Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

Well you don’t have to lie ‘cause I’m no fool.
I can see you don’t want my love at all.
I know... I still love you.



Here's another example from that tiny sub-genre of rockin bipolar romance-gone-bad lullabies like we shared at the previous Prayer Meeting. In my opinion, "Everybody Knows" is a real gem of pop-rock art: an irreducible kernel of universal young-adult experience (a piece of Truth, as Larry K. would say) presented in a rapidly alternating manic-depressive form, both lyrically and musically... in one minute and 40 seconds!

I really like the brash yet minimalist set used on this Shindig performance, as on many others from the British Invasion era. Probably the result of trying to make the most of a small production budget. Well done! And I have no problem with a reasonable lipsync job for a performance primarily intended for a TV audience (as opposed to the hack job The Who did at Superbowl Previous) since the studio audience was there to eavesdrop and was not the actual target audience.

I made up my very own rock trivia question based on the Dave Clark 5 (i.e., never previously heard by me). Here it is: Name the group that had two different songs of the same title on the pop charts four years apart. It's the DC5, as I say, with this tune and another one called "Everybody Knows" from 1968. The latter is completely forgettable, in my opinion, which makes this an excellent '60s music trivia question (even though I, myself, think trivia sucks). And Lenny Davidson is no Mike Smith --- I'll take a coupla lungsful of gravel versus a quart of treacle any day! (As long as they're someone else's lungs.)

Everybody Knows, Dave Clark 5 on Shindig (1964), via YouTube.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

Please don't destroy these lands.
Don't make them desert sands.



Shapes Of Things, Yardbirds live in Germany (1966). Via YouTube. Keith Relf's shirt is beautiful! I want one! He can keep the haircut, though.

Freedom Muffins?

*

In the comments thread of my most recent edition of Wise sayings, our friend from across the Atlantic, Mr. Barry Coidan, posted a preemptive and seeming defensive comment about Americans (me in particular?) blaming Brits for the super-awesome oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico. In my case that actually wasn't so, and I in fact agree pretty much 100% with Mr. Coidan's comment because let's face it: BP is not a Merrie Olde Company run by and for a jolly bunch of droll, quick-witted Limeys, but a global multinational energy corporation that is no more or less profit-crazed, ruthless, and unethical than any of the other five "supermajors" such as, say, ExxonMobil, Chevron, or ConocoPhillips. (U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!)

There's probably no news in this here Mobile Press-Register report (Mobile, Alabama, that is) about the spill that you don't already know if you're even halfway following the saga. But take a look at the comments thread, such as this one from the appropriately named "yellohamr":

The British are no better at fixing oil leaks than fighting the Germans. American will half to bail tham out of both.

Yes, perhaps the hapless Brits will half to depend on American Halliburton, everybody's favorite American oilfield services corporation, with headquarters in good old American Houston, Texas, America, to bail tham out! You remember: good old American Halliburton whose Chairman and CEO works and lives in Dubai, UAE, "to Focus [the] Company’s Eastern Hemisphere Growth." I wonder if the United States has an extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, it seems like Barry C. was justified in his prophetic defense. Americans can be expected to trade in their Freedom Fries for Freedom Muffins. Starting in the Deep South, predictably.

Wise sayings

*

Golf balls. Fucking golf balls!

Plan C (From Outer Space)

*

I guess we all can rest a bit easier tonight. According to Reuters, BP has a cunning new plan to plug their deepwater runaway gusher in the Gulf of Mexico:

"They are actually going to take a bunch of debris -- some shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that -- and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up to stop the leak," U.S. Coast Board Admiral Thad Allen told CBS News.

That's right, Ladies and Germs. Golf balls. And shredded tires, too. Sounds like a plan.

According to the Reuters report, BP also is drilling a relief well in order to stop the leak by relieving oil pressure at the well head, "but that could take three months." No, I don't feel like multiplying 90 days times 210,000 gallons per, either....

Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

*

Happy 100th birthday to the late Mary Lou Williams, who would have been very welcome in the pantheon of immortals born 2 days earlier than May 8. You can hear a bit about her from this so-so commemoration from NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, but her Wikipedia entry gives a much better impression of her place in jazz history from the early big band era well into bop, and then later, into Catholic sacred music.

