No one should have let him finish.

I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Reading reviews of the new Kanye West album, that is. I’m not trying to be down with the kids, or up on the Kardashians, but it seems everywhere I turn there’s news about “Yeezus,” i.e., the album, and I’m just…just…well:

New York magazine:

Shock, surely, is the point. Kanye wants to get under our skin, to rile and appall. In recent years, we’ve had a lot of dark-tinged music about sex: the brooding boudoir R&B of the Weeknd, the glum sex raps of Drake. West means to deliver the ultimate in “bummer sex” — unfiltered nastiness, set to a punishingly bleak soundtrack. The problem, ultimately, isn’t moral; it’s aesthetic. Kanye’s a wack rake. If he has a weakness as an artist, it’s his rapping, his stiff flow and sometimes awkward rhymes. When he tries to come on like a rogue, the corniness is accentuated: “Baby girl, he’s a loner/ Late-night organ donor”; “I’m a rap-lic priest/ Getting head by the nuns”; “Eatin’ Asian pussy/ All I need was sweet and sour sauce.” In the words of that rock critic Barack Obama, he sounds like a jackass.

Grantland:

On “Blood on the Leaves,” he revives the soul-sampling, love-’em-and-leave-’em crowd-pleaser of “Gold Digger.” Only this time, instead of Jamie Foxx’s sunny Ray Charles impersonation, West provocatively deploys Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” in a song that finds him complaining that he can’t force one of his “second-string bitches” to get an abortion because of all that religious “Jesus Walks” stuff. On “I’m in It,” the thoughtful messages of Watch the Throne are perverted into a devilish dancehall-accented treatise on the pleasures of multicultural sport-fucking. (“Uh, black girl sippin’ white wine / put my fist in her like a civil rights sign” is the queasiest lyric on a record with lots of competition for the distinction.) On “I Am a God,” the anti-materialism of “All Falls Down” from his 2004 debut, The College Dropout, is negated by a campy stew of clanking, Sprockets-y industrial-rock portentousness and West’s overplayed petulance about the painfully slow service at French-ass restaurants.

The Wall Street Journal:

At Monday’s event, he said having YouTube display his videos next to other people’s would be like a store stocking Louis Vuitton next to lesser brands. “I don’t want to be in that context,” the rapper said while introducing his album to the crowd with a characteristically breathless and topic-hopping statement. “I got this new strategy: It’s called no strategy. I got an idea how to sell more music: It’s called make better music.”

The New York damn Times:

Mr. West is angry, all right. In “Black Skinhead” he snarls, “I’ve been a menace for the longest/But I ain’t finished, I’m devoted,” over a track that switches between a blunt glam-rock drumbeat and a distorted synthesizer line. In “New Slaves” he’s furious at the segregation his mother’s generation faced, at corporations trying to control him, at profit-making prisons, at the media (of course) and — after many songs on previous albums that proudly itemized his collection of designer clothes — at the way designer labels are marketed to those who can’t afford them.

I don’t even know what this shit means anymore. I only know I don’t want to hear this record. Not even a little bit. Eating Asian pussy without sweet-and-sour sauce? Sampling “Strange Fruit” to bitch about your groupie problems? Why doesn’t someone clock this idiot and put us all out of his misery?

I’m writing this in early evening, having laid the groundwork for dinner this morning. Wednesday is Alan’s late night at the office, but he sometimes gets home before 9, so let’s be optimistic. Then the day unfolded, events that included:

Suspension of the Hoffa dig;
The exit of the mayoral front-runner due to filing errors, his disqualification upheld by two courts;
Plans for a new hockey arena, to be partially funded with public money

I’m probably forgetting something. But now I’m wondering if he’ll ever come home.

We’ve been having a string of perfectly lovely, perfectly perfect days, the kind where you think you should be wearing sunscreen just sitting on the couch. So of course we’re going to be smothered starting this weekend — high ’80s and chance of storms, which means humidity of the sort that makes mold grow in the elastic of your bra. Tomorrow night should be the last of the perfection, so I’m going out.

So, some bloggage:

Back to Grantland for something I fear is true: Season six of “Mad Men” was a disappointment. Since we were talking about what we’ve been watching lately.

Well, if Paula Deen thought Anthony Bourdain was tough on her before, wait until he gets a load of this.

