Poem: The Jitters

The Jitters

1
We almost always feel less
Safe than we actually are.

And not feeling safe uses
Vast swaths of bandwidth

With its high noise to signal ratio,
Leaving nothing redemptive

In the wake of paralysis
By the jitters.

2
It comes like a hit and run driver
Shooting through the crosswalk

As you stop
To tie your shoe--

Luck and circumstance
Conspire to save you.

3
Every throbbing second you spend here,
You engage in a game of dodge ball,

And bob and weave through a multitude
Of objective hazards, walls, and shoals

Over which you have no control―
And only a fraction of which you ever see.

4
If we knew of every near-miss,
It would be tough to keep shuffling on,

And somehow, we learn just enough
To mostly keep us on our toes.
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drawing: the management team

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Barbara Bush (Sr) in a swimsuit, The Brady Bunch porn movie, and other oddities

Babs Bush Sr. in her swimsuit

This is just some blogger navel gazing, when it gets down to it. For some reason, this blog has been getting a bazillion hits this week...the biggest draw: Barbara Bush Sr. in her younger years in a bathing suit (600 hits this week!), the Brady Bunch porn movie, that perennial draw, the Enunclaw Horse Sex story, and The Walribi tribe penis shaking custom. Out of 3,500 articles here over the last 4 1/2 years, it's the juicy and sometimes scandalous ones that draw the perennial crowds.



OK, I'll take it. Somehow my poetry, art, biography, and political commentary never draw quite those same numbers. . .
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Three-quarter ton bull drags officers down NJ street

Do you think they took a little ribbing when they got back to the station house?

(AP) - PATERSON, N.J. - Police say a 1,400-pound bull that escaped from a northern New Jersey slaughterhouse dragged officers with a lasso down a street and ran 10 blocks before being captured and sedated. Chief John DeCando, spokesman for Paterson Police's animal control division, says the bull was being unloaded at ENA Meat Packing Inc. when it broke loose just before 8:30 a.m. Monday.

Police tried to corral the bull by lassoing a rope around the animal's neck, but it dragged officers down the street instead.

DeCando says traffic was light during the bull run. He says the area where the officers were dragged was not residential or near a school.

Officers finally corralled the animal and DeCando was able to sedate it.

No injuries were reported. The bull was returned to the slaughterhouse.

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Triple portrait of SoS Hillary Rodham Clinton

Click to enlarge the SoS

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Seattle rain and The Beaufort Rain Scale

Seattle, Washington is well-known for its rain, but many cities have greater rainfall than Seattle (especially in the east, and particularly Lousiana and Alabama [it's the Gulf!]). It rains very often in Seattle, but it is often a drizzle or sprinkle. The rain in other cities is often heavier, causing them to have larger averages.

Tonight, the sky is dotted with cirrus clouds. Sometime in the next few hours, I expect we will see them converge. . .rain is predicted for tomorrow. The clouds tonight are scattered enough that you can still see numerous stars and glimpses of the moon.

The annual rainfall in Seattle ranges is almost always between 37 and 39 inches.


Average Rainfall in Seattle by month:
Jan 5.13
Feb 4.18
Mar 3.75
Apr 2.59
May 1.78
June 1.49
July 0.79
Aug 1.02
Sep 1.63
Oct 3.19
Nov 5.90
Dec 5.62
Total 37.07

According to Livescience.com, Seattle is actually pretty far down the list of rainy cities, with a little over three feet of rain. Many cities in Florida and Louisana get a couple feet more rain than Seattle, and there are cities in Alaska and Hawaii that receive over eight feet of rain anually. New York City gets at least three more inches of rain than Seattle does, annually; those inches, however, fall on far fewer days.


The Top Ten US cities for rainfall:

Mobile, Alabama--67 inches average annual rainfall; 59 average annual rainy days

Pensacola, Florida--65 inches average annual rainfall; 56 average annual
rainy days

New Orleans, Louisiana--64 inches average annual rainfall; 59 average
annual rainy days

West Palm Beach, Florida--63 inches average annual rainfall; 58 average
annual rainy days

Lafayette, Louisiana--62 inches average annual rainfall; 55 average annual
rainy days

Baton Rouge, Louisiana--62 inches average annual rainfall; 56 average
annual rainy days

Miami, Florida--62 inches average annual rainfall; 57 average annual rainy days

Port Arthur, Texas--61 inches average annual rainfall; 51 average annual
rainy days

Tallahassee, Florida--61 inches average annual rainfall; 56 average annual
rainy days

Lake Charles, Louisiana [Lake Charles is also the name of my favorite Lucinda Williams song] --58 inches average annual rainfall; 50 average annual rainy days

The rain in Seattle splashes, burbles, spouts, gushes, mists, pours, pounds, drizzles, sprinkles, and precipitates. Rain is really just the condensation of atmospheric water vapor into drops heavy enough to fall, often making it to the surface of our planet. Much of this planet depends on rain for fresh water, both collecting on the surface, and in creeks, rivers, and ponds, as well as recharging the subterranean aquifers and springs that we tap with our wells. In many parts of the world--specifically the arid desert regions--water never even reaches the surface. This phenomena is known as virga. In Seattle, we do not experience virga.

