Friday Night Fish Fry

*

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).

The "help" these days

*

Sometimes I think that Alice couldn't wash steam out of a tea kettle.

The new national currency: stupidity

*

I see that liberal bloggers from Balloon Juice to TPM are in high dudgeon because the Tea Party supports a bill to withdraw 1$ bills from circulation and replace them with dollar coins. For some reason they consider this idea to be outrageous. John Cole denounces it as "just weird" and Josh Marshall claims that such a change would be "a huge pain in the butt (perhaps literally) for every American."

The criticism, you see, is that dollar coins are a huge waste of money because nobody uses them, and consequently $1 billion worth are stockpiled in vaults where they do no work but cost tax dollars to store and secure. It must be true: even NPR said so back in June!

Critics of the dollar coin seem to think that eliminating the greenback would force them to carry several pounds of coins in their pockets from now on. Why exactly would that happen? Can you think of any reason why a person would have to carry more than four dollar coins at one time? One, maybe: when the 7-11 cashier or bartender has no fives in the register. Happens every day, doesn't it?

If you've fed a parking meter or vending machine lately, you know that neither provides much of a service or product for less than a dollar. To get a few hours of parking or a plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper you need to have 6 or 8 quarters handy. In my experience, vending machines spit out a used dollar bill about as often as they accept it.

Needless to say, this looks to me like some pointless piling onto the Tea Party by some self-righteous nincompoops. I've often said that liberal ideas are too important to entrust to liberals. Likewise, dumb ideas can easily find a new home in a liberal skull.

Last night I emailed Josh Marshall about his post to ask if he was serious, and to explain what exactly would be the drawback of widely circulating $1 coins. He broke my heart with no reply. Because there isn't a good one, if these ninnies were to think about it for two minutes. So you say a cashier doesn't want to accept 1$ coins? Tell the shift manager you'll shop at Walmart until their policy changes. And if you, the shopper, doesn't want to accept a $1 coin as part of your change, then leave it in the jar for Jerry's Kids! Oh, but your change includes four 1$ coins? If you're not rich enough to leave them in the tip jar, then I guess you'll become an eager adopter of this strange new monetary artifact, just like everyone else.

As an alternative approach, you could ask the cashier for a whole roll of dollar coins, then take it home and fuck yourself to sleep with it! (And by "you," I mean "the indefinite you." Thank you for your attention in this matter.)

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

Here, I think you will agree, is an undeniable kernel of Truth from Louis Jordan.



Of all the many matters in life on which myself, Beer-D, and Big Rock Head concur, I believe that we are most closely at unity on the particular point Jordan makes in this performance. How about you?

Something that always strikes me about Jordan---in addition to his considerable power as a composer-arranger, bandleader, entertainer, vocalist, and alto screecher---is what an authentically good-natured man he must have been. The guy just sounds fun, as if he could radiate pure joy into pretty much any situation. I've wondered if he intended that his lyrics for Fat Sam From Birmingham should serve as a slightly jollified autobiographical portrait of himself.

A Man's Best Friend Is A Bed, Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five (1947, 78 rpm single Decca 28543-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Peculiar marketing judgment

*

While waiting in line for an Rx at my neighborhood drugstore I found myself studying the early pregnancy test shelf, vaguely musing how new and unreliable that technology was back when I was in fighting form, reproductionwise.

Since then, these devices have evolved beyond merely returning a certain color that correlates positively with pregnancy---I think it was blue in the early '80s---sort of like testing pH with litmus paper. Today the competing vendors use different indicators for pregnancy-positive and -negative results. One test kit uses + and - signs, another uses | and O symbols, and a third uses a pointless and almost illegible LED display that indicates "pregnant" or "not pregnant." Hmm, I thought to myself: consumer choice!

Then I noticed that the CVS house brand test kit illustrated the product on the box as showing a positive (+) result. So I compared it with the three other brands of test kits on the shelves, and discovered that all but one depicted the test wand as displaying a positive pregnancy result. One brand---it has the word "blue" in the trade name, but I can't remember it---showed the display indicators as insets to the main product illustration, but the test wand was simply showing a blank result, as it would when one removes it from its sterile wrapper.

It seems to me that most people who are anxious to get early pregnancy test results---"up to 5 days before period!" as the most serious brand proclaims---are probably looking for a negative result, not a positive one. So it made me wonder what kind of unholy alliance between corporations and the religious right might have cooked up this subtly anxiety-inducing packaging. And then I realized that it was a self-answering question.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

After last night's post I suppose it's incumbent upon me to prove that I'm not just a random, bitterly nostalgic geezer who believes that no one has recorded anything worth listening to since some arbitrary holy moment in my youth. So put this in your pipe and smoke it.



