Month: January 2006

Another chapter in America’s quest to de-sex its teenagers: Georgia is set to approve a law that would make a 14-year-old who has consensual sex with a 13-year-old — a freshman and an 8th-grader, in other words — guilty of an aggravated sexual offense and would require a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison. Geez.

Yet another entry in the People Who Share My Name But Most Certainly Are Not Me Dept.: “Josh Benton is truely the *BEST* experience in my life… But yet the worst at the same tyme.”

Here’s my story from page 1 today. It’s my small contribution to the big Abramoff/lobbying story in Washington. Featuring organized crime at racetracks, a Syrian nicknamed “The Fat Man,” the Iranian government, and a near-death Elvis Presley.

A music video for Grandaddy’s “Jed’s Other Poem,” made entirely on an Apple II with 48k of RAM.

Does any one in the Dallas area have a digital camcorder I could borrow? Would be much appreciative!

Best school bus crash ever. (Don’t worry, no one seriously hurt.)
Did you know: When some punk stole some of Sonic Youth’s equipment in 1999, it meant that the band could never play the song “Eric’s Trip” again, since live performance required a special old Drifter guitar that was part of the heist. In related “Daydream Nation” trivia (and man, what a good album that is): The final part of the final track, “Eliminator Jr.,” is meant as a tribute (or something) to ZZ Top’s guitar sound.
A 1989 prediction of what computers would be like in the year 2001. Some pretty good calls, actually, although it’s funny to think back to a time when people thought the fax machine would the center of our distributed lives. Notice no use of the word “Internet,” although “ISDN” is essentially a placeholder for the term.

My column ran in today’s paper.
For some reason, though, my name was nowhere attached. It ran under the name, email address and mugshot of my colleague Holly Hacker, temporarily rendering me significantly more attractive. (And less bearded.) Hmm…perhaps the paper is trying to tell me something?
(The name thing has been corrected online. The column’s about sleep. Zzzzzzzzzz.)

This is awesome: MP3s of Janet Greene, the right-wing answer to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the 1960s. She was hired by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade to, you know, get the kids excited about fighting Big Red.
The songs are terrific in their awfulness. Take Poor Left Winger (lyrics here): “I’m just a poor left-winger / Befuddled, bewildered, forlorn / Duped by a bearded singer / Peddling his Communist corn / In the Café Expresso / Sounds of guitars could be heard / Twanging a plaintive folk song / Spreading the Communist word / Hair hung around his shoulders / And sandals were on his feet / His shirttail was ragged and dirty/ Making the picture complete.”
Plus other golden hits like “Comrade’s Lament” and “Commie Lies”!
The best part is the guys paying Greene thought she was playing ’60s folk — this is mainline ’60s Nashville country.

The new Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, is very good. It’s a six-CD set of the live sessions from which were drawn Live/Evil, in my mind easily the best electric Miles album.
As the Amazon review (written by Dallas’ own Robert Wilonsky) puts it: “This is where Miles Davis turned funk into jazz, rock into soul, and chaos into Beauty…He rocked harder than Sly, got funkier than J.B., and turned jazz inside out, slicing the music open till blood spilled on to the floor.”
I got turned onto that album around 1994, when I was roommates with L. — probably the smartest guy I’ve ever met, despite his copious appetite for illegal substances. He’s now a big-time physicist who studies things like “injection and transport of interstellar pickup ions in the solar wind” and “space plasma particle instrumentation including time-of-flight spectrometers and ion optics.” He’s the mac-daddy.

How to install The Complete New Yorker on a hard drive. (Instead of forever swapping DVDs.)