SMALL SOLUTIONS

The Gulf oil crisis is so doomsday vast that it can seem impossible for an individual to do anything useful, but there are ways. One is to help a single species at a time. In this case, the loggerhead turtle.

“Loggerhead sea turtles were in trouble before the Gulf oil spill disaster. The number of female loggerheads nesting on Florida beaches – one of the most important habitats for the species – has declined by 50 percent in the past decade. Scientists and government officials have sounded the alarm about what this could mean for the future of the ancient sea mariners. The National Marine Fisheries Service is now proposing to upgrade protection for loggerheads from threatened to endangered under the Endangered Species Act. These turtles need our help even more now. The world’s second-largest loggerhead nesting area is on the beaches of the southeastern United States, the vast majority of which includes Florida’s central Atlantic beaches. This area is expected to be threatened by the horrific oil slick, depending on how much of the slick gets picked up by the Loop Current -- a powerful ocean current that could bring the slick around the southern reaches of the state, through the sensitive coral reef and mangrove areas of the Everglades and the Keys, and then into the Gulf Stream and up the east coast of Florida. The spill could not have happened at a worse time: loggerheads and other sea turtles -- as well as many shorebirds -- are in the peak of their nesting seasons right now. Oil is extremely toxic to loggerheads and other species. Exposure can cause skin loss, poisoning, drowning and death… which is exactly why we need every available tool to help save the lives of individual loggerheads and save this species from extinction.” Click here to help.

Click here for The Beatles

The secret word is Lobby

STRANGE DAYGLO

These reproductions of vintage Marvel blacklight posters cost $899 each (no shit!) from a company called Penny Candy (559-226-1397), but at least we can post them on Doc40 for free.

PALIN LIES AGAIN

No, no, she didn’t want off-shore drilling. It was the evil environmentalists that caused the horror in the Gulf…

“With [environmentalists'] nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you're doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You're not preventing environmental hazards; you're outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous. Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.” (Our pal Bernard sent the quote.)

Click here for The Who

Click here for BP feline disinformation

Click here for Marianne

SPACE OPERA

Click here for Spike Jones. (I suspect the spacesuit is the one worn by Lou Costello in the 1953 movie Abbott & Costello Go To Mars.) Clip from our pal Munz

THAT WHICH RETURNS TO HAUNT YOU…

Every Monday morning I receive an email from Rock’s Back Pages that lists their new posts and promotes what they want to promote. Since most of my music writing has long been part of their excellent archive, I was surprised to see something new of mine on yesterday’s list, and even more surprised that it was a review of Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde written for the NME in 1976. 1976? What the fuck was I doing reviewing a ten year-old album? Things could get pretty weird around that paper back them, but this was kinda singular. A tenth anniversary appraisal? I couldn’t even remember writing it. But then I checked the issue date and all was explained. It was December 25th – a Christmas issue when editors struggle to fill pages while nothing is going on except drunkenness and shopping. So here’s this odd blast from the 20th century. It’s a little longer than the usual Doc 40 post, but what the hell. Enjoy.

