"I’ve been in a car with Joni. Joni was driving a Lincoln. Excellent driver. I felt safe.”

Over at the Vanity Fair site, check out this fairly incredible "Harper's List"-style compilation of various facts about Bob Dylan's celebrated XM radio show, featuring motifs, themes and, best of all, bons mots from the man himself (my favorites are “The Harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.", and the musings on Joni Mitchell's driving skills that I used as the title of this post but, really, almost every one of them is worthy of Jack Benny - why doesn't he (Dylan, that is) write lyrics that are this funny anymore?). I've never heard Dylan's show before, mostly because I don't get XM in my car (which is where most of my radio-listening gets done these days). I do get XM through my cable provider, but that means (I think) that I can only get it through my TV. I suppose that relaxing on my living room couch and paying close attention to the sounds spilling out of the receiver - consuming radio as though it were television, that is - would be an appropriately old-timey way to approach Dylan's show, which seems pretty proud of the ways it wallows in the pre-rock 'n' roll/country/blues/jazz/etc. muck and mire ("50% the songs he has played were recorded before 1960.").

The Reality-Based Community Strikes Again

Ah, DailyKos...

Obama was born with his sun in Leo, and his story exemplifies the quest of the Solar Hero. His father, who joins with his mother on an island, conceives a child, and soon thereafter leaves the child and mother to continue his own journeying. Obama, a 'special 'child, left to create his own internal image of 'father', and related meanings of strength, protection, leadership, etc.

I will admit, though, that as a Clinton-hater and a fan of Ray Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans, I did like the "Hillary as Medusa" metaphor.

Song of the Day (4.7.08)

Kinda sucks that whoever posted this couldn't be bothered to make his own video or AMV or anything, but its a sign of how good we've got it in 2008 that I'm even complaining: I spent most of the later half of the 1990s combing through miles of vinyl in dollar bins all over Wisconsin looking for stuff like this, just so I could hear it once. If someone had told me that, in the near future I'd have more or less immediate access to any Italo disco (or Swedish hardcore, or girl group, or black metal, or 70s AM Gold, or wax cylinder, or whatever) song I could think of via the same machine that I wrote term papers on, I'd have about wet my pants in anticipation. So it is with great pleasure and only slightly moist nether regions that I present to you Mr. Flagio's "Take a Chance." Enjoy!

Vive le Resistance!

Londoners gave it a shot yesterday, but Parisians set the standard today for anti-Genocide Olympics havoc.

Paris' Olympic torch relay descended into chaos Monday, with protesters scaling the Eiffel Tower, grabbing for the flame and forcing security officials to repeatedly snuff out the torch and transport it by bus past demonstrators yelling "Free Tibet!"
The relentless anti-Chinese demonstrations ignited across the capital with unexpected power and ingenuity, foiling 3,000 police officers deployed on motorcycles, in jogging gear and even inline skates.
Chinese organizers finally gave up on the relay, canceling the last third of what China had hoped would be a joyous jog by torch-bearing VIPs past some of Paris' most famous landmarks.

Good work! Chapeaus off to every one of 'em! Not everyone was pleased, however.

Pro-Chinese activists carrying national flags held counter-demonstrations.

"The Olympic Games are about sports. It's not fair to turn them into politics," said Gao Yi, a Chinese doctoral student in computer science.

...as he waved the national flag in a counter-demonstration. What's the Mandarin word for irony?

Stamp Out Wackiness!

I guess religion really does poison everything.

An opposite gender dress-up day at an elementary school in Reedsburg raised the ire of a Wisconsin Christian radio group Friday morning, and the district was flooded with calls from outraged listeners.

Students in Pineview Elementary had been dressing in costume all week as part of Wacky Week, an annual tradition at the school. On Friday students had the option of attending school dressed as senior citizens or members of the opposite gender. After a local resident informed the Milwaukee-based Voice of Christian Youth (VCY) America Friday, the radio network interrupted its regular schedule at 10:30 a.m. for a special broadcast that aired on nine radio stations throughout Wisconsin decrying the dress-up day and accusing the school district of promoting alternative lifestyles.

"We became aware of this from constituents in your area. Anything that concerns the populace is important enough to talk about," [some douche] said in an interview Friday. "This is tax-funded — this is not a dress-up party in somebody's house. There are parents, taxpayers … who do not appreciate the imposition of a particular lifestyle being portrayed as a normal lifestyle for the kids."

Ugh. Religion apparently poisons reading comprehension as well: the 'particular lifestyle' in question was not being portrayed as normal - it was a part of Wacky Week! It was portrayed as being wacky! If anything, the National Center for Transgender Equality should've complained! But I suppose this kind of thing is to be expected. After all, its only right and just that a school in southwest Wisconsin should bow to the whims of some obscure sect 132 miles away in Milwaukee - local control and all.

(Actually, where's the AARP on this one? That kid on the left seems to be perpetuating many of the most hurtful stereotypes of the elderly - physically infirm, dementia-addled, eyesight ruined from too many episodes of Murder She Wrote. What with all the baby boomers slowly marching toward senescence, I'd think that the blatant ageism on display by this 9-year-old could could brew up a much bigger shitstorm! I demand action!)

Happy Beer Day!

Well it beats Love Day. And its a real holiday, too, proclaimed as such by the mayor of a great American city (well, Milwaukee):

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has proclaimed today as Beer Day, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the day in 1933 that beer sales again became legal, as Prohibition drew to a close.

April 7, 1933 saw the first blows struck against the Volstead Act. The last stake wouldn't be driven through the heart of Prohibition until later that year, and these first efforts came too late to stem the tide of lawlessness and gangsterism that is the inevitable result of such measures - back in those day, it only took a decade and a half for people to come to their senses. Nevertheless, the march of freedom is always to be greeted with celebration. If only I could think of a proper way to commemorate the occasion...