This is kinda cool, if you’re a Texas music fan - Hayes Carll and RWH doing Chickens together. The sound sucks like most any live camcorded deal.

It sucks that a real professional music video is too expensive anymore. I kinda just wish they’d put up the pro version of the song under their smiling mugs. That’d suit me.

More fun - I’m 99.98% sure that this is Texas’ John Evans at the Waffle House. Probably everybody knows this, anyway:

One of the few Beck videos you can embed. Watch for Jack Black:

I think young Beck is a musical genius - he got the dubbed-in / sampling / electronic stuff ten years before anybody. But I also understand that my tastes are not necessarily popular.

Check out Devil’s Haircut, Where It’s At, Think I’m In Love, and of course, the ever-famous Loser.*

* Love the Mexican death-head wrestling mask jumping jacks in the cemetery!

Francis Poretto has a genius for distilling my fears and worries down to their essence:

The great challenge for freedom-loving Americans in our time is as it was: to find a countermeasure to the special-interest dynamic that has destroyed limited Constitutional government and put every self-supporting, self-respecting one of us at the mercy of the activists. Your Curmudgeon has no ideas he hasn’t had for a decade. The activists have grown exponentially more rapacious as time has passed, and the trend shows no sign of decelerating. We need a breakthrough, and we need it pretty damned quick.

Pray.

Yeah, what he said.

Oh, yeah - that numb tingly hand…carpal tunnel, per the doc. That explains partly my reluctance to keep chunking up tons of verbiage here. I guess one day I can get used to, as I read somewhere, my hand feeling like it belongs to a guy in another county. Meanwhile, I’ll wear this $35 splint that’s supposed to relax the wet stuff impinging on the tunnel that is carpal.

The bad thing is that this truly minor annoyance is seriously affecting my judgment about life in general. I’m wondering if, when the loss of sensation in two fingertips is driving me to distraction and crazed obsession, what happens when something really crappy happens? I’ve lived in my body too much, deriving too much pleasure from it and what it can do/tolerate. Well, could do, anyway. I’m still a long way from decrepitude, I think, but crap. I don’t really want to live with naught but this recalcitrant, noxious, pontificating, boring-in-every-way brain only. I guess that’s the end of the road, though, ain’t it? You and your idiot brain.

Yes, I’ve had a couple of toots of Jameson & Sons. Irish whisky sooths me a little. Stupid, ain’t it, that a couple of numb fingers cause this much angst, but you know, those fingers have been good to me for 47½ years, and now they desert me? And where’s the loyalty, Wrist? I built all you bastards up from nothing, and this middle-management white-collar desertion is the thanks I get? Fine, fine…I’ll pound you into bloody submission on this keyboard, and you’re going to end up burnt off by a hot dutch oven, but you won’t be able to blame me, because I tried.

I don my mantle once more and wade in over at Dick Stanley’s joint. Dick has the best of me since he’s got the article in question, while I’m kind of dancing in the dark, but at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s fair to use some kind of vet stereotype, perputated lo these many years by Hollywood, as an argument against McCarthy’s book or the film that flows from it. It’s a singularly useless prism to deploy, in this case, in my opinion.

I’m getting spam text messages on my phone.

If I may be so bold as to appropriate the name - Otis, KM, Senator, The Roman, Barndog, etc. Kind of…extending the brand.

*ahem*

JD comments on Blood Meridian. You can read my comments there.

I’ll have a book review up soon. Actually, a trilogy review. I even read them in a row.

I had no idea there was a video for this:

Lord, how many times did I see that live. No way to know. But it was always many G&Ts before they played it, every time.

Here’s a cleaner, tighter Rev…

I’m sure he’s still touring?

05/18/08 San Antonio, TX White Rabbit Nashville Pussy

Works for me. That would be a fun show for an old fat cowpunk. I’ll be the oldest motherscratcher in the room, but that’s OK.

I have no idea how I wandered into this…I hate the internets.

Sometimes, you read something that just makes you stop and say to yourself, Did I just read that?

(While the Chinese government need not stand for popular election, it generally tries to reduce sources of popular discontent when it can.)