According to the Wikipedia, "The fine particulate matter produced by car exhaust and other human sources of pollution forms cloud condensation nuclei, leads to the production of clouds and increases the likelihood of rain. As commuter and commercial traffic cause pollution to build up over the course of the week, the likelihood of rain increases: it peaks by Saturday, after five days of weekday pollution has been built up. In heavily populated areas that are near the coast, such as the United States' Eastern Seaboard, the effect can be dramatic: there is a 22% higher chance of rain on Saturdays than on Mondays."

I can't determine who came up with the Beaufort rain scale. It's been drifting around the interweb for a long long time now...you can find it in some places with huge lists of recipients, and about twelve carats > in front of every single line.


The Beaufort Rain Scale

Force 0: Complete Dryness. Absence of rain from the air. The gap between two periods of wet. Associated Phrase: "It looks like it might rain."

Force 1: Scotch Mist. Presence of wet in the air, hovering rather than falling. You can feel damp on your face but if you supinate your hand, nothing lands on it. Associated Phrase: "I think it's trying to rain."

Force 2: Individual drops. Individual drops of rain falling, but quite separate as if they are all freelance and not part of the same corporate effort. If switched on now, windscreen wipers make an awful screeching noise. Spectacle wearers begin to grumble. A newspaper being read outside begins to speckle. Associated Phrase: "It's spitting."

Force 3: Fine Rain. Raindrops falling together now, but still invisibly, like the spray which
drifts off a fountain with the wind behind. Ignored by all sportsmen except Test cricketers, who dash for cover. Spectacle wearers walk into oncoming traffic. Windscreen wipers, when switched on, make the windscreen totally opaque. If being read outside, a newspaper gets damp. Associated Phrases: "Is it worth putting the umbrella up?" and "Another fine rain you've got us into."

Force 4: Visible Light Shower. Hair starts to congeal around ears. First rainwear appears. People start to remember washing left out. Ignored by all sportsmen except Wimbledon players, who dash for cover. A newspaper being read outside starts to tear slightly. Associated Phrases: "It's starting to come down now," "It won't last," and "It's settled in for the day now."

Force 5: Drizzle. Shapes beginning to be visible in rain for the first time, usually drifting from right to left. Windscreen wipers are too slow at slow speed, too fast at fast speed. Shower-proof rainwear turns out to be shower-proof all right, but not drizzle-proof. First damp feeling inside either shoes or neckline. Butterflies take evasive action and begin to fly straight. A newspaper being read in the open starts to turn to pulp. Associated Phrases: "It's really chucking it down now," "It's raining cats and dogs," and "Nice for the farmers."

Force 6: Downpour. You can see raindrops bouncing on impact, like charter planes landing. Leaves and petals recoil when hit. Anything built of concrete begins to look nasty. Eyebrows become waterlogged. Horse racing called off. Wet feeling rises above ankles and starts for knees. Butterflies fly backwards. A newspaper being read in the open divides into two. Gardeners watering the flowers begin to think about packing it in. Associated Phrases: "It's coming down in stair rods," and "It's bucketing down."

Force 7: Squally, Gusty Rain. As Force 6, but with added wind. Water starts to be forced up your nostrils. Maniacs leave home and head for the motorway in their cars. Butterflies start walking. Household cats and dogs become unpleasant to handle. Cheaper clothes start to come to bits. Associated Phrases: "It's pissing down now," and "There's some madman out in the garden trying to read a newspaper."

Force 8: Torrential Rain. The whole world outside has been turned into an en suite douche. It starts raining inside umbrellas. Windscreen wipers become useless. The ground looks as if it is steaming. Butterflies drown. Your garments start merging into each other and becoming indistinguishable. Man reading newspaper in the open starts to disintegrate. All team games except rugby, football, and water polo called off. Associated Phrase: "Jesus, will you look at that coming down."

