Half-Life and Times

Immediately used the present from my mother-in-law to order two tix for Concrete Blonde at the Cat's Cradle October 15. Fellow babies, I am incredibly psyched! I got completely hooked on CB and Johnette Napolitano the first time I heard God is a Bullet. I've heard people talk about Grace Slick and Chrissie Hynde and other rawk chix in trying to describe Johnette but I think she's pretty unique. If you've never heard her sing and you really need something for comparison, take Slick's voice, Hynde's rock sensibility and some early Natalie Merchant theatricality and take 'em with a couple of shots of Jack Daniels and you might be somewhere in the neighborhood. But screw that - just go listen to her belt out Still in Hollywood or Jonestown and then be very, very jealous that I have tickets and you don't! Better yet, go order some and join us!

And a birthday shout-out to my nephew Ryan, who turned seventeen yesterday! I told my sister to go ahead and push the little punk out seventeen years ago because I didn't want to share my birthday with him and thankfully she obliged. He's turned out to be a pretty cool kid, except for his execrable taste in music, so happy birthday, dude! And yeah, pigs do hate me...

Don't expect to see anything here the next few days (not that I've been exactly burning up the Internet the last couple of weeks) - doing a little vacationing with no laptops! Catch up with you cats next week...

Posted by Tony @ 11:30:00 pm |

Mexed Missages - or Debate Number 1 Aftermath

Way too much good stuff out there politically to blog about, but others have already covered it pretty well.

Josh Marshall did an excellent job of Carl Cameron-gate at Fox News - funny how no one in the wingnut blogosphere is calling for his job after publishing faked Kerry quotes on the Faux News website. Yeah, he's impartial...

And on the subject of Faux News, Atrios has the scoop on the Communists for Kerry group and the inability of Faux "reporters" to actually, like, look up a website to see that the group is an anti-Kerry group. The FoxNews site now has a correction stating that the group is, in fact, a parody group. Well, thanks.

In the meantime, the wingnuts tried to make some case for Kerry having used a cheatsheet during the debate while the lefters are convinced that Bushie has an earpiece and was being fed answers - the snappish "Let me finish!" when no one else was talking being the key clue. I can only think that if Rove was actually prompting him he would have turned in a better performance.

Via both Kevin Drum and Brad DeLong (see, there's just no reason for me to blog about this stuff!), an admission from Rummy that he sees no "strong, hard evidence" of any linkage between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

And finally, in a fit of pique over being "forgotten" by Kerry, I suppose, Poland has announced that it is going to begin pulling troops out of Iraq in January and expects to be out altogether by the end of 2005. Poland's leaving - we're screwed!

Oh, and the Carolina football team still sucks. Actually, I'm starting to think that applies to both of them...

Posted by Tony @ 9:15:00 pm |

Indy Music Awards show

Oh, my goodness gracious me! Whoever put together the show at the Art Center Saturday night (I think it was primarily Stu Cole) successfully staged one of the best nights of music I've ever heard. Not only did they recruit four of the best vocal talents in the area, they obviously intentionally got people with very distinct styles, making it one hell of a variety show. I'd planned to do a whole long recap, but it probably wouldn't mean much if you weren't there, so I'll leave it at saying that the highlights in a night of many high lights were Katherine Whalen's kickass cover of the Pretenders' Kid after a set of jazz standards, and Dex ripping the fucking roof off the building - it was very cool to look around the dance floor while he was up and seeing people from their 20's to their 60's all out shaking it.

Posted by Tony @ 9:10:00 pm |