The fact that she was a teacher and colleague of people like Monk, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie must speak volumes about her charisma and musical gravitas. Jazz was always an insanely macho-asshole culture, where newcomers were mercilessly humiliated in after-hour jams --- "cutting contests" --- by established musicians who had previously suffered the same way and should have known better. (Who knows how many potential giants wept, packed their bags, and took a Grayhound back to the sticks because of this pointless malevolent treatment?)

Anyhow, take a look at her portrait on the Morning Edition site --- looks like a tough lady, all business and sultry in a "forget it, Buster!" sort of way. Then listen to this oddball piece, "The Land of O0-Bla-Dee," recorded by Dizzy in 1947 (I think). Mary Lou composed the tune to accompany a ridiculous "bop fable" penned by a guy named Milton Orent (about whom I can find nothing on short notice). The lyrics are funny but surrealistically creepy, sort of like that Looney Tune from the same era where Bugs Bunny is giving Elmer Fudd Daliesque nightmares. The chart lurches along like the two ungainly sisters of the Beautiful Princess, with stutter-steps, asymmetric lines, and unexpected minor chords at the ends of verses where you'd expect majors. The melody line sounds utterly drunk in trajectory, which vocalist Joe Carroll helps to really "sell" with his delivery.



I knew this tune long before I knew Mary Lou composed it, and I never would have guessed that. It really sounds like something Dizzy would have come up with --- really not a "ladylike" sort of sound at all. And despite the hardened nightclub sexuality of the portrait at NPR, all accounts I've read of her agree that she was a very sweet and dignified lady, as she appears in the 1930s portrait shown below, before another decade of playing with some very tough customers. Happy birthday, Beautiful Princess.

Update: looks like I missed the midnight deadline by a few minutes when posting. Mary Lou's birthday was May 8, not May 9, just to be clear about things for a change.

Another update: while poking around for something else on Google I found this nifty piece about Mary Lou published on 12 September 1949 in Time. Of note: the Time says she characterized Oo-Bla-Dee as a five-course satire of the Bop genre... in 1949! Making fun of the giants!

Ecological 9/11? [updated]

*

The headline of this post employs a gimmick that I generally despise, namely the glib sensationalization of pretty much everything for the purpose of a catchy "hed." But in fact this thought is seriously occurring to me. BP is officially clueless about what to do now that the giant cofferdam* has failed to contain the gusher. Even if it had worked, I'm guessing the leak has already exceeded the size of the Exxon Valdez, and probably by a lot. Reporting I've heard about the rate of leaking have been ambiguous (i.e., conflicting or vague numbers about the leak rate), but the Alaska disaster involved about 11 million barrels gallons if I remember correctly. But, as I say, the most feasible idea for capping this thing has failed.

Now consider the reason why the cofferdam solution failed, as reported in the linked story from ThinkProgress above: frozen methane. BP had accounted for running into methane ice and had addressed it through engineering. But they found it forming either in much greater quantities or at a much faster rate than projected. Worldwide there's a lot of this stuff lurking way deep in oceans --- giant deposits of methane gas frozen into enormous slushy masses called clathrates. My senior science advisor has told me in the past that methane clathrates are pretty much benign, ecologically, unless they warm up enough to re-enter their gaseous phase and bubble up through the briny deep into our air supply. Methane, as it happens, is a much more efficient greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, meaning ton for ton it traps much more heat than CO2. And guess what can help those clathrates evaporate --- global warming! Ding! I do not know how much methane is venting from the wellhead or how long it will remain frozen in the gulf, but it's not a stretch to say that this spill may have a potentially serious impact on the atmosphere as well as the sea.

Also consider what might happen if the spreading slick were to find its way into the Gulf Stream. I don't know how likely it is that the gulf currents will take this sludge around Flordia and up the East Coast, but it certainly seems like something to be concerned about.

NIMBYism may sometimes, or often, be a hypocritical kneejerk reaction that people have against land or resource uses they would fully support as long as it's not in their back yard. But there are plenty of things that everyone has a right to expect will not happen in their back yard. What happens when a pernicious development happens in the back yard of, say, 5 or 10 or 50 million people? Here's what: Republican Governor Schwarzenegger flipflops without sweating a single bullet. And every law of politics says he was completely correct even though, uncharacteristically, it was also the right thing to do.