Force 9: Cloudburst. Rain so fierce that it can only be maintained for a minute or two. Drops so large that they hurt if they hit you. Water gets into your pockets and forms rock-pools. Windscreen wipers are torn off cars. Too wet for water-skiing. Instantaneous rivers form on roads, and man reading newspaper floats past. Rain runs up windows.

Force 10: Hurricane. Not defined inland - the symptoms are too violent and extreme (cars floating, newspaper readers lost at sea, people drowned by inhaling rain, etc.). So, if hurricane conditions do appear to pertain, look for some other explanation. Associated Phrases: "Oh my god, the water tank has burst - it's coming through the kitchen ceiling," and "I think the man upstairs has fallen asleep in his bath."
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Alien Lore No.157 - The Nome, Alaska abductions and "The Fourth Kind"

In 2005, the FBI sent homicide detectives to investigate a series of unsolved disappearances and deaths in Nome, Alaska. Most of the victims were native villagers. Between the 1960s and 2004, over 20 people mysteriously died, or vanished. In 2006, the FBI concluded that "excessive alcohol consumption and a harsh winter climate" were to blame for the disappearances.

1n 1972, a scale of measurement was established for alien encounters. This system of classification behind it was started by astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek, and was first suggested in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. He introduced the first three kinds of encounters.



A new movie, The Fourth Kind is set in Nome, Alaska, where--mysteriously, since the 1960s--a number of the population has been reported missing every year. Despite multiple FBI investigations of the region, the truth has never been discovered. The movie has opened up a debate about whether any of this is actually true or not, or if the movie is really just another Blair Witch style documentary.

“The movie looks ridiculous,” said Kawerak Inc. Vice President Melanie Edwards, who watched the trailer online Monday. “It’s insensitive to family members of people who have gone missing in Nome over the years.”



According to Kyle Hopkins of adn.com, after years of rumors that Nome had become a dangerous place for travelers from the villages, local officials in 2005 released a list of about 20 disappearances and deaths in the city. The cases dated back to the 1960s. At the time, a Nome police officer was on trial for the murder of a young village woman, and some residents mistrusted city police.

The FBI stepped in, reviewing two dozen cases, eventually determining that excessive alcohol consumption and the winter climate were a common link in many of the cases. Unlike other commercial hubs in rural Alaska, Nome is a “wet” city, with bars and liquor stores.
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We often take heart in those statements that play to what we believe or want to believe

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"A majority of patients who have one hip dislocation will never have another."
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The English Beat return to Seattle October 3

Ranking Roger, one of the founders of the two-tone ska movement and The English Beat are returning to Seattle for a show at the Showbox on October 3rd. I'll be there. I've seen them in both Austin and Seattle. The show at Antone's was one of the best shows I've ever seen. The one at the Showbox in Seattle was pretty damned good.

The Beat became the English Beat. Ranking Roger (the lead singer and writer) and Dave Wakeling also went on to form General Public, who were lesser in my booklet, but had greater success. Other members of the original The Beat went on to form Fine Young Cannibals, a blue eyed soul band that had huge success both stateside and back in the motherland. The Specials, The Clash, and other bands all contributed members to the various configurations of the band that still exist today. For me, it's Ranking Roger's songs and voice that were the soul of many of these bands. He is a charmer and still has vocal and guitar chops.

Come on out and let's skank at The Showbox! Here is a grainy (and oddly prefaced) video of one of my favorite tunes by The Beat. Following that, is a video of one of their other great songs, Save It For later.

Come out next weekend! I guarantee you'll be bouncing on the dance floor.




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Poem: I've Looked At Clouds From Six Sides Now

[Provisional? Maybe it is done. . .nor sure. . .sometimes means that if/when the real poem emerges, it may include only two lines or all of them, in some sort of subset or superset].

1
The Seattle skybox
Is defined by a thriving
Patchwork of clouds
That resort themselves
In the gathering winds
And rotation of the earth
Forming new collages
In the patterns overhead.

2
A mother-of-pearl moon
Unveils itself in the night sky
As the four winds
Weave tufts and strands of cloud
Around her like fig leaves
Revealing and concealing,
Draping the Sea of Tranquility
The Marias and the crater Tycho
In a cloak of modesty.

3.
250,000 miles below
Under murky clouds
The moon performs
A forbidden hootchie-kootchie dance,
Like Salome or a whirling Turkish Dervish
Spinning in the shifting clouds.

3.
Clouds add a necessary roundness
To our angular lives.
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Jeff Clinton portrait

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The Fish, Part 1 - My life at Carl Fischer, Inc.

