Wild Wild West

"No people are uninteresting," especially the middle-aged Uber driver who proceeded to tell me her life story on the way to the airport yesterday, including how she realized she had to leave her hometown of NYC and move to Arizona 27 years ago when she almost punched a lady with whom she was sharing an elevator, and concluded her stem-winder by telling me she was packing heat because Big Pharma had put a hit out on her. 😳

The Thingz Play Tiki Oasis

The Thingz at the Hotel Valley Ho, Scottsdale, AZ, 4/12/19

Bamboo Club Opening Soiree

The Thingz at the Bamboo Club, Long Beach, CA, March 8, 2019

Naughty or Nice?

Me:  Anybody know what claustrophobia means?
Student:  When you're afraid of Santa!

Take Care of Yourselves, Loves

"Sadness seems to clump.
Its seems I go for a while without much, and then a big clump of it all happens at once.
And sometimes it comes for no reason and leaves just as mysteriously.
Often I cant even identify where it comes from or why.
Other times it comes in waves of sad occurrences.
Sometimes sad things happen but they dont seem to get me.
Sometimes everyday problems hit like I had never had them before.
But the feeling of being trapped, no escape, no relief. I am so glad I dont have to deal with it all the time like so many do.
I know a lot of people that are sad now, and they have good reason to be, I hope they endure and find some peace and relief.
My sadness is like an unwanted visitor who drops in unannounced, but doesnt stay long, and that is something I can be thankful about.
But I fear that sadness that comes and unpacks and repaints the walls and leaves its dishes in my sink and rearranges the furniture and squats in the spare bedroom and won't move out even when I tell it I am calling the police.
I fear the sadness that lies in bed snoring and driving away the sleep, or puts its ice cold feet on me under the covers, or won't shut up and let me escape into the peace of unconsciousness.
For all who are sad, depressed, feeling hopeless and in distress, I know it doesnt help, but I feel for you. And for those who battle these things on a daily basis because of things you cannot control in your bodies or your lives, the little sadnesses I have endured have made me appreciate the strength you must have to go on.
xo" - J. Paul Stevens

"Event Politics"

"This is just the latest instance of a phenomenon you could call “event politics”—that familiar flurry of knee-jerk responses sparked by a single image or clip that a little too perfectly illustrates one side’s worldview. There was the notorious Melania jacket that launched a feverish outrage cycle as soon as she appeared in it. There was the photograph of the little girl crying at the border that went viral and ended up on the cover of Time because it put a face and a feeling to the cruelty of Trump’s family separations. The problem: She herself wasn’t separated from her mother...This is motivated reasoning, the kind everyone uses when an image that seemingly proved something—whether it’s that antifa is a danger to society or that Kavanaugh-lite teens are entitled and racist—collapses into irresolution. To the people circulating it, that the image doesn’t portray exactly what they thought it did matters little. They knew the truth it demonstrated before and still know it after the image is debunked. The image was a convenient piece of viscerally persuasive evidence. It was the kind of thing one posts because one understands it, ultimately, as a recruitment tool for others...This is where event politics always seem to wind up: A ton of energy gets spent, but there’s no cognitively satisfying conclusion—no understanding, resolution, or shared meaning that helps the country progress in its conversations with itself. 'It’s a jacket' might be the White House equivalent of the 'it’s just a hat' defense of the Covington Catholic teens’ MAGA caps. It’s not true, and everyone knows it, but it seems dumb to overlegislate such petty terrain... I suspect, though, that event politics are a lot better at preserving power than disrupting it." (Read the rest here)

Priorities

May we remember MLK's words about Vietnam and our nation's priorities when we can't find money to fight homelessness and poverty or fund education and health care but have no problem finding the funds for war so hawks like Bolton, et al can attack Iran...

"I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, 'Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.' The world must hear this. I pray to God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty." - MLK, jr.

Red for Ed

Bret Harte Teachers Support Striking LAUSD Teachers

Love for The Thingz

Thanks to Falling James of the LA Weekly for including The Thingz latest album, Supersonic Saucer, in his Top Ten 2018 punk/indie releases.  Grateful is a great way to start the new year!!

Ancient Hallmark Sympathy Card

"Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." - Aeschylus

We Are Devo

“Presently, the fabric that holds a society together has shredded in the wind. Everyone has their own facts, their own private Idaho stored in their expensive cellular phones. The earbuds are in, the feedback loops are locked, and the Frappuccino’s are flowing freely. Social media provides the highway straight back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The restless natives react to digital shadows on the wall, reduced to fear, hate, and superstition.” - Gerald Casale

Would You Like to Buy a Monkey?

"Cabin Boy doesn’t care whether you laugh or not. It’s dangerously indifferent to anything but its own need to confuse, which is one reason squares hated it. This deep affection for the non sequitur, for the random joke, for the thing that will thrill a few and befuddle many, would later be refined by Late Night With Conan O’Brien and elevated by Mr. Show With Bob and David. Adult Swim would make it, if not mainstream, then at least the lingua franca of college night owls. Dan Harmon would turn it into something akin to a theology. But it was Resnick and Elliott who stopped making sense first, and for their efforts they were shunned and mocked before becoming heroes to weird kids everywhere." (Link here)

Make America Guileless Again

"'Nothing on this page is real,' read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. 'No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,' Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. 'Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?'” (Link here)

Frameworks and Metaphors > Facts

“A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning, and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true. People think in terms of conceptual structures called frames and metaphors. It’s not just the facts. They have values, and they understand which facts fit into their conceptual framework. You can’t understand something if your brain doesn’t allow it, if your brain filters it out in terms of your values. Democrats seem not to understand this, and they keep trying to employ reason as a persuasive vehicle. I wish Enlightenment reasoning was an accurate model for how most people think and judge, but it isn’t, and we better acknowledge that fact.” - George Lakoff

Orange is the New Blue

Counter Intuitive

"If you notice how good the drummer is, then they’re a good drummer. If you don’t notice how good the drummer is, then they’re a great drummer."

The Almaybe

"Saying that God does not exist is not so different from saying that we cannot comprehend God’s existence. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic. 'A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think,' Gray writes."

Happy Halloween!

"The internet is the technology paradox writ more monstrous than ever. It’s a nonpareil tool for learning, roving and constructive community-building. But it’s unrivaled, too, in the spread of lies, narrowing of interests and erosion of common cause. It’s a glorious buffet, but it pushes individual users toward only the red meat or just the kale. We’re ridiculously overfed and ruinously undernourished."  (Link here)

Hate, Violence, and the Pursuit of Vengeance

How many more innocent lives have to be sacrificed on the man-made altar of the 2nd Amendment before the unalienable Rights endowed by our Creator to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness take precedence?

Spirits of the Season

The Bottled Spirits at Gallagher's Pub in Huntington Beach, CA