"IT'S AN almost impossible opening sentence. There can't be anyone reading this who needs to be introduced to this record. It is certainly Bob Dylan's finest hour, and there are less than a handful of other works that can seriously challenge it for the title of the greatest rock album of all time. (And it was also, of course, the first serious rock music double-album.) Shortly after the idea of this project came up, a bunch of us were sitting in the pub. All kinds of ideas were thrown about. Pieces of information were laid out on the table. Theories flowed almost as fast as the beer.
Did anyone know that the mono mix was appreciably different? Did Dylan sit up nights in the Chelsea Hotel writing the songs, or was the rumour true that he cobbled it together right there in the CBS studios in Nashville? What was the man's drug consumption at the time?
The speculation and the technical secrets only led to one single ultimate question. Where was Bob Dylan's head at when he put down these tracks? We all know now that that is the question, and we also know it just isn't going to be answered. For ten years there have been books, articles, pamphlets, mimeographed broadsheets, wall graffiti and a million conversations worrying at the question like terriers round a rat.
One of the main problems about approaching Blonde On Blonde after all this time is the temptation to take the whole thing far too reverently. It's become entwined with the experience of so many of us, all the trips, the jagged late nights, the girls, the friends, that it's almost impossible to separate the music from the decade of one's own stacked-up responses. The only profit that could possibly come from the whole exercise would be to pin down what the initial impact was. I looked up some of the contemporary reviews and comments. There was a lot of verbiage about "a contemporary poet", how Dylan "knew", how he was "telling it like it is".The one thing they said nothing about was the music.
This kind of loose talk still goes on today. (Of course, the clichés are new.) It comes trippingly from the pen. Shit, I've done it myself, more times than I care to remember. If Dylan was really "telling it like it is", we'd all know exactly what he was talking about. We wouldn't have been sifting through his symbolism, the rare interviews and even his garbage in the vain attempt to find his particular Rosebud. If we all knew, there wouldn't be any Michael Gray or A. J. Weberman, and everyone could put a precise definition on "The ladies that treat me kindly/and furnish me with tape."
So, if it's not the language that grabs you, maybe it's just the sound that gets you.
Could it be that Blonde On Blonde was one of those records like 'Heartbreak Hotel', 'Cathy's Clown' or 'Tracks Of My Tears' that bypassed the mind and got directly to the hairs on the back of your neck?
Well, Kooper's organ was oft copied, and the combination of guitars, harmonica and keyboard had a definite impact. In things like 'One Of Us Must Know' the ponderously, ascending cathedral chords do, at times, grab me by the gut in non-verbal uplift.
o, for that matter, do some deodorant commercials. If all of Dylan was in his voice and sound, we'd be treating Self Portrait with the same reverence. It ain't just the noise. There's a whole lot more to it than that. When Blonde On Blonde came, out, a lot of us had been with Dylan for some time. It wasn't anything radical and new.
We'd been sticked and carroted progressively into it. We'd followed an observant protest singer away from the externals of society and down a corridor of increasingly unresolved movie images. They had that real dreamlike quality (as opposed to Dali or Hollywood dream sequences) in which things understood gradually become confusing. The dream gave glimpses of heaven, right next door to the hints of nightmare. In a way, Blonde On Blonde was in the pits. It was the deepest shaft rock and roll had ever sunk in its journey to the centre of the psyche. Either consciously or unconsciously, Dylan performed a neat trick. He gave the illusion that through the time space of the double-album, he was finally stripping down his head, turning himself inside out so that we could actually see into the mind of this individual who had been throwing up such tantalising, familiar images.
We bought ourselves a ticket and sat down in the front row. While we watched like geeks, the whole thing was switched on us. We weren't watching Bob Dylan's interior movie. We were seeing a series of distorting mirrors. While trying to puzzle our way through the symbolism we were, in fact, being led through previously uncharted, often suppressed and frequently twisted passages of our own brains.
All Dylan gave us were some complex cat's cradles, uncompromising structural diagrams of the way relationships operate. (Although a lot of people tag Dylan as a social commentator, the great majority of his songs are about personal relationships, not those of society. This holds true for all the songs on Blonde On Blonde. They're love songs, if you like.) We took these relationship sketches and busily fitted them into our own frames of reference. I guess that was where all the trouble started. You've probably noticed how dope fiends claim he's singing about dope, homosexuals tell you they're gay love songs and women know for sure that they're all about women. I even met a paranoid once who claimed that 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' contained the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Everyone fits Dylan into his own framework. Why exactly I'm not sure. Certainly the operation involves a certain amount of self-perception that wasn't quite the rage.
Maybe the response to Dylan at that time, both violent hostility and psychotic adulation, was the audience attempting to come to terms with some of the things they'd stumbled across in their own minds.
So Blonde On Blonde was a giant therapy group?
I had a feeling when this started that it might wind up far fetched. I really did try to keep it on the rails. But...
Anyhow, now I've come to this point we come to another version of the Big Question.
Was Dylan, the therapist, Machiavelli messing with our heads or just an unwilling catalyst? As I said earlier, that's the one we don't get an answer to.
Rosebud.
Blonde On Blonde is a mnemonic for Bob."

The secret word is Infinity

Click here for Bob
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Click here for even more Bob
Click here for Syd

Martin Sharp, circa 1967

BUT SADLY RETURNING TO THE MODERN WORLD…

Back to its doomed birds and unmitigated corporate bastardry. The fight never seems to end.

Click here for Gaga

THE OIL IS BAD ENOUGH BUT THIS IS TEN TIMES WORSE

Barack Obama has advocated three dubious energy solutions. Most recently it was off-shore oil drilling, and we’re still seeing how that one turned out. Before drilling it was clean coal and nuclear. The nuclear really jarred with me at the time, quite undoing my initial delight that we actually had a president that could pronounce the word. Obama declared the modern nuclear power plant was safe, and the old Monty Burns models were a thing of the past. Unfortunately it’s starting to emerge that nuclear power regulation is as much of a corrupt clusterfuck as oil.