And with that, I’m uncorking a bottle and about to enjoy a lovely evening. Hope your Thursday is what you want it to be.

Posted at 12:30 am in Current events, Popculch |
 

51 responses to “No one should have let him finish.”

  1. Dexter said on June 20, 2013 at 1:03 am

    To ponder: Is Paula Deen James Deen’s mommy? 🙂
    I just skimmed the Kanye West stuff. No sense for me to get riled by his nonsense; I’ll get all worked up by other things. Isn’t Kanye West that man who performed at the Super Bowl wearing tights and a skirt? yep. http://content.clearchannel.com/cc-common/mlib/1840/02/1840_1360429408.jpg

    Oh, James Deen is a porn star that made headlines recently when he made a sex tape with Miss Teen Delaware, if memory serves.

    The hockey arena and entertainment district sound wonderful. The Joe is a bit long in the tooth; it’s time to build a new hockey arena. The entertainment area might even draw Kanye West and his skirt back to town.

    The headlines screamed “Hoffa was buried alive!”
    But…it was just an old mob head a-fuckin’ wit’ da authorities. No Jimmy, no where, not ever.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVStJaB-lg4

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  2. Dexter said on June 20, 2013 at 1:19 am

    More Paula Deen…
    http://theinterrobang.com/2013/06/paula-deen-raging-racist/

    Only 51 he was, but we just lost James Gandolfini. 51 year old folks die every day, but this one is a shock. Sadly, a shock indeed.

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  3. Brandon said on June 20, 2013 at 3:40 am

    Given your tendency to cuss, you could have a second career as a rapper;)

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  4. ROGirl said on June 20, 2013 at 6:27 am

    When the news about the Hoffa dig started saturating the media I thought about declaring that I would run down the street naked if they actually found him.

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  5. Deborah said on June 20, 2013 at 6:48 am

    Who pays for the Hoffa digs?

    I’m sick of hearing about Kanye and Kim too. Who are these people?

    I’ve awakened on the wrong side of the bed and I’m crabby.

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  6. Dave said on June 20, 2013 at 7:46 am

    Everyday, I come over and read what you have to say, day doesn’t seem complete without it, make my way through the comments, but I try to avoid all things Kardashian/Kanye/Jenner, assorted garbage like that. Why are these people famous, much like why were the Gabors, thinking of one example, famous in an earlier time. Think if the Gabors had had Internet and a zillion cable channels.

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  7. basset said on June 20, 2013 at 7:54 am

    Honest, hardworking, taxpaying citizens pay for the digs, that’s who. This is just another example of government waste and Obama’s mismanagement; we need to cut the fat at the FBI, get rid of those overpaid bureaucrats, fire a couple unnecessary layers of management and run it like a business. If Jimmy Hoffa really needed to be found, free-market private enterprise would have invested in the search long ago.

    There, I feel better.

    The mujadara recipe looked good so we cooked some up last night; made the house smell good but in the end it’s still rice and lentils, needed a lot of hot sauce to make it anywhere close to interesting. Or maybe I should have tripled the spices. Cut some spinach from the pots on our back deck and made a nice salad to go with it, though… avocado, bacon bits, and a little balsamic.

    I am so far removed from pop culture it’s almost pitiful, this Kanye person sounds like a good reason not to get any closer.

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  8. coozledad said on June 20, 2013 at 8:04 am

    Bourdain can just crib it from the new York magazine article:
    Shock, surely, is the point. Paula wants to get under our skin, to rile and appall. In recent years, we’ve had a lot of dark-tinged talk from Bubba: the brooding deep fried deployment of the N word, the glum grape jelly croissant with pork cracklin’s. Deen means to deliver the ultimate in “pancreatitis food” — unfiltered nastiness, set to a punishingly bleak soundtrack of race baiting. The problem, ultimately, isn’t moral; it’s aesthetic. Deen’s the giant armed lady at the Waffle House with a platinum card. If she has a weakness as a chef, it’s her cooking, her peripheral neuropathy, and sometimes awkward memories of “the cause”. When she tries to come on like a rogue, the corniness is accentuated: “Bubba, girl, he’s a loner/ N-got the sugar, N- got no boner”; “I’m the Crisco priestess/ Gonna give your ass the beetis”; “ Eatin’ my pussy?/you’ll want a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup..” In the words of that food critic Barack Obama, “Who the fuck let Mel Gibson in the Kitchen?”.

