Friday Night Fish Fry

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Or, in my case, 16-day weekend. Fuck the Prayer Meeting tonight---arf!



Just closed out the fiscal year in the lab I work for, so I'm seizing an opportunity to take 2 weeks off, end-to-end, for the first time in memory (excluding medical leave for recreational activities such as torn tendons, broken bones, and surgery).

I intend to spend most of my time off in meatspace, my preferred domain, demolishing stuff, feeding birds, pedaling a bike, and taking photos---but there are two blog "initiatives" I want to take. One is trying to get my pathetic keyword (i.e., "label") taxonomy under control---you know it's a mess when you have a couple dozen keywords with only one or two links. Keywords are supposed to help you, my most intelligent and discerning readers, navigate this site. The other effort is less trivial: making a transition to a different interpretive framework for my observation on political economy and mass culture. I have been mulling this for a long time because I've concluded that my ideas and way of expressing them become trite when accepting the default narrative frame maintained by everyone from Drudge to FireDogLake, Fox to PBS, Limbaugh to Scott Simon. Time to get asymmetrical. More soon; if not, please gently remind me. Thank you for your attention in this matter. Now please allow me to finish my homemade electrochemical chili in peace, won't you?

Seven Day Weekend, Jimmy Cliff, Elvis Costello & The Attractions (1986, from "Out Of Our Idiot," Demon Records - Fiend CD 67), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Interesting: Jimmy Cliff gets top billing on this cut. Was he still a bigger star than Elvis Costello in Thatcher-era UK? Also: on this compilation disc we learn that Elvis was the original Napoleon Dynamite (as credited on his 1982 recording of Imperial Bedroom), a full 22 years before that movie was released about the goofy kid using the same monicker, which in my opinion is slightly underrated by IMdb users (I'd give it a solid 7.3).