“Much like Captain Renault in Casablanca, the White House is suddenly shocked, shocked to find that oil rigs can explode, destroying ecosystems and livelihoods. The Obama administration has backed away from its offshore oil expansion policy in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as the long-term environmental and economical consequences unfold in the Gulf States. Headlines are clamoring for the criminal investigations of BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and ultimately, the federal regulator, Mineral Management Services (MMS). Rather paradoxically, President Obama is using the oil spill to call for more nuclear power. Yet, with the exception of a handful of insightful political cartoonists, the obvious parallel between the regulatory delinquency of MMS and that of its nuclear equivalent - the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) - and the potential for an equally catastrophic accident in the nuclear sector, has not been drawn. As with the MMS debacle, the NRC is gambling with inevitable disaster with the same spin of the wheel of misfortune and with potentially even higher stakes. Investigations have already revealed that MMS had become too friendly and compliant toward the industry it was supposed to regulate. This hands-off approach proved to be a formula for inevitable disaster. Similarly, the NRC consistently puts the financial motives of the nuclear industry it is supposed to regulate ahead of public safety. In instance after instance, the NRC has chosen not to enforce its own regulations even in the face of repeated reactor safety violations, risking a serious reactor accident while leaving often high-risk safety problems to linger unresolved for decades.” (Click here for the rest)

Click here for Janis

The secret word is Strontium

AND WHILE WE’RE CONTEMPLATING NUKES…

…let’s ponder a bit of dangerous science.

“This is because the uranium is not enriched. A nuclear bomb fueled by uranium releases energy through fission, the breaking apart of an atom. When a neutron hits the nucleus of a uranium atom, the atom breaks apart. The resulting pieces weigh slightly less than the original whole; that weight having been turned into huge amounts of energy. Here's the key – each split nucleus has to release at least two neutrons of its own. They hit other nuclei and start two more reactions, and those atoms release more neutrons and start more reactions. The result is either a steady hum of energy or a big boom, depending on how you work it. Let's face it. If it were that simple, nuclear bombs would have been invented long ago. If there's one thing the internet proves, it's that people will never stop looking for flashy ways to hurt themselves and others. The reason why everything, from the pyramids to the Eiffel Tower aren't reduced to little particles of dust wafting around the upper atmosphere is only very, very rare isotopes of uranium break apart easily enough and give off enough neutrons to sustain a nuclear reaction. The most common uranium isotope is uranium-238, with ninety-two protons and 146 neutrons. It doesn't sustain a reaction. Uranium-235, with 143 neutrons, is the money isotope.” (Click here for more)

Click here for the greatest Boots Randolph tenor solo of all time.

THOSE WHACKY SCIENTISTS

(The image came from Valerie. We’re thinking of you, gal.)

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Ricky Frozdick became a master of disguise in the days when he was stalking Mick Jagger.

KEEP WATCHING THE DRUMMER

Click here for percussion hilarity (Sent by Munz)

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

The piece of wedding cake had been sent by the bride. It arrived in a silver box. “Yum”, I though, “Coffee and cake.” I made myself the coffee, I placed the cake on a plate, but then, as I was about to spear it with a fork, it suddenly transformed into a malevolently hostile robot that would have attacked me if I had not beaten it immobile with my favorite Elvis Presley coffee cup. (Image supplied by Faux Smoke)

Click here for Eileen Barton

The secret word is Decepticon

AVIAN GANG ACTION

The observation of the local urban wildlife has long been a fascination and I even wrote a story about it in the now defunct LA CityBeat that, in turn, actually got me hired on at the LA Times as an occasional op-ed columnist. (But then I was dropped for my shameless leftwing bias.) In my street alone, we have possums, raccoons, scary tree rats, and one time, in the dead of night, a pair of coyotes loped by like two Viet Cong during Tet. Over in Laurel Canyon you can add deer, bobcats, and hawks. Indeed, at one July 4th barbeque, I saw a hawk alight on a tree branch with a snake struggling in its beak. The other guests paid it little mind, but, as a classicist, I though it a dire omen for America. (You be the judge.)For some years now, the crows have owned my street, running off the doves and blue jays, and even demanding tribute from the squirrels. They would squire it in the dawn, eyeing the prtevious night's beer cans as possible tools, and shooting me looks as I watched from my balcony that clearly said, “If I had an opposable thumb, human motherfucker, your species would be toast.” But lately the crows have somehow lost their absolutist sway. As if it was some grim episode of The Sopranos, their power has waned. The doves are back, the humming birds work the provided feeder, and the squirrels have grown bold. The crows haven’t departed but their sass has diminished, and I’m unsure of what it might mean.

