solve this epidemic.

People having been killing one another since the dawn of man. Guns just make it really, really easy to do.

This nation of ours is like a giant violent child with a deadly weapon in its hand We need to take the tool away. As a society we've continually proven we're incapable of dealing with the responsibilities of gun ownership so we need to melt them all down. Remove the toy from the from the hands of these infantile fools.

Feh.

Since I know that my proposal will never happen, in the meantime, here's a good site with some resources and potential answers.

Oh, and if you disagree with me on this one, Go. Fuck. Off.

Friday Random Ten

And as I was drifting past the Lorelei
I heard those slinky sirens wail - whooo
So look out sailor when you hear them croon
You'll never been the same again oh no
Their crazy music drives you insane - this way

So love me, leave me. do what you will
Who knows what tomorrow might bring?
Learn from your mistakes is my only advice
And stay cool is still the main rule
Don't play yourself for a fool
Too much cheesecake too soon
Old money's better than new
No mention in the latest Tribune
And don't let this happen to you.

Isolation--Snow Patrol
Gonna Get Me Someone--The Greenhornes
Home In My Hand--Dave Edmunds
Don't Let It Get You Down--Spoon
Hands--The Raconteurs
Editions Of You--Roxy Music
Smile Like You Mean It--The Killers
Tired Of Waiting For You--Green Day*
Down On The Corner--Creedence Clearwater Revival
Long, Long, Long--The Beatles

Bonus Track:

Tea For Two--Pink Martini

*great fuckin' cover of the Kinks classic

Hope is a four letter word

I'm sure that Comrade Kunstler would find something to carp about regarding this idea, but I'm liking this Obama character more and more each day...

Here's a clue to the question in the link

The answer is yes...

And in other news...

I keep tellin' y'all that there are many other things going on in this nation aside from whether Hillary or Barack gave a speech or kissed a baby today. Sheesh. Thank goodness for Russ Feingold in he House.

It would appear that Harry Reid and crew have planted a big wet one on the Chimp's backside just in time for Valentine's Day.

Payback will be a bitch for these tools. Even thought he personally voted against it, I still don't like Reid one fucking bit. Here's the vote breakdown in case anybody is so inclined to check it out.

Underdog

I've always had a soft spot for Beagles, just ask Georgene.

Congrats to Uno!

Television - live 1978

I was just listening to some Tom Verlaine today and thought this song to be appropos for our time of war.

I think this clip may be from the Old Grey Whistle Test.

I hate Ben Stein

Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me.

Yet Another Chapter...

...in the the ongoing saga of What Digby Said.

Admiration Society

The coolest name in blogging around these days, Lance Mannion, spends some quality time examining the career and latest movie of my personal favorite living actor, Jeff Bridges.

The Dude abides...

Enjoy Yourself...

It IS later than you think.

Brother Dave and I were talking about some rather heady stuff today and this was the conclusion to which we arrived.

Bon appetit!!

yes, we can't

A fitting response to last week's popular Obama video.

Hilarious. Fuck St. McCain.

via Rising Hegemon

Paul Krugman

I had missed this column from the shrill one last week.

I couldn't agree more.

Happy Anniversary, Chuck

Here's a link to a marvelously exhaustive series on the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

Huh. Anbody out there got Mike Huckabee's email address?...

Critter Heaven

We had to bring out a raccoon trap service this week 'cause we kept seeing tracks on the back porch and Bailey the dog was gonna get in a scrap with li'l Rocky sooner or later.

Got up this morning and sho' nuff there was the little dude* looking very forlorn in the trap.

Farewell little freeloader. Good night and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

*not actual photo of our raccoon

Soup to Nuts

I'm 48 years old. I'm ever so glad that I'll probably be dead in another 30 to 40 years.

Read it and weep folks...

Defining innovation.

Found this BMW ad out on the TED site. Wow. The Earth and its inhabitants continue to amaze...

Vote Chooser

Cousin Danny sent me this today. It's cool. Go forth and choose...

Friday Random Ten

This is hell, this is hell
I am sorry to tell you
It never gets better or worse
But you'll get used to it after a spell
For heaven is hell in reverse

The failed Don Juan in the big bow-tie
Is very sorry that he spoke
For he's mislaid his punchline
More than half-way through a very tasteless joke
The fraulein caught him peeking down her gown
He's yelling in her ear
And all at once the music stopped
As he was intimately bellowing "My dear"

This is hell, this is hell, this is hell.

My favourite things are playing
Again and again
But it's by Julie Andrews
And not by John Coltrane
Endless balmy breezes in perfect sunsets framed
Vintage wine for breakfast
And naked starlets floating in champagne
All the passions of your youth
Are tranquilized and tamed
You may think it looks familiar
Though you may know it by another name

This is hell, this is hell, this is hell.

I know that I've I've been remiss the past couple of weeks in my posting of The Ten.

So sue me.

The Infinite Pet--Spoon
The Eulogy--Wyclef Jean
If Looks Could Kill--Camera Obscura
We've Got Everything--Modest Mouse
Let The Cool Goddess Rust Away--Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Lounge Act--Nirvana
Lady Jane--The Rolling Stones
Feel Again--Nick Lowe
Yellow--Coldplay
This Is Hell--Elvis Costello

Bonus Track:

Trampled Rose--Tom Waits

Ted Rall

There are literally dozens of reasons not to like the senior Senator from Arizona.

But, this is exactly why I don't like John McCain. He gives the word "opportunist" new meaning.

The Maharishi

I was never much a fan of this era of Beatles music, but the Maharishi was an important figure in many lives and his passing demands some form of acknowledgment.

He was 91.