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  9. nancy said on June 20, 2013 at 8:05 am

    Yes on the Hoffa digs. The FBI pays. Not the last one, but the one before that, the site that was dug up was under a horse barn in Milford. The people happily consented, because the government built them a brand-new one afterward. It’s like having your house fall down a Malibu hillside. Rebuild bigger and better with insurance and 1 percent loans.

    My point with the Kanye stuff is to ask, essentially, WTF, and I don’t necessarily think ignoring him is the answer. I’m trying to imagine the firestorm if a white artist took a song like “Strange Fruit,” a virtual dirge of the civil-rights movement, ripped off a lyric for a new song title and then sampled a classic recording for a rant about…groupies. No wonder nothing means anything anymore.

    On edit: This was not meant to follow Coozledad, who is clearly thread winner. Again.

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  10. basset said on June 20, 2013 at 8:17 am

    Ignoring him may not be the answer, but it sure is for me. Life’s too short.

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  11. beb said on June 20, 2013 at 8:20 am

    Kardashians? Kanye? I’ve lived a wonderful life apparently, because I never had any interest in either of these people.

    One of the things about old age is that one’s internal censor starts going on the fritz and one says things that a few years earlier one would have been mortified to say. Such, I think, is the case with Paula Deen. What a surprise that a life-long white Southern resident should be revealed as using the N-word or dreaming of a Plantation style wedding.

    Nor do I care what Anthony Bourdain thinks about Deen now, or in the past. Bourdain has built himself a niche as a traveling gourmand. From the very few episodes I’ve watched he’s good at that. Has a perfect voice for narration. And seems willing to eat even the most repulsive looking meals on the planet. If he has strong opinions about Paula Deen or Rachel Ray or Emeral… he wouldn’t be much of a chef if he didn’t.

    I’m not sure which part is weird in Detroit politics. That Mike Duggan, a white guy, was considered the front-runner in a city that’s 85% black. That the candidate who challenged his eligibility was a convicted felon, Tom Barrow. Or that Duggan, a supposedly astute politician, filed for the office way in advance of when he needed to and before the 52 week clock had run out on all intepretations of one-year residency.

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  12. Dave said on June 20, 2013 at 8:40 am

    Meanwhile, it’s been reported that Miley’s been wearing some especially skimpy clothes. And Miley’s parents? Kaput. There, I feel better now. Sorry.

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  13. brian stouder said on June 20, 2013 at 8:44 am

    I’m with Basset’s and Beb’s comments, 100%.

    Today will be a HUGE news day – from the Supreme Court of the United States.

    Take a deep breath…

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  14. Julie Robinson said on June 20, 2013 at 8:51 am

    Life is unfair. Paula venerated, Kanye emulated, Gandolfini dead at 51.

    And the Proprietress gets an edit button, when we have none.

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  15. Peter said on June 20, 2013 at 9:18 am

    I think I’ve spent a total of 30 minutes of my life on the Kardashians, and I’m going to keep it that, thank you very much. At least it’s an improvement over Paris Hilton. I guess.

    As for the Gabors, I was going to say something about the Miss Hungary pageant and all, but checking into a couple websites I’ve found that all three won the Miss Hungary pageant. Or one of them did. Or maybe none of them. Maybe there wasn’t even a Miss Hungary pageant at all. But one site said “they were known as the first examples of people being famous for no apparent reason whatsoever”.

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  16. brian stouder said on June 20, 2013 at 9:18 am

    Well said, Julie.

    Forget Kenye; I’m still affected by the climax of The Voice. Blake’s blonde was just too, too good; but I’d still pay to see Michelle Chamuel

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  17. LAMary said on June 20, 2013 at 9:39 am

    Forget Kanye.
    I’ve been sad about James Gandolfini twice now. Once when the Sopranos ended and now when he died. He was so good in that role I felt like i knew that guy.

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  18. alex said on June 20, 2013 at 9:46 am

    In the early twentieth century, Hungary was renowned for its prostitutes. Before the Gabor sisters became fame whores they were just whores.