I think it's safe to say that most people my age (high Baby Boom era) would probably consider this selection to be "noise" just as our parents condemned the Stones or the Rascals as "jungle music." Myself, I view of Seattle grunge in general as an antidote to the sterile, vacuous sound of Reagan-era rock and pop that I was lamenting here last evening. These grunge bands used instrumentation and even production values that could be replicated in any working-class garage or basement assuming a few thousand dollars of investment in recording gear and a mixing board. Pure, primitive rock and roll. I remember that there was a certain amount of hype about the Seattle sound in the early 1990s as if grunge were revolutionary and unprecedented. It wasn't; it was a throwback to the '60s and early '70s with which there was nothing wrong other than pretending that one invented it when one actually had not. Grunge lyrics were, of course, uncensored existential despair for jaded kids, but I don't think that was so much a Seattle innovation rather than a generational change in community standards for rock lyrics trafficking in despair.

This track reminds me of early '70s Alice Cooper in some respects. The chord progression, if you can call it that, seems to be variation of the classic I - IV rock chord change, but using a mutated and dissonant variant of the tonic chord. The band pretty much vamps on these chords throughout, using the mutant tonic chord almost like pedal tones. But the harmonic environment creates plenty of elbow room for the musicians to play pretty much any notes they wish at any time. They do it with discipline, though, using scales, modes, and passing tones for harmonic coherence. As far as my ears are concerned, the vocalist can hold his own with any idol of the "classic rock" era. Lyrics? My mind is too literal to understand much poetry, but I reckon they have something to do with addiction and one-upsmanship originating in some sort of personal rivalry or hostility. I don't care---my earbones have historically processed vocals as one instrument among the ensemble. Never could understand the damn things, either in terms of diction or meaning.

Retarded, Afghan Whigs (1990, from "Up In It," reissued 1991 on "The Grunge Years," Sub Pop SP112b), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting [updated]

* 

This may be a nowhere song for many people my age, but I'm always surprised at my emotional response to it. And this reaction has no specific, schmaltzy boy/girl origin; I had to plumb the shallows of my wee brain to put my finger on it. It's about what happens when you don't notice that you've passed a fork in the road.



As pitiful as this sounds, even to me, the 1970s were the best time of my life. And that's even considering some particularly tough sledding in the '73 - '75 timeframe. I suppose memories may take on a lovely, saturated Kodachrome-type patina because our problems didn't turn out to be impossible after all, while the power and romance of wide-open possibilities turns out, for too many of us, to be a high point that can never be replicated once we start the march toward diminished options.

This pensive Earth Wind & Fire single charted in summer 1979, a time I now consider to have been an indescribable rare sunset diffusing into the crisp twilight of a formative era that was destined to end abruptly. I think I even knew that at the time, meaning I sensed the morning that would emerge east of midnight would for some reason, inexplicable to me, twist itself into a deformed and crippled facsimile of a new day. Morning In America dawned brightly to many, but to me colder than it looked through my window; languid, dank, and low in oxygen. For one thing among many, the general character of rock, soul, and pop music seemed to degenerate almost overnight. Suddenly, human vitality was aggressively being displaced through heavy application of digital production methods and all the romance that Big Business has to offer. To my ears, it all started sounding like music produced to sell instead of music to listen to and dance to. Previously, barely a majority of it had struck me that way; I'd always found plenty to like, ranging from Zappa to horn bands to wimp rock to New Wave and Power Pop. Now, in the stale new dawn of 1980, it seemed that almost nothing of that remained.

Some might complain that this track is little more than a clot of overproduced schlock romanticism. Myself, I think it finds a very sweet spot between intimacy and lushness. The layers of keyboards---there are sounds like a concert grand mic'ed for pop timbres, a classic '70s Fender Rhodes electric piano, an analog synthesizer---are washed in a classy orchestral mist. And in back of it all, those swinging, mellow EW&F horns fingerpainting together in the open spaces. If I make an allowance for poetic license, I can almost hear these poignant lyrics as an elegy for social comity, which was soon to fall ill through a plague that very few people (myself included) knew was starting to creep in from under the baseboards. But then, that's just me projecting my ruminations onto the rest of the world. Enjoy the song; I wonder what memories it might tweak in you.

