( 10:02 PM )
In The Waiting Line
Random ramblings....
Alan Simpson just got upset with Sen. Barbara Boxer on Larry King Live (I'm a publicist damn it. I suffer for my art!) for talking about Californian soldiers who died in Iraq. What Al? We can't even TALK about the people who've died there? I guess if we don't discuss them, then nobody will notice that we're still sending them there to die for no good reason.
Marc Cooper reminds me it's not cool to cheer for the Cuban team in the World Baseball Classic. To be honest though, I was hoping the Cuban team would win because they don't have any MLB players on their roster, not because of Castro or communism or anything.
Since I'm basically the shop steward at my office and a constant critic of big corporate whores, I was following the recent NFL negotiations closely. And I'm psyched that the players got the better end of the deal, netting 59.5% of the revenue sharing when the owners were offering 54% (the players were asking for 60%). Of course there were other factors involved, but that's what I call a negotiation!
Lastly - once again I've been influenced by TV to buy some music. This time it was something I heard in an HBO comp ad for all of their generally great series. The music was this dreamy, mellow groove with a female vocal. I heard it 2 weeks ago, went to HBO's site and couldn't find anything about it and then moved on. But I heard it again over the weekend and listened closely to the lyrics - "do you believe in what you see." I typed the lyrics into the Goog and out came Zero 7. Yes - I am a sucker for audio suggestion and I'm not proud of it. But my ear knows what it likes and I liked this piece of electronica immediately. Check out the vid for "In The Waiting Line" that MTV probably never played here.
Nine to five
Living lies
Everyday
Stealing time
Everyone's taking everything they can
Everything they can
Everyone's taking everything they can
Everything they can
Woooohh
Do you believe
In what you feel
--Zero 7
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1 comments
( 10:29 PM )
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
You know, when one of your favorite things to blog about is politics and you decide that you probably shouldn't blog about politics anymore because so many other people do it better than you, then it takes away part of your reason to blog. But for some unknown reason, I've been stubborn about continuing my postings here and I'm beginning the realize that it really doesn't matter that other people do it "better" than I do. So as I've said a few times before, if you're looking for political insight, you should probably find a "real" information source. But on the other hand, you could do a lot worse than me.
For instance, I've been on the impeachment bandwagon since February 2004. It turns out, it really wasn't as outrageous a thought as it may have seemed. First, Bob Fertik and David Swanson formed ImpeachPac.org to get the proceedings started, then Rep. John Conyers gave the bandwagon a good kick from behind. Next, The Nation saw the necessity of removing the criminal who runs the country from office, and then other media outlets - like Harpers, the Wall Street Journal, Alternet and the Progressive - echoed or reported on that sentiment. Cities in Vermont, Minnesota and San Francisco have passed resoultions demanding a return to the rules of law set forth in the Constitution. Remember how book stores were flooded with anti-Bush books a couple of years ago? Look for the same flood to come this summer with numerous books about impeachment (starting with the Center for Constitutional Rights). And now even a US Senator, Russ Feingold, has taken the timid baby step of calling for the censure of Bush even though Feiny admits Bush's crimes are "in the strike zone" for impeachment (listen, most of the Democrats are big pussies who are more concerned with the political fallout than the principles of law. So it's a huge step.).
All of which got me to thinking. Am I a pundit pioneer? Well, no. I was just hoping/dreaming and got the reasons for throwing the bum out kinda wrong (yeah, yeah - torture, spying, lying to Congress are good reasons, but my favorite is still for failure to uphold his oath of office because he's a complete failure/incompetent/nincompoop - see the execution of the Iraq war or the Hurricane Katrina debacle). It's a slow ride down the impeachment trail, but the best and most important journeys start not with a quick arrival to the end, but with one small step.
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.
--Bob Dylan
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0 comments
( 12:38 PM )
Pandora's Box
My favorite website for the past week has been Pandora.com. It's more or less a streaming music site that lets you tell it what songs and artists you like to listen to, then it plays those songs and recommends similar music. The catch is the recommendations are not based on the genre of music you're into, but on the sonic qualities that you seem to like. So liking the Replacements "Nightclub Jitters" might segue into some Miles Davis, or my telling Pandora that I like Concrete Blonde resulted in Pandora playing Orchards & Vines "In The Darkness" because "this track features electric rock instrumentation, acoustic and rock instrumentation, electric rhythem guitars" female vocals and other similarites identified in their "music genome project"". Check it out if you have some time and want to try to discover something you haven't heard. (One note though - don't skip too many songs because their license only allows them to play a limited number of songs an hour. So too many skips will force you to listen to all of the bad stuff that sometimes comes up.)
Sweet Pandora
Good-like aura
Smell like a flora
Open up your door-a for me
--Aerosmith
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1 comments
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