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!

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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

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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!

click to enlarge the billboard jack

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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

click to enlarge the West Point Lighthouse

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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