Tony Wilson, the music promoter, label owner, and club proprietor widely seen as the father of the Manchester music scene (as seen in 24 Hour Party People), has passed away.
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Weird Fact Learned This Week
The set of people included in the sets of “Former Doobie Brothers,” “Former Members of Steely Dan,” and “Defense Department Counterterrorism Analysts” has at least one member, and it’s Jeff Baxter. (Via MeFi.)
Best. Commercial. EVAR.
Watch for the subtext.
More on the lion vid
Apparently, there’s a great deal more to that story; the lion in question was mostly raised in an apartment in London (they bought him at Harrod’s) before being released as an adult. He lived, by all accounts, a normal lion life after adjusting (with a bit of help) to being “wild” for the first time.
A word on content
The Magnolia Office expressed some distress in re: the influx of cat-related content. Fear not, as football season approaches, which will bring with it an entirely different set of content-related gripes.
Cheney Wants Another War
Check it out; the Dark Lord still has a hard-on for Iran. Of course, why wouldn’t he? It puts money in his pocket, and the issues of our government, our military, and our nation are about to be somebody else’s problem.
Biiiiiig Kitty
So, lion raised by people and ultimately release, right? A year later, his caretakers go check on him in the wild. Check out the video. Neat.
“Louis Libby has been held accountable”
What Bush means by “accountability,” via Balko.
Universal Gets A Massive Clue
Via BoingBoing:
Universal Music — who are usually the most extreme piracyphobes in the music industry — have announced that they’re going to try selling much of their catalog without DRM from now until January. What caused them to change positions? Fear of an iPod Planet.
The iPod plays two kinds of music: music crippled with Apple’s DRM and MP3s. If you want to cripple your music with Apple’s DRM, you have to give Apple total control over your track-pricing. No other store can carry Apple-crippled music. Every time we buy an Apple-crippled track, it gets that much harder and more expensive to switch away from the iPod and iTunes.
For record companies, there are only two choices: sell Apple-crippled music and increase Apple’s control over the online music business, or sell uncrippled music.
This is huge. HUGE.
Neat.
High-speed x-ray shots of bullets going through things.
Sadly, it’s not manifestly stupider than your average Michael Bay film
(Via MeFi.)
Omar is Real
Via MeFi, here’s a NYT article on the guy Simon based Omar on. Good stuff.
More Florida Prosecutorial Assholery
The prosecutors in the “we don’t care if you have a prescription for those” Mark O’Hara case have announced the won’t drop the charges, this despite having their case called “ridiculous” by the appeals court.
As noted before, they’ve already bankrupted the guy. They somehow managed to get information about his prescription suppressed in the first trial; there’s no doubt they’ll try some similarly unethical angle this time around. Perhaps in response we’ll see real sanctions from the judge, or at least the Florida Bar.
Dept. of Really Classy Moves
Johnson and Johnson is suing the Red Cross because the charity — which is, by the way, older than J&J — is using its eponymous symbol on products it sells to the public (the proceeds help fund the Red Cross’ mission).
Can you say “douchebags,” boys and girls?
Things that are probably not good ideas
Best Headline Today
Passenger ‘hid monkey under hat’, which we found at Majikthise.
A man has been questioned by police at LaGuardia airport in New York after smuggling a monkey onto a flight from Florida by hiding it under his hat.
Passengers spotted the animal when it climbed out and perched on the man’s ponytail, Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell told reporters.
Here’s the best part:
When passengers noticed the fist-sized primate on the flight, they asked the man “if he knew he had a monkey on him”, Ms Russell said.
MUST. HAVE. MONKEYHAT.
This Week’s Onion Pick
DNA Evidence Frees Man From Zoo
PHOENIX — Years of controversy were finally settled Monday after DNA tests conclusively proved that Duane Panovich, an attraction at the Phoenix Zoo for the past 11 years, was indeed a human being, and not a reticulated giraffe from southwestern Kenya.
and
In a statement following Panovich’s release, the zoo said it will appeal the court’s decision regarding its former giraffe. In spite of this, Panovich’s story has spurred new interest in the case of Ernesto, a scarlet ibis that claims to be a contractor hired to remodel the aviary at the Houston Zoo.
More “Good” from the War on Some Drugs
The DC Court of Appeals decided yesterday that there is no fundamental right to lifesaving drugs. Radley Balko has more, but the gist is this:
the bureaucrats at the FDA can now deny terminally sick people the medication that could save their lives. And not even because it isn’t safe, but because it hasn’t been proven effective, at least according to standards set by the FDA.
Right. Bureaucrats are in control, firmly. What’s worse, they cited a medical marijuana case (Raich, which held that the feds can deny pot to sick people who need it, regardless of benefit) in the decision, which makes this case another casualty, at least in part, of our bogus drug war.
Cutest. Cat. EVAR.
We’re sorry:
The joy that is Internet Explorer
It’s really all we can do to NOT put this little snippet of code into Heathen. (from /.)
One more case of the Republican Stupids
So, you know how it usually turns out that the aggressively righteous and homophobic are the ones that get caught committing exactly those sins that they rail against? Didja notice these goons are almost always Republicans? Yeah, us too.