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  19. adrianne said on June 20, 2013 at 10:14 am

    Kanye needs to STFU. An (unintentionally) hilarious interview with him in New York magazine tells you all you need to know about this idiot.

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  20. BigHank53 said on June 20, 2013 at 10:59 am

    The world cries out for a Paula Deen/Kanye West mash-up. A musical one would do, though if anyone has a line on an industrial meatgrinder that’s not closely guarded on weekends….

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  21. annie said on June 20, 2013 at 11:19 am

    Kanye is not untalented. I really like his song “All of the Lights” — thoughtful lyrics, interesting music. And yes, he comes off as a pompous ass sometimes but obviously his music means a lot to many people–young people, people of color, old white men — oh wait…

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  22. mark said on June 20, 2013 at 11:28 am

    “Why doesn’t someone clock this idiot and put us all out of his misery?”

    Good for you, Nancy, for not taking the oh-so-easy “Forget Kanye” approach. It’s much easier to bash Paula for being a dumb bigot, but her influence and impact is about zero. The under twenty crowd has no idea who she is and they are currently busy tweeting “RIP” for lil Snupe, a 17 yr-old Kanye wannabe ushered off the earth today in a blaze of the violence his music celebrated.

    We can ignore Kanye, but the children do not. The message he sends, particularly about and for women, is as vile as it is pervasive. How can those of you with daughters “ignore” Kanye?

    But, of course, those horrible fundies and republicans and racists and southerners and rural folk (how redundant of me) probably don’t like Kanye, and nobody wants to agree with them. So let’s talk about that awful Paula D or how genetically-modified foods are so bad for the children. And just forget about Kanye.

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  23. brian stouder said on June 20, 2013 at 11:42 am

    Aside from recognizing the name Kenye West, all I know about him is he has a beautiful wife*.

    Anyone here who has (or had) teenagers (for example) in their homes know this shoot-the-moon, I-have-all-the-answers attitude.

    Annie expands the point with her incisive remark about young people, people of color, old white men

    Any number of know-it-alls and gadflies will be more than happy to tell you all sorts of bullshit, 24-7.

    Why hell, here in Fort Wayne yesterday, our local lip flapper had our member of congress – Marlin Stutzman – on.

    Stutzman is from a farming family, and as such he’s been the direct recipient of gobs of federal cash; for crop price support payments, and federally insured crop insurance, and set-aside cash, and so on and so forth. And do you know what his big idea is? SNAP (aka ‘foodstamps’) needs to be removed from the Farm Bill because….because why?

    Because, goddammit, a white male farmer millionaire shouldn’t have to take guhmint cash (aka welfare!) out of the same pot as ‘those people’…or at least that’s what I got from his inane nattering.

    By way of saying, forget Kanye; he’s a piker, compared to a moron like Stutzman (or Cruz ), who has an actual vote in the Congress of the United States.

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  24. Charlotte said on June 20, 2013 at 12:01 pm

    Oh man — word is leaking that Gandolfini was in Italy with his 13 year old son for a “guys trip” before going to a film festival. The kid found him having a heart attack, and called the hotel folks — then CPR and ambulances and the emergency room and then he was all alone with his dead father in a foreign country. Break my heart.

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  25. Prospero said on June 20, 2013 at 12:48 pm

    Anthony Bourdain’s thumnail photo should be in dictionaries next to “insufferably boorish”, and I hear Procul singing Piggy, Pig, Pig every time I see Paula Deen. My only child is a grown woman now that grew up a fan of E Street, Tom Waits, XTC, Prince

    Extrapolating from their ages, Hungary was about as strapped as a country can get when the Gabimbo sisters were in their beauty queen primes.

    Funniest thing about Kanye is Dick Vitale’s pitiful shoutout on Twitter. That is just sad. Made up baby talk, boinking portly white women, bad spelling, stupid serial nicknames and purple drank do not an artist make. I was an early adopter on rap music and I own NWA, Run-DMC, KRS-1, Public Enemy, Bone Thugs and Harmony, and Diggable Planets albums. And Wyclef’s The Carnival, which is a masterpiece that completely transcends hiphop. But this stuff lately is fracking drivel, and the downward trend in hiphop’s IQ started with P the Diddler. Kanye is an ahole; his bitch scorned act when he snatched the microphone was so lame it’s surprising any kid is left that buys his act enough to spend money on his album. So is JayZ, especially after the maternity ward remake episode. And what these guys call music is repetitive, derivative, unimaginative and, generally, forgettable and boring as hell. I imagine this crap nauseates somebody like Chuck D. These guys are inferior to the idiot assclown Flava Flav. Maybe Flav could hit Kanye with the clock he wears around his neck.

