What a Difference a Year Makes

My last post was exactly one year ago. Much has changed in my life since then. As it happens, that last post was on the birthday of the woman responsible for much of that change. And one of the things she asked for, for this birthday, was a new blog posting. (I think she's mainly just tired of seeing Jose Padilla every time she opens my laptop.) How could I say no?

So, in addition to being the triumphant return of Start Drinking Coffee, this here is the triumphant return of Our Most Popular Feature, "Lyric of the Day". This one is from an album I bought around the time we were first dating, a song I used to listen to, and think of her.

Hit it boys!


Suddenly, all your history's ablaze
Try to breathe, as the world disintegrates
Just like autumn leaves, we're in for change
Holding tenderly to what remains
And all your memories, are as precious as gold
And all the honey, and the fire which you've stole
Have you running through all your red-cheeked days
Shaking loose these souls, from their sacred hiding space

Hold your heart courageously
As we walk into this dark place
Stand steadfast erect and see
That love is the province of the brave

Pushed under this expanse of bursting stars
Let this burning brightly illuminate the where we are
In this hollow that lovers' voices occupy
Let it follow that we let it free, let it fly

Breaking open the walls of this cage
Intoxicated, Oh so amazed
Much like falcons tumbling from the heights at play
Conjoined, talons engaged

Hold these hearts courageously
As we walk into this dark place
Stand steadfast beside me and see
That love is the province of the brave

--"Province", TV on the Radio

Happy Birthday, Shannon!

Love,
Rob

Andy D-word

'NewsRadio' actor apologizes for using n-word.

Since I never heard about this incident before the apology, I'm thinking washed up good old Andy Dick is just trying to generate a little publicity for himself.

Jose Padilla in the Pit of Despair

I was extremely disturbed by this story in the NY Times today. We know, of course, that Jose Padilla has not only never been tried for or convicted of any crime, but he was held for years without even being charged with a crime.

Now we see an example of how an "enemy combatant" is treated:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

What purpose could this extremity of sensory deprivation possibly serve? I mean, I can see if Padilla had mutant superpowers, like Magneto...



But, and here I'm admittedly just assuming, Padilla can't shoot laser beams from his eyes, and he can't make a sonic boom out of his ears. Is this kind of extraordinary measure needed because he's so fiercely dangerous? Doesn't sound like it:

One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.

In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”

Granted, that's Padilla's defense attorney talking. But it sounds right to me. Assuming Padilla had any fight in him when he was arrested, who would after treatment like this?

This whole sordid story reminds me of nothing so much as that famous experiment anyone who's ever taken Psych 101 will remember:



Harry Harlow showed that baby rhesus monkeys preferred "mothers" covered in terrycloth over stark wire mothers, even when the wire mothers gave them milk. They apparently needed social contact more than they needed food, even. And in a later, more radical, series of experiments, Harlow put monkeys into what he called the Pit of Despair:

Harlow placed baby monkeys in the chamber alone for up to six weeks. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed from the chamber, and most did not recover.
...
After 30 days, the "total isolates," as they were called, were found to be "enormously disturbed": two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death. After being isolated for a year, the monkeys were found initially to barely move, didn't explore or play, were incapable of having sexual relations. When put with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied by the other monkeys.

Pieces of furniture.

Candles in the Wind

So here's a site I came across today: "Who Have I Outlived?"

http://www.deadoraliveinfo.com/dead.nsf/Search.outlived?OpenForm&x=nf

My results?

Outlived Results for - September 24, 1970
You have been alive 13,213 days.
Here are your closest "competitors":
You've outlived Princess Diana by 3 days.
If you make it 2 more days, you will outlive Marilyn Monroe.

Goodbye English Rose; and I'm coming for you next, Norma Jean!

Klosed Kaptioning Funnies

I'm up much too late on a school night, having a glass of wine, listening to some weird music (Naked City's Absinthe) and surfing the web, and have Craig Ferguson's show playing on the telly, muted (because I'd had on Letterman earlier to see Michael Richardson's rather pathetic and weird apology for his recent onstage racialist tirade). I glanced up a few minutes ago and saw Christian Slater being interviewed. I guess he must be in the new movie Bobby, because he was talking about it. (Yes, my senses remain sharp even into this late hour.) So but according to the closed captioning, the movie was apparently directed by... Well, goddamn, while I was writing my clever setup, I forgot the punchline. Shit. It was a real funny corruption of "Emilio Estevez" that some crazy typist threw in there. I think it was three words. I'm pretty sure the last word was "vezz", but that wasn't the funny part. It was the first couple words that made much chuckle. Dang.