Finally, consider just how big this back yard really is when you take into account (1) ruined livelihoods, (2) fatal damage to coastal ecosystems and biodiversity, (3) ruined oceanfront real estate, and (4) destruction of aquaculture and seafood resources. Oh yeah: don't forget skyrocketing energy prices as the good folks at Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips and Chevron and Saudi Aramco (and, yes, BP) go for the jugular of the oil-consuming public to extract the greatest possible return on investment in this holocaust.

The real impact of September 11 for most of us (i.e., those of us who weren't killed, maimed, traumatized, or crazed with grief for someone who those things did happen to at one of the Ground Zeros) was that popular sentiment was manipulated by very bad people into support for two illegal, disastrous wars and one unitary surveillance state. And that act of terrorism --- as spectacular, amoral, and gut-churning as it was --- had no concrete impact on the vast majority of Americans (until our teenagers started killing and being killed overseas, and our civil liberties at home began slumping like a mudslide). I wonder what socio-political witches' brew might start fermenting if the dirt-cheap shrimp disappear from Red Lobster and the sunrise reflects from an oily sheen off Cape Cod.

Update: part of the ambiguity about leakage rates I noted above probably relates to the fact that the media sometimes refer to barrels, sometimes to gallons, and other times to tons. The Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons, not 11 million barrels --- my apologies. The unit conversion for 1 barrel is 42 gallons, meaning that if the leakage rate figure stated here (8th paragraph) is correct, that means roughly a quarter-million gallons ooze in each day. There are two unknowns: one is how long this will go on; the other is whether BP is lowballing the leakage rate for purposes of public appearances. So is the really a possible "Ecological 9/11"? We have to hope not, but the answer is directly related to how many "back yards" are trashed and how many bank accounts are strained as a result.
_____________________
* I get to use this word because I've actually written about cofferdams in the past... so there!

An explanation for Gurlitzer

*

She of the heading above expressed confusion about this post in the comments thread. Too much shorthand in my work there, or I should say not enough longhand.

What's The Matter With Kansas is a book by Thomas Frank that examines why social conservatives reliably have voted against their own best interests (i.e., for Republicans) for the past 40 or 50 years. Wikipedia says Franks:

finds extraordinary irony in working-class Kansans' overwhelming support for Republican politicians, despite his belief that the economic policies of the Republican party are wreaking havoc on their communities and livelihoods for the benefit of the extremely wealthy.

So do I. So I tried linking to a report about Florida Gulf Coast fishermen who were applying for jobs to help BP contain the spill, but got snookered in return for their modest honorarium of $5,000 by agreeing in the fine print to waive all future rights to attempt recovering compensation for any damage or illness that might result from their efforts. In fact, some fishermen are so desperate for cash that they signed the contract with knowledge of the reamjob. That article included slice-of-life interviews with some of the affected people.

Enter stereotyping. I usually avoid this tactic, but let's face it: the "working class" in the Gulf states looks pretty much like an ultraconservative, government-hating Republican voting bloc. Anyway, instead of trying to find the article I originally intended to link I've found another one that's more to the point: a commentary by Dana Milbank of the Post that I cribbed from Cab Drollery with a bank shot through Eschaton. Here it is, and I think it's self-explanatory: people who live in Republican states usually have the luxury of hating government and taxation for legitimate public purposes because their cynical, scumbag leaders make it so easy for them. And for some reason these selfsame states receive federal dollars well in excess of what their tax bases contribute. But when there's a crisis, by Jesus Joseph & Mary, it's the government's duty to step in and make it all go away.

I know that reality is not as simple as all that, but it kinda just makes me want to say, "Fuck you, neighbors. The federal response will address only the national-level issues related to this disaster, such as future coastal safeguards for the entire nation and a comprehensive energy policy that rapidly dis-incentivizes the use of petroleum for fuel of any kind. If you all who benefit from fisheries --- or jobs therein --- and resorts, hifalutin beachfront properties, and quaint rum shacks want some help from the federal government, then first you need to ask yourselves your favorite question: 'Who's gonna pay for it?' Answer: you will pay through a surcharge on your personal and corporate income taxes, set to take effect as soon as you want it to. Before then, not a cent... socialist swine."

Caveat: the above is somewhat slopplily thought out and authored, but I'm just too damn worn out to revise this evening.