    Tony Soprano aside, I really liked the at war two men movie The Last Castle, a wonderfully melodramatic scenery chewing competition between Gandolfini and R. Redford. I don’t think I know anybody else that ever watched it. Anybody that liked Sidney Lumet’s The Hill, with Sean Connery, would like The Last Castle.

    A lot of GOPer Congressvarmints are recipients of farm subsidy money. Grassley should recuse himself from the discussion and from votes on the issue.

    People like this dickhead TN rep. Fincher, who’s a leader ion the granny starving aspects of the farm bill while collecting subsidy bucks. I bet he claims to have Christian values.

    I have fond memories of the Joe. Saw the Stones there in ’69, with BB King opening, and later CSN&Y.

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  26. beb said on June 20, 2013 at 12:50 pm

    Charlotte, that is rough, man.

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  27. Bob (not Greene) said on June 20, 2013 at 2:06 pm

    Hip-hop I can get on board with. A friend of mine plays percussion for these guys.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mivi7TyF8Wg

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  28. coozledad said on June 20, 2013 at 2:16 pm

    That’s fun stuff, Bob. The horns sound like son of Fishbone.

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  29. Basset said on June 20, 2013 at 2:40 pm

    In my opinion hip-hop, as Bill Monroe used to say in other contexts, “ain’t no part of nothing.”

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  30. Prospero said on June 20, 2013 at 2:51 pm

    Masterful short story writer Alice Munro wins a book award and announces she’s not writing anymore, in a funny and interesting interview.

    Here’s a very thoughtful and moving piece about receiving a cancer diagnosis, by the CEO of Sojourners, a liberal public policy and social welfare group that actually deserves a 501(c)4 tax designation, since they meet the requirements of the tax code for exclusivity regarding social welfare activities. As does the NAACP, which Shrubco IRS attacked and tried to relieve of tax exempt status. And that’s the rest of the story.

    Anybody buy watermelon Oreos yet. Eeeeewww. Certain to taste more like Peeps than watermelon. Gross.

    That’s some good jazz-hop Bob(nG) Diggable Planets is similar, a bit more raucous. Fishbone are a bunch of maniacs.

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  31. Sherri said on June 20, 2013 at 2:56 pm

    I can’t believe y’all are so mean to Miz Paula. All she wanted to do was recreate a wedding for her brother just like the one great-great-granddaddy had when he married his cousin!

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  32. Brandon said on June 20, 2013 at 3:08 pm

    Hip hop is now centered in the South. It originated on the East Coast. The West Coast rose in prominence in the late 80s, and through the mid 90s, the region was a contender for the new center of hip hop. From the late 90s on, the South gained power with several regional scenes (New Orleans, Houston, Memphis, Miami, Atlanta). Everyone from Master P and Three Six Mafia to Lil Jon to Trick Daddy to newer rappers like Gucci Mane and Yung Jeezy. But one of the hottest rappers now, Chief Keef, is a Chicagoan. The book Dirty South is a good overview of Southern hip hop’s beginnings and rise to current prominence. And the below article explains trap rap:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_(music_genre)

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  33. Prospero said on June 20, 2013 at 3:37 pm

    If Paula Deen ever needs a transfusion, somebody will have to sterilize a stall at a dairy farm and a room at Duke’s (South’s favorite) mayonnaise factory. Pass the deep-fried butter and the mayonnaise dip.

    Mocking Kanye’s product placements, mercilessly.

    I just got an email with the message: “Al Franken must be defeated.” Now where did these shitheels get my address? The NSA. And somebody was asking why people send malware. If I knew how, I’d be sending big ammo to the Conservative Campaign Committee and to whatever bastards sold them my email address. Guess it’s not just the government playing fast and loose with telecomm info.

