Ah yes! Rap from the colonies has caught on across the pond! I don't know why, but I've watched all of Mr. B's YouTube videos, and I'm thinking about looking for his album. It's fascinating, like when that stripper fell in love with John "The Elephant Man" Merrick. I love it. Ith very civilized...

Posted under Music, The Normal Things I Ramble About, it's BRITISH!!!!

This is serious. Barak Obama was really starting to win me over. He's never served in the military, but he's shown some startling insight into what needs to be done to fix our nation's myriad of military issues, like Iraq (get the fuck out now), Afghanistan (get the fuck out soon, after we have an asshole killing contest), and the rest of the GWOT AOR (predator drones, hellfire missiles, ninjas, Chuck Norris and Leroy Jenkins).
Now, some fuck-nut at Rolling Stone is allowed access to General McChrystal's entourage for a week in what may be the biggest military blunder since Stripes, and what does he do? "Oh, I'll bet he highlights his strengths as a leader." No, you're wrong. "Oh, then, I'll bet he talks about the amazing feats he accomplished on his meteoric rise through the ranks to become one of the most highly respected military leaders since Patton?" No, not that either. "Oh, well, then I guess the only thing left is McChrystal's history of participating in raids and missions at the soldier's level, no matter how high his rank. I mean, he's the first General to ever go on over 100 missions with his troops. That's what they made a point of, right?". Wrong again.
That whole fucking article is a Japanese torpedo. How many Taliban are on the Rolling Stone staff for them to go THAT FUCKING FAR out of their way to cause problems? Is Jane Fonda on their board of directors? Because that's the exact type of journalism they are participating in. Fuck their ass-rag magazine for COMPLETELY DERAILING our military offensive in Afghanistan. Thanks to a couple of shitty reporters, and a big douchebag of a media circus that they ringleadered, they forced the fumble of the greatest possible military command at the time we need it most. Yeah, he's getting replaced with Petraeus, but so what? It's like replacing your squeaky brake pads with cardboard. Yeah, they won't make noise any more, but they also won't help you any as you hurtle downhill into a church full of children and explode into flames. "Gosh, I thought the cardboard would be effective because it didn't make any noise", you say to a claims adjuster in heaven, after you die in a fiery mess. You failed to use anything effective because of your stupid pride and dumb idea of how the world works in relation to you. Good job.
I would like to go on record with the following:
1. McChrystal is the best kind of military leader that only shows up in a generation. Last generation was Patton. We have McChrystal. Our president chose to put a fucking yes man in his place, at a time when his leadership is the difference between billions of US Dollars being squandered or used effectively to fight the Taliban, because a music magazine said he used bad words and didn't like Joe Biden. If you were to poll the country, Mr. President, we ALL say disparaging things about Joe Biden. He's a dick.
2. I met McChrystal once in the course of work, and he convinced me and 145 other people that we needed to work 80 hours a week to support operations, by convincing me that it was important to our way of life. I met Patraeus once, and he only taught me that you're supposed to wear a hat outside, but not inside, and that I'm very small and insignificant and nothing I do can ever help a command so important as his. Guess which one I'm rooting for?
3. If this is the way our administration is going to make its decisions, I would rather live in Iceland.

That's it. If this decision isn't going to be changed, then every smart thing they did is about to be undone. Ugh. How could the media have this much impact on our government policy and staffing? Is Home and Gardens going to start weighing in on the Federal Interest Rate? This is all wrong.

Posted under America is a couple of months away from a Mad Max movie, SOOO maybe drinking been little I've, Terrorism, Tha Whar, The Normal Things I Ramble About, What the fuck America?

Musically, visually, and conceptually Lauri Anderson is really ahead of our time, as seen here playing a tape bow violin and contemplating binary data. It's not going to be until several hundred years into the future that people really 'get' her, and by then we'll be enslaved by an alien race that will have us mining cobalt for 20 hours a day and I fear that her message will be lost. So, I call on all our scientists and government think tanks: Figure it out before it's too late. Maybe she's trying to warn us of impending doom. Maybe iPods are slowly poisoning us. Someone needs to figure this out!

Posted under Music, The Normal Things I Ramble About

I've been buried under work. Really buried, like Jimmy Hoffa under a sports stadium. During this period, for some reason, I've been re-connecting with my Eastern European roots through Last.fm. Last.fm is amazing. I type something like 'Goran Bregović', and BAM- I get him and a bunch of crap like him. So I've been cruising the Gypsy Tag Radio, and reconnecting with a bunch of crap that I thought was cool many years ago. King of my high school obsessions (second only to masturbation), is Vladimir Visotski. Proof that at some point, Tom Waits fucked Pete Seeger in the ass in a Russian time machine, got him pregnant, and he kept that baby.  Amazing, long winded, self obsessed, he sounds like a cigarette being stubbed out in a mixture of gravel, vodka and coffee. Just like Pete Seeger, he's a subversive folkie. I love these guys who say "I'm just a guy with a guitar that hates the government", and the government mobilizes against him like he's a fucking nuclear missile on it's way to Cuba. Visotski was illegal in Soviet Mother Russia forever. He was even featured in the movie White Nights, right at the zenith of my I-Wish-I-Was-From-Eastern-Europe phase, in a scene where Baryshnikov reminds us that while he can't act his way out of a wet paper bag, there is a very good reason that he an international icon. VV has an amazing discography, with   probably a billion songs. Only Robert Pollard can match him, and even he was pretending to be British (I guess). Sadly, he's part of a group of my heroes that's dead now, so I'll never have the opportunity to grovel at his feet or try to impress him with my knowledge of Soviet Cold War Prison Russian slang, which I studied for a year (yeah, the Star Trek Fan Club alienated me).

Posted under Music, The Normal Things I Ramble About