What's the matter with Kansas? [updated]

*

Gulf of Mexico tutorial here.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Update: I pasted the wrong link into the first graf, which naturally confused everyone who clicked through. I have replaced that link to a later post explaining myself. Sorry peeps.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

"Interest A-1!" Warning: girls may want to navigate to the "My Little Pony" official site instead of clicking through to watch what he-men were made of in the 1960s.



Are the girls gone now? Good! OK, men, watching The Crusher and cousin Dick The Bruiser, "the shark of the ring" as he's referred to here, was one way a bored 1960s Chicagoland teenage boy might kill time on a Sunday morning when there were no cartoons and nothing else was happening. (Channel 26 if I'm remembering correctly.) As one announcer assures us, "That's blood, fans. That's real, honest-to-goodness blood," spoken with artfully understated hype. It was a simpler time. Really.

This is a classic lambs-to-the-slaughter tag team match. I will direct the attention of younger visitors to the quality of the ringside announcers. The commentary is quite colorful and amusing, but presented in a straight journalistic style that helped to keep us all guessing about whether wrestling was real or not. We never quite knew, although we suspected... but suspected... what?

Worst ever?

*

Atrios muses that BP may end up being credited with the worst-ever human-caused disaster. Well, I won't necessarily argue about that because it remains to be seen. But take a look at these pictures from The Boston Globe online (as seen on Eschaton, op cit.). Photos 13 and 14 do a good job of conveying the general sense of what's going on in the water and the puny human response to same.

Even ignoring Hiroshima and Nagasaki as outliers, there are some other pretty heavy contenders for the Worst-Ever Human-Caused Environmental Cataclysm Award. Chernobyl, the flower of Ukraine, would certainly be a finalist. But I think it might be hard (for the moment) to top the utter destruction of the fourth largest lake in the world in Uzbekistan, formerly known as the Aral Sea. But still... maybe we can.

U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!

Editor's note: attentive readers may notice that in yesterday's post on this topic I besmirched Russia only half-accurately as the villain behind certain apocalyptic environmental cockups. Neither aforementioned holocaust actually took place on Russian soil (conveniently for Russians), but were instead "a USSR joint." So take my inexcusable journalistic lapse with a grain of morphine.

Let's make the water turn black

*

Our finer citizens, many of whom believe that homos cause hurricanes, may need to consider how cute it is to chant "Drill Baby Drill." It's not cute: it's monstrous.

The drip drip drip of analysis (which BP surely knew two weeks ago) indicates that this disaster is on deck to be America's largest water pollution catastrophe, as projected in this NOLA Times-Picayune graph. I think Russia is still way ahead with China a natural favorite in the coming two decades, if that makes you feel any better. And anyway, don't worry: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is "losing patience," so we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So imagine the eastern Gulf of Mexico, with toxic fisheries and black, gooey beaches writhing with dying birds. Then consider the hypoxic dead zone in the northwestern gulf, made possible by petrochemical companies, agribusiness, and luxuriant suburban lawns. Heckuva job, trickle-downers. I wonder if our finer citizens will ever understand that hurricanes are not caused by homos, but by Republicans. (Volcanos, too.)

"To some it might seem creepy what they do."



(Composition by Frank Zappa for a Cousteau Society documentary, via YouTube, performed by Ensemble Modern.)

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

Heartstrings...



I always liked the bipolar nature of this melancholy Mersey beat by Gerry and the Pacemakers. It's somewhat peppier than your typical pop ballad, arrangementwise, but the string tremolos, French horns, and reedy oboe lines very effectively evoke a melancholy fugue somewhere far east of midnight. The package is subtle: its topic is fairly standard heartbreak, but the narrator speaks as a trusted advisor --- sympathetic but not sentimental, encouraging but not patronizing. Like other songs I've embedded here, this one always struck me as being Important Music. The orchestration was a factor in that assessment, but there was more to it than that. It was a nontrivial treatment of an emotion that I was fully capable of, uh, emoting for a member of the opposite camp without all the accompanying complications of hormones. (It charted when I was in 6th grade, I think.)