Click to enlarge - view of The Fish from Cooper Square Park or The Bowery

I moved to New York City in the spring of 1977, arriving at the Port Authority after a $50, eighty-three hour ride on the Greyhound Bus from Seattle--an excruciatingly cramped and bumpy ride in the back of the bus through Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

Click to enlarge. A shot from 4th avenue/E 8th (St Mark's Place) just north of Cooper Square. I think!

Keelin had already been there since September, along with a dozen other students from Fairhaven College, including the adorable and funny Jan Newberry who became one of our main partners in crime. For the next couple of months, we lived in a loft on Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn, then in a loft in the Houston street war zone near The Bowery, and later back to Atlantic Avenue in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn and for the last three years, at 158 W. 84th Street on the Upper West Side.

I walked through these doors every day for over four years.

The Son of Sam murders were in full swing and the New York Daily News and New York post were filled with Son of Sam headlines every day--almost daring him to strike again. Mayor Abe Beame continued his haphazard and befuddled stewardship of the city. It was dirty, the subways were not air conditioned, there were transit strikes, garbage strikes, litter everywhere, and Times Square was still filled with strip clubs, grindhouses, bad Irish bars, pickpockets, and three card monte players.

New York City was at one of its various low points. . .but it would get worse. Within a year, the first people began showing signs of H.I.V., and the AIDS epidemic began to devastate the city and pick up steam as it spread. The crack epidemic had not yet hit. Punk and new wave music were in full flower and theatre was flourishing. The Boss roared to life. The Yankees were hot. We would attend a World Series game the next year. In fact, we would sneak in using a password for which we'd paid rogue stadium employees. But these random memories are not why we're here. We're here to talk about The Fish.

I bounced back from my first disastrous job at Brewburger (See My Worst Jobs, Part 3), and from my near-death experience in Long Island College Hospital from a collapsed lung that blossomed into double pneumonia (I was a patient there for 23 days). While I was in the hospital, on July 5th, 1977, I watched as the lights of the World Trade Center, and every building across the river and all around me, blinked off. Within a few hours massive looting broke out in the city, and they had to re-open The Tombs to hold the three thousand arrestees. The lights came back a couple of days later. At the worst of it, the hospital was around 103 degrees.

Click to enlarge. July, 1977 - By the time this was taken, it was was no longer touch and go after a collapsed lung devolved into double pneumonia (which the first resident diagnosed as T.B.!) I recovered from double pneumonia after a week, and the pneumothorax was cured in two days once they realized they hadn't actually put the chest tube in the right place. They realized this 20 days in to my 23 day hospital stay. I did not file a lawsuit.

After a week of recovery at home, it was time to hit the job trail again. I grabbed a copy of The Village Voice and New York Times and started firing off resumes and pounding the streets. The letters and resumes: crickets. You were competing with Ivy League grads and their impressive resumes filled with prestigious internships and lists of community services and awards for even lowliest jobs at book publishers.

The silence from potential employers was deafening. I heard nothing back, and received a ream of polite mimeographed turndowns. In September, 1977, after a month of fruitless searching, I received two phone calls and one letter--all on the same day. The first was an offer from a publisher of adult fiction. I would receive a dollar a page for writing pulp porn. They would furnish a bare-bones plotline and list of characters, and after that, it was up to you. You would essentially write a book a week for a couple of hundred dollars.

The second offer of employment was with an adult "novelties" manufacturer and distributor. The job was manning the complaint desk and fielding phone calls , and mostly letters, from their consumers. Their largest product lines were dildos, "restraint devices," blow-up dolls, and a line of scented lubricants. My job would be to answer complaints and negotiate refunds and exchanges for defective merchandise for $2.35 an hour.

The third job offer came from a famous music publisher in the East Village near Broadway, Washington Square Park, and NYU, right across from Cooper Union, and just a couple blocks north of CBGB--Carl Fischer, Inc.

I did the sensible, but foolish thing. And along the way, I met some great friends like Pinky! and Cheryl, Neil Clegg, Crazy Richie, Fuzzy, Susan Ward nee Lurie, Dot Melin nee Jennin, Jim and Pamela Ahlberg, DelRoy, and Mary Farmer. And, in the end, probably missed out on a thousand hilarious stories at the novelty factory. I took the job at The Fish. It was a union job (the AFL-CIO Motion Picture Workers) and paid just under $10,000 a year.