After The Love Has Gone, Earth Wind & Fire (1979, from "I Am," Columbia 35730), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Update: I've done some editing and rewriting to flesh out the mental shorthand I was dealing out last night.

DSL smashup

*
Looks like I had to take the advice of Big Hussein Otis and pitch the old DSL modem/router. The new one appears to be performing according to specs, meaning that when I turn it on it stays on.

After I got back online tonight and came here I decided to "check out Blogger's streamlined new interface." It certainly does look "cleaner" (I'm typing into it now), but it's got me all disoriented now, eyebonewise. I've had enough of computers this week and will come back tomorrow. Now I'm gonna go read some Will Eisner Spirit reprints from 1941.

Meanwhile, please stay tuned for more exciting new content... whenever.

Wise sayings

*

I'm starting to think that even the people I totally agree with are idiots.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

Although there are three more weeks of summer, as etched into the DNA of The Creator's very own Firmament, corporations have trained us to call off the season immediately after Labor Day. The drones have to get to work preparing the Xmas retail displays, which need to be set up by the Friday before Columbus Day. So here's something to transition all my fellow drones out of "official summer" on a sweet note.



The "official" Beach Boys song for this time of year is, of course, "All Summer Long." I sort of like that one because of---not in spite of---it's bouncy vapidity and Norman Rockwell-HBO depiction of California teenage glory in the mid-1960s. The truth of that place and era for most kids was probably more about bullying, under-age drunkenness, and finger-fucking in the front seat of a 1951 Plymouth than "miniature golf and hondas in the hills." (Wait... I'm starting to like the song less and less the more I write about it.)

Anyway, the title track of the Pet Sounds album is an instrumental gem that has a sort of valedictory quality that well suits the manufactured occasion of a summer's end. The percussion throughout reminds me of crickets and cicadas like I'm hearing right now through the open screen windows. The beat wafts by like a balmy, early-evening breeze. As progression unfolds toward an ultimate series of formal, brass-driven stock ending-type cadences that have more in common with Sousa than rock and roll, subtle temporary key changes are injected that keep the mood bright. And the closing fade sustains an optimism that your pet sounds will always be around. (Unless you're dumb enough to store them all in "The Cloud," from which some corporation will steal them from you in a coupla years and make you pay for them again.)

Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys (1966, from "Pet Sounds," Capitol D 100513 [1990 CD reissue], via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: the Wikipedia article on this album has some interesting information, but I must say that it's also chock full of thinly sliced horseshit. First, Pet Sounds is not "a heralding album in the emerging psychedelic rock style." It's just not. Period. Yes, Brian Wilson was using psychedelic drugs during 1965 and 1966, and an alternate version of "I Know There's An Answer," called "Hang On To Your Ego," has acid-driven lyrics. But just listen to it: what you hear is fairly standard surfer-type rock and pop arranged for a zillion different instruments---brilliantly, in my opinion---and mostly moody lyrics that are more characteristic of youthful depression than psychedelia.

Second, Pet Sounds is not an example of "Baroque pop" because, despite what Wikipedia has to say, there never was any such fucking thing! God help us! Yes, Wikipedia has an entire article on this nonexistent musical genre, and claim that the term has been in use since 1966. Well, maybe some early rock critic looking for attention coined the term, but no regular people ever did. Almost all of the references used to document the existence of this made-up genre were published in the 21st century (the rest are 1990s), possibly written by people who were raised more on rock music magazines than on rock music. You know: poseurs.

Now I'm so worked up I have to go burn some Delhi saffron incense and meditate....

Fifty50 housekeeping notes

*
After treating my router to a milkshake made of Fleet's Phospho-Soda and epicac, directly before a nice waterboarding session, it seems to be performing its mission here at Fifty50 Headquarters once again. The previous situation was getting old very fast and cannibalizing the time that I prefer to dedicate to you, my valuable readers. (I'm afraid I may be forced to use the same prescription on a nice lady named Alice who, after six years of working for me as a contractor, still doesn't seem to fully grasp the concept of "washing silverware.")

Also, apropos of nothing, I've changed the setting for the comments page so you no longer have to deal with that irritating popup window. Now we're set up just like the big kids over on the next block.

Finally, I've enabled the blog's settings to load a mobile template, specially designed for "smart" phones, which customizes the display when Fifty50 is viewed on such devices.

Please form an orderly line for purposes of thanking me. I do so hate it when the masses "teem" with spontaneous delight.