Watch this performance now because it was pulled down a month or two ago for reasons I certainly don't approve of and therefore hold in contempt. I don't know the provenance of the clip, but it's just cool. Check out the nice Mondrian-inspired set, which is shown wide two or three times. This is definitely not a lipsync of the record. Possibly it's a live-in-studio clip, but it might be a lipsync of a prerecorded original performance specifically for the program. The chamber orchestra may have been present in the TV studio, or the band might be playing to the accompaniment of a prerecorded orchestra (bandsyncing, so to speak). Anyway, the performance is a little raw around the edges, which I like. The occasional tempo problems don't bother me at all because they lend authenticity, making it seem possible that some producer actually went through the expense and difficulty of throwing umpty-nine musicians together in a room for a live TV performance to entertain a mob of frenzied teenage girls one day in 1965.

I don't consider this a glitzy, over-rehearsed production number, but just a down-to-earth British Invasion band from Liverpool playing with a pickup orchestra to recreate the feel of the vinyl studio recording for an audience because someone actually cared. Gerry's guitar and the electric piano sound sincerely grimy, without cheapness, backdropped and framed in the ambiance of 19th century orchestral romanticism. Luxuriate in it.

Reality really *does* have a liberal bias

*

Here's a concept called "epistemic closure," which I first heard of in a Paul Krugman blog post the other day. I'm glad to see this being talked about in mainstream media in serious, clinical terms rather than the usual flummoxed mockery that most of us are forced to resort to. The post spins off from another one by a guy named Jonathan Bernstein, which you can read here, but I think Krugman makes the point more accessible without even acknowledging FOX News and the like. Krugman sees epistemic closure every day in elite university culture --- in the field of economics, to be specific:

It’s been painfully obvious since the crisis broke that people at Minnesota, or even many people at Chicago, have no idea what New Keynesian economics is all about. I don’t mean they disagree, or think it’s garbage, they literally have no idea what the concepts are. And that’s why they reinvent 80-year-old fallacies when they try to discuss the subject.

The postmodern conservative separation from reality, whether in the Senate, or the corporate infotainment universe, or the freshwater school of economics (i.e., Friedman and the Reaganomics he spawned), is deliberately sustained by simply shunning any information that does not originate with like-minded people. Ironically, this anti-reality bias destroys one of the sacred free-market shibboleths: the "marketplace of ideas."

On the one hand I find this development quite chilling to contemplate. On the other hand, I think that the mechanics of de-evolution and decadence will take care of this species of hominids (homo ignoramus) well before mid-century. That's the good news; the bad news is that the world suffers immeasurably more than it really needs to in the interim.

So, as in all other things, Stephen Colbert is right.

It's Bedtime!

*

So get back to in bed right now and I really, really don't wanna hear another peep outta ya!



Credit where due: I copped it from YouTube via BoingBoing. They all copped it from somewhere else, however.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

Apropos of Earth Day No. 1, which I deliberately avoided commemorating until today:



This mellow Spirit number may be a bit old for even a precocious 59er to have fetished in 1970, but I remember the sounds, sights, and scents of the odd little hippie dungeon Fred's disinterested parents allowed him to construct in the basement. The room started out as a sort of studwall-framed CB radio shack, but was readily upgraded to alternate uses soon after I saw Easy Rider, bought my first pair of railroad stripe bell bottoms, and scored a nickel bag in the middle of the street during broad daylight in a Chicago suburb called Markham. I don't exactly remember the story of Fred's "evolution" at that point. But the important thing was that he tacked fake walnut paneling to the retrofitted basement studwall and we spent plenty of spare hours there listening to "underground" rock, including this song, gazing at blacklight posters illuminated by genuine ultraviolet tubes, and taking aromatherapy so to speak.

I don't know if there's any direct connection between the first Earth Day and "Nature's Way," but Wikipedia says that Spirit began recording the Dr. Sardonicus album in April 1970. I'm guessing yes.

15 minutes of fame

*

If Andy Warhol were alive today he would have to retract his overquoted epigram, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well, since he ain't and I am, I'll tell you why.

I've been mystified by the encroachment of Facebook into the lives of pretty much everyone under 30 and a shocking number of people over that age. I'll allow for the possibility that social media could possibly serve some minor constructive purpose in postmodern society even if I can't tell you what that would be. My best take on it has been that Facebook exists for people who want to star in their own reality show; people who understand that the only rule for becoming famous is to become well known. Social networking technology provides such people with a powerful, cannibalistic multimedia "platform" that they can use to dedicate their lives to collecting "friends" and "fans." For the mass of them, I will say, stereotypingly, the quest for said friends and fans involves relentless online disclosure of every thought fragment that causes three synapses to fire. And between those events, there's a world of fun to be had trolling banal data streams issuing from every other fellow contestant. When everybody "follows" everybody else on the World Wide Web, then everyone is world-famous for the duration. This amounts to a shocking rebuke to Warhol's vision, which in any case was more akin to a knowing wisecrack than a profundity.