    I’m listening to George Clinton’s Maggot Brain album in its entirety on Youtube right now. Pretty much leaves hiphop of the last 15 years in the dust. Last hiphop album displaying originality was probably the first Outkast album.

    Hiphop antidote for Basset, Steve Earle and Del McCoury band on a coal mining song:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBuMFDHkrH8

    The Lady, and her hubby, the Cannonball, talk about boating all the time. I imagine they have a Boston Whaler. The brand claims to be unsinkable, and that couple looks to go about half a ton in toto.

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  34. brian stouder said on June 20, 2013 at 3:51 pm

    Poor toto!!

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  35. Judybusy said on June 20, 2013 at 4:10 pm

    Check out this ASL interpreter for some rap group I’ve never heard of. Pretty cool!

    In other musical tastes, I’m reading a fictionalized account of the life of Hildegard von Bingen. I’d highly recommend it, if you’re interested in the lives of religious women in the early 1100s. And who isn’t? But that’s one of the things that I find so fascinating about people–what we respond to aesthetically, what moves us. Although I can’t fathom why people would want to listen to such mysoginistic claptrap as Kanye.

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  36. Brandon said on June 20, 2013 at 4:25 pm

    Wu Tang has been around for at least twenty years. Their breakthrough album in 1993 helped start the movement of hip hop back to the East Coast at a time when Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg were atop the rap charts. Wu Tang is far better than many of the rappers out there.

    @Judybusy: What’s the title? There’s a few books on Hildegard. She had a very fascinating life, it seems.

    Kanye, I think, presented himself as a sensitive rapper. But fame got to his head and now you get Yeezus. It’s not unlike John Mayer, who started out as clean-cut and earnest then morphed into a louche weirdo who said he had a Benetton heart but a white-supremist member.

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  37. Brandon said on June 20, 2013 at 4:35 pm

    What do you think? Are they savvy or just chicken?

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/wp/2013/06/20/the-fauquier-times-democrat-removes-democrat-from-its-name-after-108-years/

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  38. Judybusy said on June 20, 2013 at 4:46 pm

    Brandon, reading that Wu Tang have been around for 20 years just made me laugh–I’m really not tuned into that whole world at all.

    The book is called Illuminations:A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen, by Mary Sharratt. Sharratt has a few other books, too, including one about women mill workers in Minneapolis in the early 1900s. I really like her writing, and the centrality that women have in her work.

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  39. brian stouder said on June 20, 2013 at 4:48 pm

    And speaking of women, it’s an all-woman jury for Treyvon Martin’s killer.

    Struck me as interesting…

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  40. Prospero said on June 20, 2013 at 5:10 pm

    Oliver Sacks has a good chapter on Hildegard in The Man that Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I have a recording of some of her choral music that is very beautiful.

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  41. LAMary said on June 20, 2013 at 5:24 pm

    Not seeing the von Bingen in Hildegard’s name, I thought you were talking about the 50’s TV star. Even I’m not old enough to remember her but I wondered what Oliver Sacks was doing writing about her.

    James Gandolfini was in in Italy with his son, but his sister was with them as well as his personal assistant, so his son wasn’t alone.

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  42. Judybusy said on June 20, 2013 at 5:33 pm

    Yes, I think Sacks posits that Hildegard’s visions were connected to migraines–I was doing some reading about her today and they quoted that bit from Sacks on a site. I love that kind of music, too. It’s so soaring, yet so restful.

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  43. LAMary said on June 20, 2013 at 5:40 pm

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovQoN7izf2U

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  44. coozledad said on June 20, 2013 at 6:09 pm

    They’ve always been trash, and always will be:
    http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/06/20/bushs_ancestor_was_a_slave_trader.html

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  45. Prospero said on June 20, 2013 at 6:11 pm

    Ha, ha, ha, Boehner you nit. The farm bill got it’s lunch. Boner says it’s the fault of the Dems, who said upfront and ahead of time they wouldn’t vote for the evil homunculus Protect Monsanto Bill nor for the massive cuts in federal food aid for the poorest Americans in the SNAP Program. Nice try Speaker Dumbass. You lost all the teabangers by raising the subsidies instead of 86ing them. He’s getting to be like Lear, doting on the ungrateful, scheming, evil members while defecating on those that try to take the job seriously.

    Brandon, there is a weekly in Linn, MO called the Unterrified Democrat that has been around for a long time.