Coincidentally, Johan and I happened to drive right by his ashram a few years ago in Vlodrop while on bidness in the Netherlands. The Dutch revered him.

Damn hippies...

Book Quiz

I love this kind of stuff.

Go ahead and take the quiz.

BTW, I'm "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut...go figure...

Faux in the house

Cute how this barely got any attention in the 'Murkan media. Fucker.

Although I find the hoopla over these dumb primaries quite silly, I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying watching the fascist media types, (El Rushbo, Coulter, Hannity, Glenn Beck) eating their insides out over the coronation of St. John McCain and saying that they'll vote for Hillary or Obama instead.

Personally, I'd rather revisit the myriad sins of the Bush debacle and try to grasp why anyone with a sentient mind would vote for anyone who labeled themselves a "conservative" candidate. Here's just a smattering of the clusterfuck of conservative brilliance that we've witnessed during the past 7 years from our comrades over at Wikipedia...

Garage Rock

Despite the Redman's experience up in Cheeseland, I still really dig the Fleshtones.

Listen here...

Harper's Weekly Review

As a subscriber to the ever venerable Harper's Magazine, I get this weekly update via email. Here it is for your perusal...

President George W. Bush unveiled a $3.1 trillion spending package that would increase military funding while protecting tax cuts, and Wal-Mart announced an economic "stimulus plan" that offers steep discounts on thousands of items, including a five-pound bag of Tyson frozen chicken wings ($8.88) and two Hillshire Farms Cocktail Smokies or Ropes ($5). Mississippi lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants in the state to serve obese people, and an unidentified robber killed five women in a Chicago-area branch of the plus-sized clothing store Lane Bryant. A camping-goods website was selling a cheeseburger in a can.

Police in India uncovered a kidney-napping ring that preyed upon impoverished laborers, farmers, and rickshaw drivers. "I had no idea about kidney transplants," said Shakeel Ahmed, a laborer from Uttar Pradesh state. "I knew that these people meant to do evil to me. When I woke up, a doctor said I would be shot if I ever told anyone what happened."

An unidentified donor gave $130 million to Bangladesh to repair cyclone damage, and hungry Haitians were eating cookies made of mud.

Abu Laith al Libi, alleged to be a high-ranking Libyan member of Al Qaeda, was killed in a missile strike in Pakistan. An Indonesian housewife became the 103rd person to die from bird flu in that country, and an Iowa outbreak of the rare lung disease histoplasmosis, a fungal infection often spread by bird or bat droppings, was traced back to a November 29 2007 American Lung Association event at the governor's mansion.

Two earthquakes killed 30 people in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thousands of Chadians fleeing skirmishes in the capital N'Djamena sought refuge in Cameroon, and UN peacekeepers in the disputed African territory of Western Sahara were reprimanded for defacing ancient rock paintings on Devil Mountain. Remnants of a 7,000-year-old city were found in Egypt's Fayyum oasis. Egypt and India were afflicted with limited Internet service, and power failures in South Africa closed mines and shopping centers for several days.

In China, where hundreds of thousands of people traveling for the Lunar New Year remained stranded by winter storms, a woman was trampled to death in a stampede to board a train. Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, signalling six more weeks of winter, and John Edwards pulled out of the presidential race, saying he would step aside "so that history can blaze its path." California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed Republican candidate John McCain, while Schwarzenegger's wife, Maria Shriver, the niece of John F. Kennedy, endorsed Barack Obama.

The Pentagon said that nine Iraqi civilians had been killed in a strike intended for militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. West Virginia was considering a bill that would require gym classes to teach middle-schoolers how to handle a gun. In Pennsylvania a woman locked her ten-year-old grandson in a dog crate and threatened to bury him alive in the backyard after he disclosed that he had been spiking his family's drinks with lamp oil and household cleaner, and in Britain retail chain Woolworths withdrew from sale a bed for six-year-old girls called the Lolita Midsleeper Combi after receiving complaints from parents. "We had to look it up on Wikipedia," said a store spokesman. "But we certainly know who she is now."

It was reported that a sedentary lifestyle speeds aging, and new pictures of Mercury revealed the elderly planet's spider-shaped birthmark, shrinkage, wrinkles, and scars. The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots to win Superbowl XLII, while the NFL refused to allow churches to show the game on big-screen televisions.

Seventeen Russian tourists visiting a spa in the Caucasus were hospitalized after a nurse accidentally administered hydrogen-peroxide enemas, and a Japanese urologist noted an increase in "vaginal ejaculation disorder, or an inability to ejaculate inside the vagina," among Japanese men, crediting it to "incredible progress made in masturbation goods." British scientists announced that it would soon be possible to convert female bone marrow into viable sperm cells, hastening the obsolescence of men.

Carla Bruni - Ooh La-La

Mon Dieu!

Ladies and gents, mon amis, I give you the first lady of France.

Mrs. Huckabee or The Lump ain't got nuthin' on her. I guess we'll have to elect Barack Obama just to keep up with the hotness factor.

Barack Obama Music Video

I'm not quite sure what to make of this.

I do know that beyond wil.i.am, Scarlett Johansen, John Legend and Herbie Hancock; I don't recognize anybody in this video.

Maybe that's a good thing. Anywho, here it is...

No Joy in Mudville

I hate dynasties. I hate the Yankees, The Buckeyes, (sorry Mr. Reed) and the Bushes.

And now I hate the Patriots. When a team or person becomes so cocky and is sure that they DESERVE to win any given game, there is nothing sweeter than when their hopes are dashed on the rocks and they lose. In the words of Nelson Muntz...ha,ha.

Herewith, I give you this lovely little piece from the Boston Globe this morning.

And I'll also provide a little story from ancient mythology as to why one should avoid these feelings of hubris.