Actually, this post is a pretty accurate example of how I tell jokes in real life.

Zing! Goodnight! I'll be here all week!

Another Friday, Another Random Ten

Talking Heads-Once in a Lifetime
Big Satan-Description du Tunnel
The Thing-Sounds Like a Sandwich
Lupe Fiasco-Hurt Me Soul
Shellac-The Admiral
Kanye West-Skit #3 (I'm not sure this counts, since it's not really a song)
Naked City-I Die Screaming
Naked City-Metal Tov
John Zorn-Protocols of Zion
Kidd Jordan-Last of the Chicken Wings
Naked City-Poisonhead (extra #11, since in the last four songs, I decided Skit #3 definitely doesn't count)

Damn, that's a lot of John Zorn (Naked City being, as you all must know, one of his bands). Love Zorn, and especially love Naked City, but I'm finding that Naked City shows up ALL THE TIME on my shuffle play, since their records tend to each have like 30 songs that are mostly like 30 seconds long. And since in the recent Naked City boxset, which I just got relatively cheap at Tower's going-out-of-business sale (so long, Tower, you used to be cool), all the music was remixed (remixed = the volume was cranked way up), and since a lot of Naked City's songs start with crazy shrieking by Japanese crazy-shrieker Yamataka Eye, I've been getting my eardrums blown out on a regular basis. Thanks for that, John Zorn.

Holy shit, I just noticed that in that last tune, "Poisonhead", the barely decipherable lyrics are from Public Enemy's "Caught, Can I Get a Witness?" Awesome!

And her post before this one was about a record convention!

One of my favorite bloggers, the always-worth-reading Amanda Marcotte, has explicated the difference between "small government conservatives" and "big government liberals" in a way that I haven't seen before and that seems to me to be kind of brilliantly observed:

"I think it all goes right back to my suggestion of what conservatives mean when they say they’re for 'small' government and liberals are for 'big' government—those adjectives describe the size of the number of people that count as worthy of government attention, protection, and assistance in their view.

"If you think the number of people who matter to the government should be big and in fact should encompass all Americans, then when one person oppresses another, you think that is a matter of government attention and the rights of women, racial minorities, and gay people actually count. If you think the number of people who count is limited to rich straight white men, then racist, sexist, classist oppression is a matter of “personal” morality, and how you treat the Untermenschen is between you and your view of Jeebus."

Stupid Blogger doesn't let you easily embed links in the Safari browser so, here you go:

http://pandagon.net/2006/10/30/who-counts/

I Do Not Approve This Message

But it did make me laugh. I picked up a couple seasons' worth of Kids in the Hall DVDs recently. I loved this show when I was in college. It's more uneven than I remembered, but still good stuff. As a jazz fan, I enjoyed the following, even though it's so so so wrong.


[Bruce McCullough is flanked by two musicians, one playing flute, one bass:]

Wow. One thing I hear a lot is, people say, "Bruce, what's this with you and Jazz? What's the beef with you and Jazz music?"

I say, "Well, I really hate Jazz."

They say, "What do you hate about poor old Jazz?"

I say, "The sound. The sound that Jazz instruments make, when they're being manipulated by Jazz players, to the delight of Jazz respondents. I think of it as musical barf."

They say, "I don't think you've given Jazz a chance."

Well, I maintain, I haven't given SUICIDE a chance, but. . . Well, I did give suicide a chance. But that was only because I was threatened with Jazz. You know--jazz music.

One thing I hate? One thing I hate is being woken up in the middle of the night, when I'm dreaming about, say, promiscuity with dignity, by a rap-tap-tappin' on my window, by those guys with goatee things on their faces, saying, "Hey. Can we come in? Beano's clarinet's gettin' wet." And then they go into this sorta Gene Krupa trance.

Jazz schmazz. I'm sorry--I've got to go that far: Jazz schmazz.

You know what? I'd like to declare this a Jazz-free zone, about forty miles as far as the Jazz-hatin' crow flies in any direction. Just paradise. Those guys would go to work--and it wouldn't be there.

I'm gonna ask a question: What sort of music do you think there is in Hell? You know, H-E-double hockey sticks? Well, I think it's probably hateful, free-form Jazz.

And in Heaven? Country and Western music.

The choice is pretty obvious. It's not Jazz. It's not bop-a-dop bop-be-bop-bo Jazz.

[To flautist:] What's that? A recorder or something? I'm not into it. Fuzz pedal--that's what I'm into. You know?


Copied, and slightly edited by me, from here.