    The Zimmerman jurors are all caucasian too. There’s no place like FLA. The trial is FLA white tie. Jorts, wife beater and freshly trimmed mullet de rigeur.

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  46. Prospero said on June 20, 2013 at 6:50 pm

    Judybusy: When I first heard Hildegard music, I imagined it being incorporated into pieces by Yes or the Strawbs, or a reconstituted King Crimson. Shortly after Hildegard was canonized in ’12, she was designated a “Doctor of the Church”, a rare honor she shares with Thomas Aquinas. Hildegard is the only woman granted this rank. The wonderful thing about reading Oliver Sacks, aside from his effortless prose style, is his ability to examine the science of neurological phenomena without losing a sense of wonder regarding the mystery, spirituality and humanity involved in his cases. When I taught anatomy, the kids did not want to leave the nervous system after I had them read Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

    Beautiful and useful, possibly lifesaving, public art. Really cool piece of design.

    Lewis Black is on Craig Ferguson’s show tonight. That should be pretty damned funny.

    This really fries my ass:

    http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/19/us_chamber_versus_entitlements_the_cuts_won_t_stop.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content

    The US Chamber is a lobbying organization that specializes in injecting money from foreign corporations into American political processes. The Chamber wants to attack SSI and call it an eentitlement? I’m 62 and have been paying max FICA since my middle 30s. They can kiss my ass with this entitlement baloney. As for employers that also paid in, they would have had to pay me more, directly or into an IRA had they not. Using the term entitlement for something that people like me have paid for already in large amounts under a social contract is infuriating Luntzian and Lakoffian horse crap, like talking about Obamaphones. I swear I will land a right hand to the face of anybody that says this in my presence.

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  47. Bitter Scribe said on June 20, 2013 at 7:46 pm

    From Kris Humphries to this guy. Kim, girl, you sure can pick ’em.

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  48. Bitter Scribe said on June 20, 2013 at 7:50 pm

    I’m sure it will surprise no one to learn that Zsa Zsa Gabor was Paris Hilton’s step-great-grandmother.

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  49. Julie Robinson said on June 20, 2013 at 7:53 pm

    Judybusy, that sounds like a fascinating book and it’s definitely going in my queue. I love chant and have several chant CDs, including a couple written by Hildegard. It’s understood by few these days but when done well, preferably in a building with some nice reverb, you can understand its mystical connections.

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  50. LAMary said on June 20, 2013 at 7:54 pm

    Bitter, Kris Humphries and Kanye can sure pick ’em as well. They all deserve each other as far as I can tell.

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  51. Prospero said on June 20, 2013 at 8:48 pm

    Zsa Zsa Gabor was Paris Hilton’s step-great-grandmother

    That’s where she got her brains and talent.

    http://www.popmodal.com/video/5523/Green-Acres-Theme-Song-1966

    I first heard of Hildegarde from a woman I used to know named Patty Van Ness, who played violin in a superb rock band she started with her brother Paul called Private lightning. It’s been years, but I see from Google she has refashioned herself into a composer and classical violinist, and is Patricia (L. noble woman) now, not Patty. She still has a strong interest in sacred music apparently, and has had jobs as a musical director at several N.E. conservatories. She has written music that incorporates aspects of Hildegardes, apparently:

    http://earlymusicboston.com/422/hildegard-ordo-virtutum/

    I don’t know that anybody has actually called her a “21st Century Hildegarde”, but Patty was very smart, very talented, and very beautiful. Private lightning:

    http://www.nme.com/nme-video/youtube/id/xpA-6fMV90U

    I’m pretty sure Paul Van Ness wrote the lyrics, which I think are quite good. If you like this song, find Song of the Kite and I Can’t Kiss You When I’m Laughing on YouTube. This was an extremely original band. Like the cars with heart and soul, and much better lyrics.

    Who’s that babydaddy, Kanye or Reggie Bush? Kris Humphries is a big SOB, 6-8, 6-9 about 250. In a game between the Nets and Celts this year, he low-bridged KGarnett. Really dirty play intending to injure. 5-11 165lb Rondo went after Humphries who retreated into the stands. Rondo was suspended. I would have thrown Humphries out of the NBA for backing up a dirty play by turning coward.

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