ANOTHER STUPID AND REALLY DANGEROUS IDEA

A story in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune can hardly be anything but cause for new levels of concern about what exactly the bloody White House thinks it’s doing. As I read it, according to “military sources”, the Bush administration, well put out by recent assassination attempts against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, and a resurgence of Taliban forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. I could be wrong, but, to a grizzled and paranoid science fiction writer, this would seem like an incredibly bad idea, in that it would set the Moslem Fundamentalists in fresh ultra-uproar, and further destabilize a highly fucked-up nuclear power, the stability of which is already about as tenuous as the snail bladerunning on the sharp edge of the proverbial straight razor.

ELVIS SHOULD LEAVE THE BUILDING

It's obviously nowhere near as serious as Pakistan going ballistic in a megaton blaze of Isamic, radioactive glory, but I also feel damned uncomfortable with the idea that the Elvis Presley Estate has authorized what would appear to be the fucking silly idea of cutting the quarter-inch master tapes of the Elvis Sun recordings into one inch strips and then encasing them in plexiglass plaques that can be sold to the true-believers, like pieces of the True Cross, as objects touched by the Magnetism of the King. Okay, so all of the music contained on the tapes is cleaned up, digitally preserved, and totally safe, but, hell, somehow it doesn’t seem right to be putting a knife into such originals. If Graceland Inc. needs the cash that bad, couldn’t they have called McCartney, Springsteen, Ted Turner, Felix Dennis and assorted other rich guys and asked them if they wanted to buy the whole uncut reels?

LINK OF THE DAY

Hip Spinster is a natural diarist with wondrous and on-the-money insights on all manner of topics from bars to cars to poetry to rock & roll, love, literature, depression, alcohol and the lousy shape of the human condition. Visit, but treat her right. She blogs at...http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Did you hear something?

POSTSCRIPT

And just as I'm posting this I find out that James Brown is back in the slam on a domestic violence rap. Damn, James wassamatter wit you? You're motherfucking 70, man. Like, old enough to know better.