Well, it happened again: Florida state rep Bob Allen was just arrested for soliciting sex in a public bathroom from an undercover cop.
But it gets better, and stupider, as Scalzi points out.
specifically it’s alleged that he offered an undercover cop a Jackson if he’d let the legislator blow him. This was not a smart thing to do. But having been caught doing something stupid, Allen, who is a pudgy white fellow, has decided to double down on his stupidity by offering what is a truly, spectacularly — indeed, magnificently — dumb reason for soliciting another man for sex: Fear of a Black Planet!
“This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park,” said Allen, according to this article in the Orlando Sentinel. Allen went on to say he was afraid of becoming a “statistic.”
[…]
[L]et’s think Allen’s rationale through:
Allen, during the middle of the work day, was at the park, just minding his own business, enjoying the Florida sunshine or whatever, like you do, when he suddenly noticed that the park was full of black men. Fearing for his own personal safety, he decided that the best course of action was to go into the public restroom, peer over a stall — twice — to locate a black man, and offer that black man $20 and a blow job if he’d just leave him alone.
Go read the whole thing. Scalzi’s on fire with this one.
Today in Creepy Art
In some ways, it was inevitable that some artist would order a Realdoll of themselves and use it in weird performance art.
“Evel Knievel needs a nap.”
This long profile is a bit of a sad coda to the 70s daredevil’s life of death-defying showmanship. We sorta wonder if our Snake River Canyon playset is still in the Ancestral Heathen Estate’s attic.
HBD
The Magnolia Office celebrates a birthday today. Buy him a drink!
Dear Democrats: What the HELL is wrong with you?
A bill gutting the already lax restrictions on warrantless domestic spying passed the House yesterday, just as Bush wanted.
WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE? As one Kos diarist says, enough with the excuses. Stop rolling over. Fuck the GOP, and fuck their contempt for due process and the Constitution. Stand the hell up and fight.
Dear Dateline: You suck
So, the Predator-catchin’ pseudo-journalists at Dateline decided they’d try to get someone in undercover at the annual DefCon hacker conference this week. We’re sure that, had they succeeded, we’d all hear about how AWFUL and DANGEROUS they all are, and how THEY COULD GET TO YOU RIGHT NOW and all sorts of other alarmist crap, since that’s what passes for journalism on TV these days.
Fortunately for the attendees (and TV viewers), it turns out their mole got found out, so the organizers amended all the presentations to be given to include her photograph and the information that she was in fact an NBC reporter, etc. The first “reveal” was actually set up as an ambush for the reporter, just like their usual victims. Awesome! Hi-larious!
However, the real “WTF?” moment on all this is pretty simple: Here’s who they picked to infiltrate the conference. Dude, that’s a girl. Are you HIGH?
Expert Witnesses, Mississippi Style
We hope someone in the Magnolia Office can tell us that the asshole described here is, somehow, going to be kept from helping to convict more people on bogus science. Please?
Will they EVER stop with this crap?
One of the Right’s favorite rants is that to fail to support this president is to be unpatriotic. To them, there is apparently no room for dissent, no possible honorable path besides blind obedience and trust in the state, which is of course an idea with no merit at all. In fact, to call it “intellectually bankrupt” would be an insult to bankruptcy.
And yet, they still do it, which means some idiots are actually buying it. We outlien for you now a distinction:
It is the Right that insists its opponents are unpatriotic; that they hope the enemy wins; that they are in Osama’s camp; that they support Al Qaeda; and that they hate the troops because they want to bring them home. They do this because, we assume, it is the best they can do. They cannot admit their failure and their folly because they equate apology and course-changing to weakness. Instead, they want to run out the clock (and troops and country be damned) and slink away in 18 months.
It is the Left that insists none of these ideas have any merit on their face, and that it is in fact supremely patriotic to insist a President be answerable to those who elected them, to the Constitution, to the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution (once held so dear by the GOP when Clinton lived at 1600 Pennsylvania). No one on the Left ascribes treasonous motives to their opponents — well, unless clearly wishing to establish an Imperial presidency is treasonous (and it may be).
Shut up.
We were busy yesterday. However, here’s a great big match, just to make it up to you.
Things you should not forget
Dept. of Questionable Scientific Pursuits
Scientists develop 12-headed jellyfish.
D00D, we’re not sure 1-headed jellyfish are a good idea. WTF?
Yet More Evidence That Law Enforcement Needs WAY More Oversight
Even at the rarefied level of the FBI, wherein we supposedly place the cream of the law enforcement crop, we’ve got pretty serious problems:
Last week, a federal judge excoriated the FBI for not only hiding exculpatory evidence that would have exonerated four innocent men who served more than thirty years in prison, but for rewarding those who did the hiding and covering up with bonuses and promotions. For this crime against American citizens, American taxpayers will now shell out more than $100 million. Thus far, none of the government agents actually responsible for this crime have been held accountable. Only rewarded.