Next up: The Fish, Part 2 -- How Fuzzy (aka Dwight Henry Thompson) taught a hillbilly boy from Seattle the ropes; how we came to be known at The Fish as White Dwight and N***er John. Fuzzy introduced me to Joey Ramone, Klaus Naomi, the poets Ted Berrigan, Tuli Kupferberg, and Allen Ginsberg. And mafia strip clubs, leather and S & M bars, gorgeous transvestites, the joys of chasing down anisette with Rolling Rock, and various other excesses and experiments, about which, more later. I think The Fish story may be good for about five installments...when you work with that many wacky people in a really strange company for four years, something pretty interesting will shake out. And it did.
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Dean - a photo of unknown provenance

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I'm not sure when this photo of Dean was taken, but it reportedly came from a business development trip in the middle-east.
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Rock Shows in Kent, Washington at Tiffany's Skate-In

I went to see my earliest rock shows (after seeing The Beatles at Seattle's Coliseum) at Tiffany's Skate-inn in Kent, Washington. Barney Armstrong, a local Kent boy, always seemed totally cool, since he was fronting rock bands like Aftermath, and Ralph. I think I saw them both at Tiffany's. I also saw Fragile Lime there, as well as Merilee Rush and the Turnabouts (who had a national hit later with "Angel of the morning"), who Barney had also played with. Around this time I also saw Them with Van Morrison (Gloria, Mystic Eyes, Brown Eyed Girl), but I can't remember if it was at Tiffany's or elsewhere.

According to PNWbands.com, "The Barney Armstrong Aftermath played the club circuit in the Pacific Northwest. This was the first band Barney formed after leaving Merrilee. Barney and the band gained notoriety with a "Mister Bojangles" tap dance routine that Barney would do. Adding to their uniqueness was a pedal steel guitar and a five-foot grand piano in a rock band. Bob "Boom Boom" Bennett, formerly with the Sonics banged the skins for the Barney Armstrong Aftermath."

Some other bands that played at Tiffany's:

The Archies

The Bards

Borrowed Time

City Zu

The Box Tops (Alex Chilton's first band...Soul Deep, etc.)

Fragile Lime

The Pied Pipers

Sundae Funnies

The Sunn

Merrilee and the Turnabouts

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"No hamsters" - 1980's dating service video compliation

Dating Montage is an 80's video-dating video compilation on Daily Motion, an Internet video site. Whew. One line, by one of the prospective suitors says it all: "No hamsters."

Dating Montage
Uploaded by smithy00101. - Independent web videos.

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SP No. 39 - jack brummet under the lens

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Joseph Griffith's painting of George Washington - The Surrender

[click the painting to enlarge]

According to Joseph Griffith, "I painted this for the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown when George Washington and the Continentals traunched the British. The county would not dignify it with a response, however, George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate kindly wrote me an e-mail saying they would “pass it along to the staff”.

I think I like Fonzie the best...
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Huh? Keep f***ing that chicken! Ernie Anastos's live "slip"

Ernie Anastos of Fox News affiliate Channel 5 in NYC tells the weather man to keep "f***ing that chicken..." He drops the F-bomb seemingly out of nowhere. The best part of the video clip has to be the look on his co-anchor's face--a mix of horror, her own innocence, and the realization Ernie is in hot water.

As a meandering side-note...Anastos alludes to Frank Purdue's commercials from my days in New York, where Frank would tell us "it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken." Purdue sold a lot of chicken in the NYC region (and his company still does I think). I remember that he somewhat resembled our mayor, Ed Koch, and that Purdue chicken were quite yellow (like many chickens in Mexico) because marigold leaves were part of their diet...


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Digital art: Twisted

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Gollum terrorizes Panama town?

According to the Panamanian news service Telemetro, locals in a Panama town are scared sh**less after a creature they describe as "Gollum" crawled out of a lake and charged at schoolchildren. "The four terrified boys said they hurled rocks at the strange creature to kill it, before throwing its corpse in the water and running away." Actually, they don't sound THAT scared, do they? One of the boys said the five-foot creature emerged from a cave and started scrambling over rocks "as if to attack them".

In a "desperate bid to defend themselves" the four boys hurled rocks at the strange creature to kill it and then threw the body in the water before running away. Their parents returned to the lake the following day — where they discovered the disturbing body washed up on the beach.
Panamanian officials have yet to make any statements regarding their discovery. Quite possibly, their silence is due to the fact that Panama Red is back in town.

Thanks to Jeff Clinton for suggesting this article.
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TBTL Lives!

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TBTL roared back to life as a Podcast after being cancelled as a terrestrial radio show in Seattle. The show was always one of the lowest rated in Seattle, but it has fans around the world and its podcast was always extremely popular. The parent company decide to fund Too Beautiful To Live as a podcast for an unspecified period of time. This is my favorite radio show of all time.