Yesterday's doke

*

Provided yesterday courtesy of John Cole's brother:

“Fox News. You know what that is? Nickelodeon for people with dementia.”

Please make a note of it.

Today's doke

*

The Invisible Army has been ratfucking my DSL router for several weeks. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Sunday after hours

*

There is only one reason I'd ever post such a thing to this blog. See if you can guess what it is.



A Walk In The Black Forest, Horst Jankowski (1965, Mercury Records [catalog information unavailable]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: some wags might consider this tune 1965's answer to Kyu Sakamoto's 1963 hit, "Sukiyaki," and also to the eternal question "Who won World War II, you so smart?"

Friday Evening After Hours

*

This balls-heavy power trio track from Frank Zappa's Apostrophe(') album has always been linked in my mind to the approach of a certain monstrous, torrential chain-lightning storm as heralded by gorgeously hideous thunderheads the color of lead and a curiously refreshing 20 mph wind out of the west.



I'm certain that this tune would make a terrific soundtrack for the approach of Hurricane Irene assuming that (1) you and yours are personally safe, (2) all irreplaceable valuables are secured in a watertight fortress, (3) you are fully insured, and (4) you don't live within reach of the storm surge. Lotta ifs, I know. But what else can a Simple Country Editor offer other than best wishes and exciting incidental music?

Seriously, this is one of the most interesting power trio jams I've ever heard, with Jack Bruce strangling a dramatic fuzz-bass fanfare-style solo from his instrument right out of the gate. Then, once Bruce's hyperactive "preliminaries" are concluded, Zappa slips in from rhythm to an aggressive, precision solo that reminds me of a serpent's tongue made out of piano wire. It slashes its way through or around all obstacles popping out of the rhythm bed, where Bruce is still strumming away like Oedipus plucking at his own optic nerves. This is one of those tracks (and albums) that you have to own on high-quality physical media and pump hard through a nice set of real headphones at 11. Even on a simple track like this one, Zappa had a lot of things going on deeper in the mix that are lost in MP3 files and computer headphones.

I hope anyone in the hurricane path who might be listening and reading along comes through it all with nothing worse than a wet bird, as Sinatra used to say.

Apostrophe', Frank Zappa (1974, from "Apostrophe(')," DiscReet DS 2175), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

The wealthy elites "smash and grab," too

*

I know we're all supposed to dutifully wind down our attention to the Steve Jobs resignation and join around the national hearth to watch Hurricane Irene lash East Coast homosexuals and liberals with the beastly righteousness only nature can dispense. Also that our Federal Reserve chairman thinks our economy will continue to grow over time even though he sees some "clouds on the horizon" because unemployment is still over 9%.

But the fallout from global austerity economics has not abated just because the Brits have swept up the broken glass from their mid-month wave of rioting. In a comment from an August 13 post, Marginalia of London noted that the looting was a political act despite the fact that the rioters may not have realized it. I agree.

Everybody knows that rioting, looting, and arson are heinous acts that punish the innocent much more than any legitimate object of political opprobrium. Pundits on both sides of the Atlantic responded with scolding in high dudgeon: shame on the nihilistic children; shame on their useless parents; the problem is that nobody knows how good they really have it any more; et cetera.

But most of us are still waiting for celebrity pundits to tut-tut the misbehavior of the elite global financiers who have been "looting with the lights on" for a decade or more:

[England's] riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable.

Click through to read the entire Guardian piece by Naomi Klein---it's a pippin. I copped the link from Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice, who also notes that PM David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson were both members of the obscenely wealthy and destructive Bullingdon Club during college years.

Klein's most interesting point, in my opinion, is another one of those truths that are hidden right in front of our noses: that Western media are quick to laud the high political ideals of rioters, looters, and insurrectionists in Bad Countries like Iraq, for example, because

this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves.