The Agitator has more on the legislative fallout of this case; apparently, we need a law to force the Feds to disclose exculpatory evidence, as well as evidence that their confidential drug informants may have committed violent felonies, including murder. In their view, we guess, keeping a drug case alive is more important than keeping the wrong people out of prison, and that’s just sick. Balko continues:
This would be a morally dubious policy even if were were talking about matters of, say, national security. But we aren’t. We’re talking about the FBI concealing evidence of murder and other violent crimes, and of knowingly allowing innocent people to go to prison in order to not disrupt drug investigations. In other words, all of this is necessary, the FBI is saying, to keep people from getting high. And when confronted by the United States Congress, the FBI can’t even say outright that this is categorically a bad idea, nor can it promise that it will institute a policy preventing these things from happening in the future.
We love the Onion, again
Their hard-hitting reporting on such topics as “Could Multiple Stab Wounds Harm Monkeys?” is simply unmatched by the mainstream media.
Back when I was guvnuh, MTV played videos
Like this one:
Of course, in the Heathen homeland, we didn’t have MTV in 1983; we had to watch Friday Night Videos, which was a weak sister at the time (oh! what we’d give for FNV reruns now!).
This video was one of the ones excitedly discussed in junior high cafeterias that year; Phil Oakey’s gender-bending presentation combined with the baritone was pretty transgressive and weird, and then there were those girls. Their names, like Oakey’s, we didn’t know until today: Susan Ann Gayle and Joanne Catherall, both of whom were apparently underage when they joined the band in 1980. The zoom-in-the-map trick at the head end reminds us now of Google, but back then it was pretty jarring and cool (note how the sidestep some of the special effects — the boy and the ball take on the pinkish red hue when they’re inside the circle, but you never actually see the transition).
In retrospect, we figure the Human League was one of the first examples of what we now know as 80s synth pop that we heard down in Mississippi. (Captain Telescope may have other ideas, which we encourage him to share; certainly we’d probably heard Flock of Seagulls by then, and Devo, but they’re all of a piece.) The whole look is there in the video: very 80s clothing, hair, makeup, and sounds, all of which served to remind us that well, we lived in a backwater, since there was essentially zero local music there at the time. (Not counting these guys, since they came later.)
The earlier iconic Human League video is also on YouTube, of course. Amusingly, collateral Googling for this post revealed that the band is actually still active and touring, 30 years on. Neat.
Our favorite quote this morning
“Trust me, a little open-bar scotch and any decent imam will overlook the flaws in your color scheme.”
From this breath of fresh air on the whole process of wedding planning. Granted, the author admits they spent a boatload of cash, but the real point of the thing was that they never once went nuts. That’s key.
Grow some balls, boys.
Rove’s refusing to honor his subpoena as well. Time for Congress to cowboy up and take the next step; Bush has already made clear he thinks nobody in the executive is answerable to Congress. This is incorrect, and Congress needs to make an object lesson of every last one of them.
WANT
There exist LEGO ice trays.
What Has It Got In Its Pockets?
There’s a Flickr group concerned entirely with photos of [hat its members carry in their pockets every day; this as opposed to the much larger, and potentially more revealing “What’s In Your Bag?” group that’s been around forever.
We like the pockets version better, especially this one, about Gary, and this one, which includes several options not present in most photos. This guy should probably hook up with him.
Unsurprisingly, Moleskine notebooks and certain telephones are heavily represented.
We did one; we think you should, too.
And you think YOU have problems
At least you’re not part of the Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation.
(Via MeFi, in whose comments you will find the obligatory Goatse joke.)
(It turns out we covered this first in 2004, but with nearly 5,000 entries, how can we be expected to come up with new material every single time? We figure you could use the reminder.)
Pat Tillman Roundup
This is fucking sick. Evidence is mounting, years later, that makes the DoD’s stonewalling regarding Tillman’s death make a bit more sense. First he was killed in battle. Then he was killed in a tragic misunderstanding, a so-called friendly fire incident. These things happen in wartime, of course.
But it’s looking a lot more like that’s not true, either. He may well have been murdered by American troops, potentially for his antiwar views.
Lovely.
Things we didn’t realize were ten years old
The Foo Fighters record The Color and the Shape has been reissued in a 10th anniversary edition; the original came out in May of 1997.
Fortunately, it’s on EMusic, so we can just snag the new tracks. Also fortunately, the “Everlong” video is on YouTube:
It’s working out so well for George, ol’ Rick thought he’d try it
Texas governor Rick Perry has joined George in his anti-science crusade and appointed a nutbird looney creationist to CHAIR the State Board of Education. We shit you not.
The appointee, Dr. Don McLeroy, has repeatedly voted to stifle scientific information in textbooks covering evolution. From an Austin American-Statesman editorial:
In 2001, McLeroy and a majority of the board rejected the only Advanced Placement textbook for high school environmental science because its views on global warming and other events didn’t comport with the beliefs of the board majority. The book wasn’t factual and was anti-American and anti-Christian, the majority claimed. Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities were using the textbook, including Baylor University, the nation’s largest Baptist college.
You can find out even more “proud to be ignorant” information on McLeroy’s web site, which is chock full of anti-intellectual — he’s a big fan of Conservative anti-Enlightenment author and discredited moralist Paul Johnson — anti-evolution, abstinence-only claptrap. He is, of course, an Aggie, and lives in Bryan.