Subscribe! Go to the iTunes Podcast page to subscribe or download shows, or go to http://www.tbtl.net/



Tom Tangney, a Seattle movie critic, wrote the following moving tribute last week, when TBTL's cancellation was announced:


TBTL - Why it mattered
By Tom Tangney


The KIRO radio show TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has attained its own apotheosis. The show whose very title dared to foretell its demise has now completed its mission. TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has indeed died.

I am not here to bury TBTL however, but to praise it. Its 396 shows now constitute the complete "TBTL Collector's Series" of programs and, in retrospect, the most compelling question may not be "Why is it suddenly gone?" but rather "How did it last as long as it did?" I'd like to believe we live in a world in which something like TBTL could survive but the evidence points to the contrary. So instead, I'll just appreciate the fact it existed at all.

TBTL was the most original, innovative, and intelligently off-the-wall show I've ever heard on radio. Where else are you going to hear butchered impromptu readings of famous movie scenes, regular visits from a grammarian, an in-house a capella re-enactment of a modern opera, an Oscar show in which food from a nominated film is cooked and consumed live on air, a week's worth of Spanish and Latin lessons, a spontaneous dance-off to music designated as impossible to dance to, in-studio imitations of Bob Dylan singing Christmas songs, and hundreds of other wacky ideas. And who else but TBTL would organize a listeners' prom, a roller skating party, and nights out at the Opera AND a Mariners game?

Often described as the radio equivalent of the TV series SEINFELD, TBTL really was a show about nothing. And in its seemingly haphazard investigation of "nothing," it proved to be, more often than not, about "everything." The genius of TBTL was that it recognized the profundity of the mundane. We all have to live in the mundane world, of course, but articulate dissections of our mundane lives can actually produce clever and entertaining insights. The personal stories shared each night by host Luke Burbank, producer Jen Andrews, and board-op Sean De Tore were more humorous than earth-shattering but the point was they were always very human - the kind of daily victories and embarrassments that make up our everyday lives.

TBTL often hurtled headlong into the inane preoccupations of pop culture as well. Their WHY IT MATTERS segments would debate everything from the silly to the sublime (e.g. an early show took on the significance of those Karate Kid movies, a late show examined the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino.) But no matter how deep it dove into the superficial, it would always, or almost always, emerge with a smile and a wink. After all, this was a show run by smart and culturally savvy people. Burbank is an especially quick and literate host who can drop off-the-cuff references to Tenzing Norgay, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jeff Koons as readily as he can to Zooey Deschanel and Jemaine Clement and he often does so in a single conversation. And Andrews was always more apt to cull material for the show from, say, THE NEW YORKER than she was from TMZ. For me and much of the TBTListan nation, I suspect, it's that high art/low art tension that best defines the show's appeal.

TBTL always reminded me of a slice of lemon meringue pie. At its best, it was the perfect combination of sugar-spun fluff and tart flavor. When taking a bite out of TBTL, you had to make sure you tasted both the meringue and the lemon, or you'd miss the point. Too many people, I'm afraid, couldn't get past the meringue in the show to taste the lemon. But if you stuck with the show long enough, the lemon would always out.

Rawr.
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Scwarzkopf on War and France

"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Norman Schwartzkopf

Scene from the goldmine

The 20 best rock songs of all time?

The 20 best rock songs of all time?? Not so much. Here is a YouTuber's take on the 20 best of all time. He got a few right. But he also has three or four AC/DC tunes on this list. Stay tuned for my list this week. . .



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Two paintings by Narboo, a Seattle artist

For my birthday, Keelin bought two paintings by Narboo. I had seen paintings at a Vera Project show. Thank you Kee!

Click to enlarge:





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Jack interviews Senator Jerry Melin, ca 1980

From 1973-1984, I recorded hundreds of hours of material in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City. The Archives--a collection of cassette tapes, drawings, poetry, and ephemera--containing these recordings has largely disappeared, being lost, borrowed, and rendered unusable by the ravages of time. This recording was salvaged from a crumbling generic cassette tape by a Seattle audio engineer, Ian Rodia. The sound levels vary widely, there is a large amount of ambient noise, including buses and semis passing by. To make matters worse, every few seconds there is a bump sound in the recording caused by a defect in the recorder's mechanism. Jerry Melin died a decade ago, and this is one of the few audio recordings that survived him.


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digital art: The Grey

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The first step to good health: regularity!