As the article says, though, London isn't Baghdad. Maybe not (fewer minarets, for one thing), but maybe turning London into Baghdad is part of Premier Cameron's and Chairman Murdoch's 10-year Great-Leap-Ahead Plan. It's almost as if Western nations are deliberately avoiding the tested, straightforward solutions to depression economics (i.e., stimulus and employment programs) in order to do some social engineering through the magic of Disaster Capitalism. If corporatists love anything more than tax cuts for themselves, it's political crackdowns.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*
Nothin' new, sound of breaking glass



A peppy little number about real anarchy, not the Disney version that Libertarians pretend can save the world. Our British cousins had an ugly taste of it last week. The conscious agenda of the rioters was "smash and grab"; nothing overtly political motivating it, and nothing sympathetic to say about it. But both of those remarks are beside the point, I think: riotous anarchy is an emergent phenomenon that explodes forth when a certain set of social, political, and economic conditions is satisfied. It has root causes that can either be mitigated or aggravated. In Western democracies we have sparks that are being fanned into flames by an international nest of motherfuckers. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if I have more to say on the subject sometime. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass, Nick Lowe (1978, from "Pure Pop For Now People," Columbia 35329), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note:  The UK release of this album was called "Jesus of Cool," but Lowe's US label wouldn't stand for such heretical cheekery in the title, so my original purchase of this music was called Pure Pop. But Lowe reissued "Jesus" on CD a few years ago, which I also own and highly recommend for the bonus tracks.

Meanwhile, under the radar

*

I saw this post by David Dayen linked to Heather Digby Parton's Hullaballo blog. It illustrates the other major crime of professional malpractice committed by the corporation-directed media that provide most of what most Americans accept in good faith as news.

The gist of it is that Republican lawmakers are being confronted at their August "town hall meetings" by ordinary people who are firmly demanding to know why legislators (John McCain, for example) believe that reducing taxes on corporations or wealthy people will help the economy in the absence of evidence. But there's not a peep about it on CNN, Fox, or NPR. Dayen's point is that last summer the media were all eyes and ears as "tea partiers" disrupted these town hall meetings last August, even brandishing or carrying concealed weapons in some cases. And why not? I leave this question as an exercise for the reader.

Dayen highlights examples published in the hometown press of conservative strongholds such as North Dakota, Tucson, Wilkes-Barre, PA, and Lincoln, NE. Dayen also claims that someone has compiled more than 100 such stories from around the nation, but unfortunately he doesn't provide a link to document that. But that's what the New York Times and the CNN national news desks are for, I'd think. Not a peep, though.

To me, the interesting thing is that these appear to be examples of everyday people who, without any help from the national media or national political leaders of either party are piecing together the story for themselves... the story being that the conventional wisdom we're being force-fed about deficits, debt ceilings, and "job-creating" rich people may be starting to wear thin.

In front of their own noses, too

*

Adding onto yesterday's observations on Krugman's blog post about media malpractice in reporting on the impact of the S&P downgrade, I'll point to another Krugman piece from today. This one addresses the same phenomenon---straightforward lying about the reality right in front of everybody's noses---but pertains to elite economists who lie about their data in very transparent ways.

So this one on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a guy named "Narayana Kocherlakota," argues that the Fed should tighten the money supply---raise interest rates, that is---because he wants us to believe that taking money out of the economy will reduce unemployment. But, always the good-natured wag, Krugman points out that:

The Fed dissenters are obviously looking for excuses to pursue tight policies; they’re looking at the facts only in search of support for their prejudices. As the old line goes, they’re using evidence the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

Economists do it as much as the media, whether famous neoliberal intellectuals or Federal Reserve policymakers (usually the same guys, anyway). I enjoy reading about Krugman peeing on their lamppost.

In front of our noses

*

This Krugman blog post highlights a virtually unreported detail about the past week of financial-world turmoil on the heels of the S&P downgrade of US debt:

A week ago, before the S&P downgrade, the interest rate on US 10-year bonds was 2.56 percent. As I write this, it’s 2.24 percent, with the yield on inflation-protected bonds actually negative.

You would think this would amount to strong evidence that the downgrade totally failed to shake confidence in US debt.

Yet people who listen to radio and TV reporting tell me that most stories attribute the stock plunge to the downgrade, and are telling listeners that the case for immediate spending cuts has gotten even stronger.

Get it? This is how the corporate narrative works. The Situationists figured it out more than 40 years ago:

[They] argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life.

Their term for the narrative and its associated creations and fabrications was The Spectacle. Sounds correct to me.

Be that as it may, I call it criminal malpractice by the news media. Ordinary people who consider themselves to be very well informed because they follow the "nice" media CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and NPR are being deliberately misled. I call it deliberate deception because I know what a fucking news editor is really supposed to do for a paycheck.

One might think that our very own President North Star would have been hammering this point home for the past day or two, or maybe that he'll get around to it next week. But in order to do that, he would have to be a leader of sorts, with a few guts inside his skin. Where have you gone, Huey Long? Our nation turns its longing eyes to you. Goo goo goo joob.