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.