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The billboard in Saskatoon going up this week

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All This Is That awards President Barack Obama The Halo

click POTUS to enlarge

By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Correspondent

For only the 11th time in five years, All This Is That is awarding The Halo, this time to The President. This is his second halo. I am not going to analyze the speech here. Go watch it on YouTube.

I do think, however, that as great at The President's speech was, in tenor and substance, his response to Representative Joe "douchebag" Wilson was anemic. Instead of merely saying"that's not true!" BHO should instead have called the cracker out right there in the middle of the speech. Or asked the Secret Service to escort the hillbilly out of the room. Or better yet, marched down to Wilson and clocked him, or even asked the closest Secret Serviceman to borrow his 9 .mm, and gone down and popped him once in each kneecap. But alas, such was not to be, and we'll just have to settle for the personal and professional ignominy that is currently, and will keep hailing down, on yet another member of the South Carolina delegation (and their former teammate, Democrat John Edwards).
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Three incredible moments with fledgling Senator Al Franken

So many people wrote Al Franken off as a lightweight and hand-wringing liberal pansy, that, despite writing some good books, a lot of great comedy, sounding pretty damned smart, passionate, and knowledgeable on his radio show, and being a lifetime Grateful Dead fan, even I started to wonder.

As it turns out, judging from these amazing video clips, Senator Franklin is a master of retail politics. His grasp of health care fundamentals and geography are just stunning in these glimpses of Al "among the people."

Al handles an angry teabagger ambush with aplomb and an incredible mastery of the subject and issues:



Al draws a map of the U.S. from memory in a couple of minutes. Wow! I wonder how many of the 534 other members of Congress could pull off this one? I will add a little bit of a disclaimer here. I first saw Al do this about 20 years ago on the David Letterman show, so in some sense this is a parlor trick he mastered long ago. But it is impressive nonetheless.



And finally Al aces Ann Coulter by saying he would choose to be Adolph Hitler:


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Fame!

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Ex-First Lady Laura Bush on President Obama: Thurmbs Up!

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Let me tell you, this is a bit of a mindf***er. At a United Nations meeting in Paris, where Mrs. Bush was promoting literacy, she told CNN, among other things:

● Obama "is doing a good job."

● On the ridiculous brouhaha over BHO addressing the nation's schoolchildren: "I think there is a place for the president ... to talk to schoolchildren and encourage them."

● She does not think it is fair for Obama to be labeled a "socialist"

● On her husband George failing to work in a bipartisan manner: "He was disappointed that that was not the way it worked out in Washington."

● Paradoxically, she criticized the excessive partisanship of Washington, while she expressed gratitude for Cheney's decision to vocally "defend her husband's performance," even though he is one of the torch bearers for destructive partisanship.

● While she defended Cheney, she also said her husband still speaks with Cheney "occasionally." As you know, those last couple of years they were at odds, particularly over Bush's refusal to pardon Cheney's henchman Scooter Libby.
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Labor Day, and a reluctant end to summer

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OK. It is technically the last day of summer, although it is supposed to get hot again later this week.

In Seattle, the last weekend means Bumbershoot, and usually, a good weekend--Saturday at Bumbershoot, we saw Mayer Hawthorne and The County, Sheryl Crowe (briefly), The Old 97's, Natalie Portman's Shaved Head (awesome!), and De La Soul.

Today we hiked down the hill in Discovery Park to the beach at West Point. A nice walk--with intermittent sprinkles and sun breaks, as we like to say--to the lighthouse and foghorn just below Magnolia Bluff. It must be scallop season--there were far more scallop shells on the beach than clams, crabs or mussels.
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The anti-performance art manifesto

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An anti-performance art manifesto from an art exhibit at Bumbershoot yesterday...the transcription on the right is mine.

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No performance art!

One of my favorite art exhibits at this year's Bumbershoot was a piece challenging the sanity of performance art. Nice. While I have enjoyed performance art over the years (especially some of my friend Ron Littke's insane performances in Manhattan in the early 1980's), there is always an overhanging cloud of *huh*?

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Jack Brummet interviews Senator Jerry Melin, 1980, New York City

Of the literally hundreds of hours of recordings in The Archives, only one cassette tape has survived. That cassette, fortunately, contained numerous recordings of the late, greatly and dearly loved Jerry Melin. This is one of them. Thanks to Ian Rodia, who digitized the crumbling generic cassette tape. As you can hear, the cassette recorder itself generated a "bump" every few seconds, and the tape is filled with the ambient sounds of buses, semis, glasses tinkling, coughs, and mumbling. Nonetheless, it is good to hear Jerry's voice.

