Like we need this!

Iran's new president has gone ahead and put the crazy man hat on, calling for the destruction of Isreal. What, is he doing an intern? Trying to distract from disasterous economic realities and a scandal-ridden administration?

Excuse me? Oh, God told him to say it. Yeah, we have one of those too.

Miers out, Rove in the crosshairs, and tha W off his game

and what do I feel? It is schadenfraude? Is it righteous glee? Is it gloatious gloatfullness? Alas, it is none of these things. Becuase my country is in the crapper with 3+ years to go. We're neck deep in an honest-to-Pete quagmire in Iraq - an optional quagmire, at that - and we have all the makings of theocratic oligarchy at home. Noted perverts like Bill O'Reilly claim the high ground and the best thing the common-sense mid-left has going is Jon Stewart, who, as he frequently points out, is a comedian.

I used to be a bona fide pinko, with fashionable Lenin t-shirts and everything. This was years and years ago, in the mid-eighties, when to be otherwise was to be a Reaganite yuppie jackass. After years in the workforce and a belated college career (that, with any luck, will be coming to a successful close in December), I have arrived somewhere near the political center - a tad to the right on economic issues, and more than a tad to the left on social stuff. Religious righties scare the bejesus out of me, and knee-jerk wannabe commies are just irritating. You think consumer capitalism is oppressive? Try Stalinism. At least we get iPods!

So what's the point? I take no great pleasure in the recent and rapid demise of Bush Republicanism. I mean yeah, he's a simpleton surrounded by criminals, so I don't really feel any sympathy for Rove, Scooter, Dick and whoever else goes to jail when all is said and done. Justice will have been done. But we - you know, "the people," - will get stuck with the cleanup. Ordinary folks, the ones who live in Fernand Braudel's long durée, will have a lot of shit to shovel.

Tea Time

My minions laboring in dank solitute at Flatbed Labs have discovered the precise limits of Tea Time as relating to sweet iced tea, the only kind of tea that proper carbanoids consume. It is between 0415 and 0727 UT. This is the time that produces minumum flavanoid bruising and maximum tannic release. Please note that this is brew time, not preparation and/or consumption time. Further research should isolate proper preparation (chilling) and consumption (having me some tea). Please note that sweetening is part of the brewing process. Duh.

Adventures in Cross-Platform Living: Stupid lousy Windows file name truncation...

See, I come from Steveland - a wonderful place where file names can just about be as long as they need to be, because that's how *nixes are (up to 255 Unicode characters). And the iTunes Music Store (iTMS from here on in) is a Steveland edifice, and it's where I buy my music. Some time ago, for various academic reasons, I switched to Windows XP for my primary "productivity" platform, and MacOS became strictly a creative space. My digital audio and graphic design efforts all take place back in Steveland.

So what's the point of all this? It's this: when I moved my iTunes library over to my new PC, I spent several days re-associating songs with their files in cases where the song (file name) or album title (directory name) was too long for XP. When I copied the stuff over, XP truncated those file and directory names, but the iTunes database records were unchanged. I posted about all this before. Now, I've updated to iTunes 6 so I can buy episodes of Lost from the iTMS, and guess what? It appears to have re-broken a bunch of those linkages I spent several hours fixing. Sheesh...

Is the Bible literally true? Is the Pope Catholic?

Well, maybe not...

The Times Online is reporting that officially published Catholic documents state pretty plainly that "[t]he Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: 'We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.'" [article] Anybody who's ever read the bit where Joshua commands the Sun to stand still (Joshua 10:12) has to figure that the Bible's science is, to say the least, a bit weak - divinely inspired though they may have been, the author of this passage reflects a pre-Copernican understanding of the Solar System.

So, duh.

It's been a long time, since I left you

without a strong rhyme to step to
think of how many weak shows you slept through
time's up - sorry I kept you

That's how folks used to do! Eric B. and Rakim, from Paid in Full. Fitty isn't fit to carry Rakim's mic for him. Candy shop = candy ass!

Sorry - occasionally the weak state of Hip Hop (at least what's slathered all over radio and MTV) gets me all rant-ish. Yeah, we got Jurassic 5 and the Roots, and the Beastie's are kinda sorta still keeping it tight, but back in the day, when I was a white boy in Columbus, GA rockin' the shell-toes and disecting Run-DMC's King of Rock and LL's Rock tha Bells - the good stuff was everywhere. It was the radio and YO! MTV Raps. MCs had skills, the beats were hard and clean and everything didn't sound like a Korg Triton demo patch. Just watching Big Daddy Kane come out and lay waste to a bunch of young guys on the VH1 Hip Hop Honors was enough to remind me that yes, mainstream Hip Hop used to be more than bling and cookie-cutter beats and mumble-mouthed so-called rappers. At least Common is finally getting some.

what a week

It's been quite a week here - a synopsis:

• Flatbed Labs (my studio) moved into its new digs over at the Precinct, the decomissioned police station owned by my man Mitch in downtown ATL. We started tracking Thursday, working on demos for new weaklazyliar material. The Precinct is also home to modern hard-rock masters Dropsonic, so we have the pleasure of listening in while they do their thing.
  
• My aunt - my mom's twin sister - was given the two-week warning by her doctors. She's been fighting cancer for a while now, and complications have her back in the hospital. Prayers and good vibrations...
• I had a midterm - I am now less than two months away from finishing my educations master's degree.

So, I haven't been keeping up the gloatfest over here, as one GOP operative after another hits the skids. Will this admin end up like the Reagan White House, with over 100 indictments?

It's funky because it's true

This track may represent an oversimplification of the President's view towards people of color (the man has put together a diverse cabinet), but it sure does capture the post-Katrina Zeitgeist in a funky nutshell...

George Bush Doesn't Care about Black People (mp3) - don't know who did this, but it's based on a Kanye track.

that newfangled Buddhism

I was doing my typical high-speed channel scan last night around 10:30 when I saw some commentator on Fox News getting his knickers in a twist over Hollywood mysticism - his main concern seemed to be with Richard Gere's Buddhism and the prevalence of the Kabbala. He said something along the lines of, "Why are they all into these new religions, and what's the matter with old-fashioned religion?" My guess is he was referring to good ol' mainline Protestant Christianity, or maybe even the peculiar brand of the Gospel favored by Klansmen and some Republicans (Trent Lott to the white courtesy phone...).

Now, setting aside the fact that it's none of his effing business what Richard Gere's (or anybody else's) faith is, because of that whole free-exercise clause thing, what's laughable is that this genius didn't know that Buddhism is at least 500 years older than Christianity, and that the Kabbalah, an offshoot of Judaism, dates back to the first century AD, or CE if you're so inclined. Typical American thinking, or I guess I should say typical modern American thinking, as this country has a pretty rich and varied religious tradition, including the Deism and Unitarianism of many of our Founders and the Trascendentalist movement of the 19th Century. The current hard-right evangelical movement only thinks itself as holding aloft the standard of true American religion out of chauvinism or ignorance, willful or otherwise. Remember, folks, only the Mormons believe that Jesus ever came to the Americas.