But today I learned that the world is even better for fame-seekers --- right now --- than my dystopian best guess for the future. Big Hussein Otis sent me this New York Times technical bulletin on the latest colorful timewasting trend to emerge from social networking: a cornucopia of new business models based on specialized social networking web sites for sharing "TMI," as the post-Friends generation likes to say:

A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

The reporter continues to reveal that "Blippy" members share access to their Gmail accounts with the company so it can publish their purchases, thereby greatly increasing the "Blippy" members' street cred by about a zillion I suppose.

In the pithy blurb he sent with the link, Big Otis observed: "those silly millennials --- making the world safe for fascism." I disagree. If this is where American society is headed there will be no need for fascism. After all, the Morlocks did not need to resort to fascism in order to feast on the Eloi --- all they needed was a scary-sounding air raid siren and a docile population with one highly motivating conditioned response. The siren in our real-world postmodern case of course, like the Sirens of Ulysses, is every bit as sinister as what the Morlocks used. But unlike The Odyssey and very much like the Eloi, few today are tied to the mast or have intentionally plugged their ears. So Silicon Valley scumbags glibly brag about their super new business models to The New York Times. Here's how it works: a generation surrenders its privacy to corporations in order to build a "fan base"; American society is rewarded with a terminal load of gangrene.

Update before I'm through: I don't fully or exclusively blame the "millennials" for their victimhood. Besides the prime mover in this sickening trend --- the information-industrial complex --- plenty of blame belongs to Baby Boomers and their clueless concepts of what it means to be a good parent and a good citizen. (Hoy, I need to get me to the prayer meeting.)

Double feature!

*

For my wiseass friend, "Anonymous" (if that's truly your name), in the previous comments thread.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

You know she was a dancer / She moved better on wine



I don't have much to say about this lummox-rocker*, one of my favorites of all time, except that I heard it over and over again on an 8-track in Fred's hopped-up red GTO around 1970-way and permanently bonded with it. I consider it the original cowbell song, and the overdrive bass riff sounded like an entire orchestra to me (back 1970-way). The story behind the composing of Mississippi Queen was new to me as of tonight, though.

As an aside, the video accompanying this tune is almost A-OK with me, lummox-wise, except that the footage from Two Lane Blacktop is squashed left-to-right and the motorcycle stuff doesn't belong at all. I love the color of Steve McQueen's Mustang, too.

Oh yeah, and in terms of "this day in history," I just happened to learn on the FM robot oldies station that on this day in 1983 Mountain bassist Felix Pappalardi met his maker thanks to some "criminally negligent homicide" served up with a bullet by his wife, Gail. (Poor guy had to retire early due to partial hearing loss incurred by entertaining a generation of lowriding stoners. Peace, Felix.)
________________________
* To the best of my knowledge, the term "lummox rock" was invented by Larry K.

Local color goes national

*

Champaign, Ill., Mayor Jerry Schweighart (SCHWY-hart) has earned his 15 minutes of fame on HuffingtonPost.

See, Mayor Schweighart is a birther, and he can't understand why his opinion is controversial. It's controversial because President Obama's birth certificate has been produced for the record and the "Kenyan version" was exposed as a counterfeit before the election (but I'm too lazy to look for the links on a Saturday morning). OK, whatever. This is no surprise to residents who have long known of Schweighart's far-right-wing orientation. But he's some kind of imposing fascist strongman, or even a strong mayor for that matter. He generally avoids inflammatory interjections into city politics, other than the odd periodic stupid comment that a few wingnuts applaud and everyone else ignores.

Predictably, the comments thread on HuffingtonPost is every bit as clueless as anything Crazy Uncle Jerry might utter. According to a commenter called "What's going on," everyone should sign a petition to "help us citizens of Champaign get this guy out of office." Commenter "LouisGA" declares that at "Champaign town meetings" the mayor "insists on wearing his white sheet and hood." No, he actually doesn't.