A quiz

Your Slanguage Profile

New England Slang: 50%

Prison Slang: 50%

Victorian Slang: 50%

Aussie Slang: 25%

British Slang: 25%

Southern Slang: 25%

Canadian Slang: 0%

What Slanguage Do You Speak?

Got this via Lauren, at Feministe

Guess which of these houses I grew up in?

Well, any guesses?

Friday Random Ten

If I have been following my blog history correctly, this tradition started here, with Roxanne. Get your mp3 player loaded with all your music, set to randomize, and then of Friday record the first ten songs it plays for you.

Here goes mine, although this is my collection at work so it's a little thinner than what I have at home (although denser with cool stuff?). Anyway:

I'm Gonna Run -- The Fiery Furnaces
Elizabeth Montgomery's Face -- The Embarrassment
Late Blues -- San Serac (from the New Believer music issue)
Insignificance -- Jim O'Rourke
Buzzards and Dreadful Crows -- Guided by Voices
Lucky Cloud -- Arthur Russell
Down By The Riverside (North American Ballads) -- Fredric Rzewski performed by Lisa Moore
Cowboy -- Harry Nilsson
This Time Another Year You May Be Gone -- Rev. Edward Clayborn
Been Listening All the Day -- Blind Joe Taggart

The last two are from American Primitive, Vol. 1, Raw Pre-war Gospel. Totally great album.

Bonus track 11 -- "Vocabulary Building" by Del Close and John Brent from How to Speak Hip

Lions rescue beaten Ethiopian girl

Uh, this is just crazy.

Salon.com News | Lions rescue beaten Ethiopian girl

Justice

I don't really know the specifics of the case, but it looks like justice has been done in Missisippi.

And let's remember that in 1980, the town where this happened is where Ronald Reagan began his bid for the Presidency. What a great guy.

Wolcott destroying all in his path

For my money, Wolcott and Berube are the best prose stylists in the lefty blogospehere.

Here, Wolcott does some sweet ass destroying. Savor.

What Are You Reading?: Big Trouble

I've got a bunch of books going at once right now, but Big Trouble, which I bought almost a year ago has finally sung out to me from the shelves and I'm really digging it. It has leapt to the top on the pile.

Only about 100 pages in, magnificent writing about class strife in the American West, 1905. Miners, railroads, private eyes, you name it. Amazingly compelling prose. Its author, J. Anthony Lukas committed suicide before the books publication. I really want to read his book about Boston's busing and school intergration fights from the 1970s.

It's Father's Day. Not much going on here. Emmett is currently napping. My dad has bypass surgery on Wednesday.

Lynching

This cartoon over at Black Commentator is pretty sweet. As a Democrat, I have to rememeber that for a long time my party was the racist party in America. Thank goodness LBJ, among all of his other flaws, ended that once and for all.

A trend

My man Jason Henderson just sent me this.

More linky goodness

My friend Mindy just sent me this at work. You shouldn't watch it if people might be looking over your shoulder. But the folks at Planned Parenthood have come up with a little animation to tell the kiddies where babies come from.

Someone links to me

OK, continuing the geeky gushing over the world of blogs, then soon I will have enough posts to kick this way down in the archives and no one will see what a dork I am.

But Sydney, over at Shut Up and Listen links to this li'l ol' blog. As I do to her. Check it, she yells at John Cole pretty good. And the she wonders if she's wrathful like Brad Pitt. Oh, but she is, you can see.

Thanks, Sydney!

Thanks to Lauren at Feministe

Uh, Amanda asked me to add a post at Pandagon for the blogathon, but Lauren is the first person in all of blogland to steer anyone my way in an unsolicited way. Super cool! Someone besides me has looked at these jottings. And I've been commenting over on her blog, the first time I've done that with any regularity.

Now, episode seven of Deadwood, Season 1!

Some more photo experimentation

The cosmos doesn't like you. I don't like you either.

Emmett

Emmett6
Originally uploaded by sadogre.

Just experimenting here. Here's the cutest little dude I can think of.

Dave Devries's Monster Engine

Man, more linky blogging! Totalyl content free!

Dave Devries's Monster Engine is super cool. I found it from here.

Hey Tim, It's Totally New

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment Audiofile

The music over at the Salon daily download is pretty good, but you get the feeling every act will end up on NPR within two years, and that, my friends, is the kiss of death. How can NPR get so many things so right, and then their music coverage seems likes it's written by someone who does all their music shopping at Starbucks and by watching the OC.

Sigh.

Phraseology hat tip to Tim, to whom many hats should be tipped.

Wow.

This article/excerpt from War: Realities and Myths by Chris Hedges is amazing.