They are the RED CHINESE. CHI-COMMS. Remember? They “reduce sources of popular discontent” by jailing or killing those who might be discontent. Christ almighty. We’re not talking about your basic benevolent monarchy that allows democracy to take root and flourish. We’re talking about Long March / Cultural Revolution stone Commies here.

We can all sit around and pretend they’re not real Communists, and buy their clothes and their cheap furniture, and let them hold the Olympics, but — they’re Commies. Commies kill their ‘discontent’ every damn day. Everybody seems to forget this, and it makes me spitting mad that James Fallows and the Atlantic magazine can only parenthetically acknowledge this on page four of a long-ass article. Well, I’m probably the only one bugged by it, so screw me.

Why in the hell can’t I find a can of Bon Ami in San Antonio?

They say they sell it at the hometown favorite* HEB, but I’ve tried three stores with no luck. I’m reduced to something called Bar Keeper’s Friend. What-effin’-ever. Next trip to Dallas, I’m buying a case of the good stuff, man.

* It pretty much sucks having one dang grocery store to go to. This town could use some competition outside of the Wal-Mart firing at ‘em, but the grocery business is as low-margin as the bar biz or the restaurant biz. Why bother? All these folks are trained to go to HEB, just like they keep eating Bill Miller’s crappy BBQ. The company town aspect of this city is one of the very few drawbacks. C’est la vie, huh? Could be lots worse.

Tom asks how much “Can you really say that today’s projection equipment is as good as what they had back in 1959?” A question that deserves some serious study, I say…

This is horrible:

From smokin’-hot hubba-hubba to The Wire-level dope-fiend.

Via Frank…

There’s just something creepy about state-compelled cheerleading.

Hopefully, they’ll at least have a momma put out a hit on her daughter’s competition. Meantime, give me the pick of the litter:*

Via Tom McMahon, who always has cool stuff…

* Anyone remember that?

Jesus H. Christ on a pogo-stick:*

Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored.

Clearly, there is a mental illness that grips you when you have that many significant digits to the left of the decimal point in your bank account. “Oh, all the natural laws that allowed to me amass a fortune undreamed of by even Scrooge McDuck in the funny papers can be repealed on the say-so of…me.”

Or maybe it’s his esposa, browbeating him about the umpteenth 6 ft.-wide plasma flat screen. Who knows? Fucking lunatics, all running the world, sitting around Davos, spending gajillions to talk about revising capitalism with their lunatic gajillionaire friends. Talk about pulling the ladder up behind you.

Throw me a million, bub…I’ll give you a revision. Sure I will. Just as soon as I knock out this change to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

NB: Alan Sullivan demolishes this dipshit way of thinking:

The Third World does not need technocratic paternalists. It needs home-grown leaders who value the common good above personal pelf, and who build polities where private property is secure. Then and only then, people will lift themselves from poverty; they need no help from Bill Gates.

When and why did the dopehead Heath Ledger acquire the Mantle of Unmockability?

On his radio show yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson responded to ThinkProgress’ criticism of his comments mocking the death of Heath Ledger, saying that it was just “a little Brokeback Mountain joke” and there is “no point in passing up a good joke.”

Without offering any sort of apology, Gibson defended his callous comments by claiming that “for months and months and months,” his show has consistently made fun of the line, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Brokeback Mountain. “I’m not giving that up,” exclaimed Gibson:

I’ve been driving back and forth to Laredo for the last few days, and for most of that, the radio is on, and I have to hear, on the hour and half-hour, news reports about the latest details of this jackass’ self-imolation. For two freaking days, for 10 hours of driving — that’s 20 GDMFSOBing news reports about the pill-popping dumbass.

That right there is what’s wrong with America — the idea that such a thing is news. How many other dopeheads, all across America, died on Tuesday of an overdose? Or in a wreck caused by their drunkenness? I don’t know, because I didn’t hear about any others…just this schmuck. Like all decent people, I mourn every untimely death, but just because the dude could recite lines, had some good looks, and made enough money to indulge his habit out of sight of the rest of the world doesn’t shield him from mockery. C’mon now, people.

Wonder what the reaction from the Grief Machine would have been if he’d died in a gun accident?