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Digital Art: Incoming Japanese Prime Minister and First Lady Miyuki Hatoyama and Yukio Hatoyama

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Alien Lore No. 156 (in a collector's series) - Japanese first lady abducted by aliens

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Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan's Prime Minister-elect, Yukio Hatoyama, is into macrobiotics, was divorced, was once an actress, and often wears clothes she creates herself. She was also a dancer in Japan's fabled all-female Takarazuka theatrical group (an elite, hugely loved troupe that produces schmaltzy versions of U.S. theatrical and movie productions).

62-year-old Miyuki Hatoyama says she knew Tom Cruise in a former incarnation (he was Japanese), She says if they meet, "I believe he'd get it if I said to him, 'Long time no see'," she told an interviewer recently. Oh, and she was also once abducted by aliens. I love this woman!!!

In her book, "Very Strange Things I've Encountered" she writes that was abducted by aliens while she slept one night 20 years. Naturally, this has vaulted her onto front pages and gossip columns.


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"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," she explains in the tome she published last year. "It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green."

Her previous husband, told her it was just a dream. She says the soon to be Prime Minister, however, would say, 'Oh, that's great'," she wrote.

Mister and Mrs. Hatoyama met in the United States. She worked in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, and he was in grad. school at Stanford University. Miyuki was still married. "The average man chooses his mate from among unmarried women," Hatoyama boasted years later. "I chose mine from among all women."

They say Hatoyama adores his wacky wife. Why wouldn't he?? "I feel relieved when I get home," he says. "She is like an energy refuelling base."
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Auto-tune the news, co-starring the ex Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin

I love these guys. It's not such a preposterous prospect to think that in the not so distant future, all news will be auto-tuned. It just might help TV prevent the decimation that has engulfed their print brethren. . .

Horsin' Around? Shades of the Enumclaw horse sex case--another Washington State man succumbs to the lure of a smokin' filly

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Will this turn out to be a callback to the Enumclaw Horse Sex case? [ed's note: For whatever reason, some of the highest hits on All This Is That from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines are for the horse sex stories we published a few years ago. The other high hits are also usually related to something especially salacious, scandalous, or fictional (which are mostly salacious AND scandalous) that appear here...]

According to the Associated Press, a pantless, Finley, Washington man is accused of harassing a neighbor's horse. And "trespassing." The Tri-City Herald said the horse owner found the man with no pants chasing a horse at three-thirty a.m. Benton County sheriff's deputies identified a 26-year-old man, living next door, as the suspect. He was jailed for investigation of trespassing. Deputies also were called to the home Thursday evening when the owner "saw the same bald man scaring the horse enough to break through an electrical and barb-wire fence." He was wearing a black T-shirt and had pants on this time.

Previous All This Is That Washington State Horse Sex coverage:

Further ruminations on Enumclaw
Horsin' around: update on Enumclaw
Another shocking revelation
Beastiality in south King County
The final horse/beastiality update
Enumclaw Story To Become A Movie
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Seattle Cougar Sightings

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It's been quite a year for animal sightings in Seattle (see: here and here). Now, it's the cougars (a/k/a bobcats and mountain lions) prowling the two neighborhoods adjoining ours: Discovery Park and near the Woodland Park Zoo.

According to The Seattle P.I. (the defunct 'paper that is now a web site), "Residents in two Seattle neighborhoods have reported seeing a cougar. . .In Magnolia, cougar sightings reportedly have been going on for several days."

Dean Ericksen (@dean_ericksen) wrote: "Break out the Aqua Velva."
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Ex-VP Dick Cheney: does it take a myocardial infarction to shut this douchebag up?

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The Trees of Ballard

Tonight, I went for a walk in our neighborhood, meandering through the streets on the way to the promenade/lookout:



And I started keeping track of the trees. . .in 25 blocks or so, I saw:



Bamboo
Alder
Douglas Fir
Horse Chestnut
Oregon White Oak (I think!)
Monkey Tree (aka Araucaria - they have leaves that are brutally sharp)
Western Red Cedar
Crab Apple (Pacific?)
Ponderosa Pine (aka Western Yellow Pine)
Yew
Juniper
Apple
Willow
Red Maple
Cherry
Elm
A couple scruffy palm trees
Dogwood
Ash
Holly
Red Alder

And I saw at least ten trees which I do not know--mainly deciduous...I have the evergreens nailed. Who knows what I would have seen if they hadn't clear-cut Seattle 100 years ago? Probably a forest of fir and alder?
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