Via James Wolcott

A guy I went to college with

It's always weird when someone you know make sit in a bigger way than you do (or have thus far). I was in a play with this guy back in Iowa in 1994. He was a good actor, but I have to say that the play we were in, our director had such a hard time working with the cast's ego, he, our director didn't come to opening night. At all. And he was a professor, not a student director. Very bad overall cast attitude, lead by the linked to guy in question. I did a good job, but had a much smaller role.

Anyway, he just spammed me to but his book. If I have any real female readers as a result of yesterday's post on Pandagon (because I had almost no readers at all before then, and no writer either), maybe it would interest you? Do you have a real body? Can a short gay man help you understand that?

I doubt he would even remember me, even though our director liked working with me more than him. So there, buddy!

Speaking of that kind of stuff, there may be news on the blog this week about some exciting acting gigs coming up for me. More later.

Summer School

This is a great idea over at Salon. Since I named this blog the Empty Collection because I buy many more books than I read, getting an inside look at people who are just now reading classics that I more than likely haven't read either will be quite entertaining.

The monsters in my personal collection that I haven't completed? Or at least the ones I feel the most immediate obligation to finish?

Don Quixote

Anna Karenina

Citizens

The Power Broker, which I was going to write about in yesterday's post--I'll be getting Amanda's copy of Can't Stop Won't Stop soonish, but from what I understand there's some in there about what Robert Moses did to the Bronx, some of which provided the the flame on the stovetop on which hiphop's pioneers cooked their jerk chicken. I actually took The Power Broker with me to the hospital when Emmett was born two years ago. It was the book I was reading at the time, but I wasn' t far enough into it to get to the really gripping, page-turning stuff. I was in the late teens, early twenties. Let's just say that early 20th century lower lever bureaucracy is not the subject matter you want to be reading about when your first child has arrived. I haven't been back to it since. Maybe later this year.

For the Pandagon community

Hey, many thanks to Amanda, my neighbor up the street for asking me to pitch in for the Amnesty Blogathon. I'm humbled to be invited to speak to the Pandagon community, especially considering the other guest bloggers actually write stuff. On their own blog. So thanks Amanda for the kick in the pants to actually write. Feel free to look around, but there's not much here right now.

OK, enough throat clearing. I'll be writing today about hip-hop. I have no idea how many regular Panadagon readers listen to it, although I guess more than listen to contemporary country. If you do like rap, let me steer you in the direction of the album that's been on constant rotation chez moi recently, Edan's Beauty and the Beat. If you like silver-era new school hip-hop (say 1988-1993), this album will slay you like it's been slaying me recently. Crackly, oblique beats and jazz samples, outer space sound effects, and shout outs to rap's founding fathers both known (Melly Mel, Kool Moe Dee, Ultramagnetic MCs) and unknown (Percee P, and the Threacherous Three MCs) make this the sweetest and most retro-innovative album I've heard in a while. His reverance earlier music makes him something like the Wynton Marsalis of hip-hop, if Wynton Marsalis were a white dude from Boston who looks like Jimmy Page, and if being the Wytnon Marsalis of any genre weren't inherently a douchey title to hold. Give it a listen.

So, the reason I'm writing about hip-hop today is not because there's a track on Beauty and the Beat called Torture Chamber, but because Amanda had a post eariler this month that's made me think about hip-hop, local and national identity, and political devisevness. I haven't read Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop, so I'm sort of going off Amanda's summation of Chang's argument. But I do think there's something upside down about the notion that the 60s consisted of a "nationwide push for a unified identity as Americans, a push that has two basic causes, one being the Vietnam War, since war tends to create a nationalized identity." From a certian way of looking at, that statement is right on. But the 60s are also the decade thats saw, as Rick Perlstein has it, the unmkaing of the American Consensus. Part of that consensus was founded on an unquestioning acceptance of racial division and a faith in the moral rightness of any American military adventure abroad. By questioning those two pieces of the consensus, the 60s blew upon a hole in American identity. The right realized there was political gold in dividing America (Nixon's quote, paraphrases "Let's tear the country in half, because we'll have the bigger half."), a poisonous coin that the Right is still addicted to.

So from my point of view, Straight Outta Compton is an extemely localized expression, but considering that I was a white kid from rural Iowa when that album came out and could absorb, if not fully appreciate, what Dre, and Ice Cube and Easy E were tallking about says something about the power of local expression to cross over to other communities. I feel NWA weren't rapping about local pride, but about local frustration about being left out of the national conversation. And I think that's what divides Americans today--the right is addicted to a narrow definition of Americaness and to maintian political power needs to feed and exploit the siege mentality felt by some of our fellow citizens. The left is more willing and able to listen to stories from comminities left out of the national conversation.

OK, thanks to Amanda and Jesse for use of the hall.

The Face Knife � Blog Archive � Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Hilarious.


The Face Knife � Blog Archive � Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Ken Mehlman

The chair of the RNC thinks lower income workers are suckers. Says they are voting against their self-interest, and that "a good thing." Just go listen.