"We just set up the equipment. Everybody got high. And stuff would happen" - Jerry Garcia

Interview with Jerry Garcia about the Acid Tests and the early history of the Grateful Dead:

Happy 100th to Albert Camus (1913-1960)

As one of millions who works in a job whose rewards are not always immediately apparent (except on payday), I've often found the last lines of The Myth of Sisyphus a useful mantra in the midst of a complicated spreadsheet or the middle of a long meeting:

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." (La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d'homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.)

Lou Reed 1942-2013

The topic of this post is "old news" of course in the era of Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter, but out at lunch today I passed a plastic red The Village Voice box and saw Lou Reed's face staring out at me on that old medium, ink on paper. I used to subscribe to the Voice back in the Seventies when it was much more "content heavy" (to use an awful 21st century concept) and there was compelling writing and art in it every week. Now I rarely pick it up for free, but this week's is an exception, so grab the Oct 30-Nov 5 issue if it's still available around you.  It's filled with reviews from the Voice archives of Lou's concerts and albums, including a long 1989 Tom Carson review of New York that's worth a search for this issue. That and the cover, with the line from Halloween Parade at the bottom ("This Halloween is something, to be sure / Especially to be here without you"), which is suitable for framing.

The Word of the Day is (once again) "Terrorism"

Is there any doubt that a person with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a semi-automatic rifle entering an international airport to kill as many TSA agents as possible should be labeled a terrorist? Apparently there is, because I saw the ABC news story about this murderer tonight and have been looking at many other videos online and I have yet to see any reporter refer to this "shooter" or "gunman" or "assailant" or "suspect" or "perpetrator" as a "terrorist".

Is there any doubt that the t-word would be used immediately if the LAX shooter's name were Abdul Muhammad rather than Paul Anthony Ciancia and if he were carrying a Koran rather than a note that included references to Janet Napolitano and the New World Order and talked about how he wanted to attack TSA officers and "instill fear into their traitorous minds"?

This is about more than language, and it's a pattern. Here's a link to a post from February 18, 2010 about another white male Christian terrorist suicide bomber who flew his plane into a building containing an IRS office in Texas. He, of course, was not a "terrorist" to the government or the press, but simply a troubled 53-year-old businessman with tax problems. Why? Simply because his name was Joseph Andrew Stack III rather than Mohammed Atta. But if we don't use the word terrorism for terrorist acts carried out by our home-grown murderous right-wing nuts, then we shouldn't use it for anyone. It becomes a word devoid of meaning.

Close Down the GOP! (their website is buggy)

On a whim, or out of an excess of masochism, I made my way over to GOP.com this afternoon and started clicking on random annoying pages and links.  When I "decided to contribute" and pressed the appropriate virtual button, I got stuck on the following blank screen with its frozen progress bar:

GOP.com on Internet Explorer, 25 October 2013

Based on the logic that they've applied to the growing pains of Healthcare.gov in its first month of operation, their political party needs to be shut down until they can get this fixed. At the very least, based on their party chairman's logic about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the GOP needs to fire Reince Priebus.

~~~

In the interest of fairness, I should point out that the frozen screen up above that appeared in two tries with Internet Explorer was solved with a quick switch to Google Chrome where I was able to "donate" to the party of the rich and their dupes. But these complex interactions between browsers, operating systems, etc., are indicative of some of the growing pains the Obamacare site  is experiencing too. They will be fixed.

Or maybe it's just a state of mind...

I just took This Quiz and discovered that I should be living 3,000 miles away in "relaxed & creative" Washington State rather than in "temperamental & uninhibited" New York. 

Take it yourself, though I do think it should take more account of regional differences within states. I'm living in a very relaxed & creative part of New York.

The Quote of the Day Is About Thomas Pynchon

There is a brilliant review by Michael Chabon of Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in the new issue of The New York Review of Books. There's a lot in his commentary on this book I finished reading a week ago that makes me want to drop what I'm reading now and go back and start reading Pynchon again immediately (and when you do read Bleeding Edge, I highly recommend turning around immediately and reading the first paragraphs as soon as you've let the final page sink in).

But here's Michael Chabon's sentence that caused me to drop The Review and fire up Blogger:

Everything means something, or nothing means anything, and as in every Pynchon novel what can be found is not solution but the grace of moments spent suspended between those certainties.

Pynchon's books are the only ones that I religiously buy and start reading on the day they appear, but I've never seen the appeal of these novels summed up as well in a single sentence.

And the Chabon review will give you a slightly better idea of what you're in for than the official Penguin promotional video...


And with Bleeding Edge shortlisted for this year's National Book Award, I'd love to see it win just to see who (if anyone) would accept this year. Would that person be able to match Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech in 1973 in place of Richard Python?

"Strategy of Distraction" Update

Not only is the Fox/RNC/Teabag outrage over the WWII Memorial closing a manufactured distraction, but it's a lie too: http://t.co/dHXCIZQoog
— TrueBlue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) October 16, 2013

When the histories of this continuing GOP shutdown of the government are written, the view from the Right will continue to put "Obama's closing of the WWII Memorial" in a central place in their Fair and Balanced version. Not only is this a minor distraction from a major government shutdown caused by a quixotic Tea Party quest to defund the Affordable Care Act, as I wrote on October 4, but their storyline about WWII vets being prevented from entering their memorial on the National Mall is not even true, as reported in Politico today:

Republicans have turned the National World War II Memorial into the government shutdown’s poster child.

But there’s one big problem with their protest: Veterans streaming into Washington to see the monument don’t really face any obstacles in their visits, and many complain that they are being used for political gain.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/how-much-of-the-gop-spin-about-angry-vets-is-true-98362.html#ixzz2htg8OMcI

2016 GOP Clown Circus Update: The Nuge!!

OK, I haven't updated my 2016 GOP Clown Circus Casting Couch posts lately, but I couldn't help noticing this headline from CBS Detroit:

Ted Nugent Cuts His Hair, Hints At Presidential Run

Please, please do it! Although if his competition on the Clown Circus stage includes Rafael Edward "Calgary Ted" Cruz and Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann, this gun nut may come off as the sane one.

The Patron Saint of the Tea Party

As the lemmings with suicide vests are in the process of flying off the cliff in this third week of the GOP shutdown, it's important to look back at the forerunners of those who are currently waving Confederate flags in front of a black family's house in Washington DC. Specifically, we can't help thinking of March 23, 2003 every time we see the word socialist spelled "scholiast", or fields of waving yellow snake teabag flags, or a tricorner hat festooned with teabags.

On March 23, 2003, in the midst of nationwide demonstrations against the Iraq War, one unnamed flag-bandanna-bedecked Urteabagger and future meme confronted hundreds of antiwar protesters outside a Boeing missile factory and gave us the creatively-spelled sign that would launch thousands of imitators as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated.

From a Google image search on the word "Morans"

Mr. Get-A-Brain!-Morans deserves to be the Patron Saint, or at least the Unknown Soldier, of the modern Tea Party.