(Drawing by the late and still lamented Edward Barker)

Click here for Steeleye Span

BUT THE CROWS MAY NOT BE THWARTED YET

BUT IT’S THE WEEKEND, AND I CAN PUT MY FEET UP (Like the little lion last Friday)

OR WE COULD REMEMBER D-DAY

“THOMAS KINKADE IS A DEADBEAT”

The business practices of Thomas Kinkade – the massively successful painter of Christian-kitsch cottages – are coming under serious scrutiny as one of his companies goes belly up. This comes on top of long buzzing rumors about his connections with World Vision, a supposedly evangelical aid organisation that the paranoid conspiracy community has suspected for decades of being a CIA front operation with ties to brainwashing and the 1978 Jonestown massacre.

“One of Thomas Kinkade's companies filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, a day after a $1-million payment was due to former gallery owners who have tried for four years to collect on a judgment they won against the self-styled "painter of light." The Chapter 11 petition was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Jose in the name of the Kinkade production arm, Pacific Metro of Morgan Hill, Calif. It allows Pacific Metro to reorganize and puts an automatic stay on the collection of all judgments, including one for $3 million owed to Karen Hazlewood and Jeff Spinello. "Kinkade is a … deadbeat," said their lawyer, Norman Yatooma, who accused the artist and his Los Angeles attorney, Dana Levitt, of "breaching their agreement" to pay up. "Kinkade's word is as worthless as his artwork. His lawyer is no better." (Click here for more)

Click here for Joe Brown

The secret word is Saccharine

“BLUE LAGOON”

Click here for another track (plus minimalist video) from the upcoming virtual album String Theory by my longtime songwriting partner and band mate Andy Colquhoun (once and future Deviant and Pink Fairy). The title of the track is “Blue Lagoon.” I don’t know if Andy was thinking of the cocktail or an idyllic beach when he composed the piece, but, naturally, here at Doc40, we used the image of the alcohol. Click here for previous upload.

SPACE OPERA

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

COKE, IT SEEMS, IS BAD FOR YOU (Or so they say)

It’s Friday and here on Doc40 it’s turned out to be a day of recreational pursuits away for all the ghastly stuff that seems to be our daily news fodder.

"TUESDAY, June 1 (HealthDay News) -- Cocaine abusers -- already at risk for an abnormal heartbeat, hallucinations, convulsions and stroke -- can add another potential health complication to the list: rotting flesh. "If you are a user of cocaine, you should be aware that some of the cocaine is not clean and can have other agents that can cause you to have a low white-cell count or skin tissue death," said Dr. Ghinwa Dumyati, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Rochester and an epidemiologist for the Monroe County Health Department in New York. In a report in the June 1 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, Dumyati and doctors from the University of Rochester Medical Center discuss two cases involving women with a history of cocaine use who came to the hospital for help when they noticed purplish plaques on their cheeks, earlobes, legs, thighs and buttocks. Their profiles were typical of toxicity with levamisole, the doctors reported. The medication is a veterinary anti-worming agent, approved for use in cattle, sheep and pigs. It was once used to treat cancer, autoimmune diseases and kidney problems in humans, Dumyati said. It's no longer approved for use in people in the United States, she said, because of adverse side effects. But it's often used to cut cocaine, before distribution to the user, she said. "Almost 80 percent of the cocaine coming into this country has levamisole mixed in," Dumyati said." (Click here for more)

Click here for Marianne

The secret word is Cut

PORN BY THE NUMBERS

Click here for a mass of graphic and explicit facts and figures

Click here for Elvis

And after that what else but…

ORGIES ARE NOT WHAT THEY USED TO BE #3

Click here for Christina Aguilera (Seems like everyone’s got an orgy video, although I notice Kylie’s has been pulled down.)

BUT ON DOC40 CUTE IS STILL STRICTLY RATIONED

“It’s Friday and I can put my feet up.”


(Image lifted from World of Wonder.)

THE WAGES OF GREED

I’ve admired Jim Hightower for a long time. He makes a lot of sense.

“Many news reports about the Gulf oil catastrophe refer to it as a "spill." Wrong. A spill is a minor "oops" — one accidentally spills milks, for example, and from childhood, we're taught the old aphorism: "Don't cry over spilt milk." What's in the Gulf isn't milk and it wasn't spilt. The explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon well was the inevitable result of deliberate decisions made by avaricious corporate executives, laissez faire politicians and obsequious regulators. As the ruinous gulf oil blowout spreads onto land, over wildlife, across the ocean floor and into people's lives, it raises a fundamental question for all of us Americans: Who the hell's in charge here? What we're witnessing is not merely a human and environmental horror, but also an appalling deterioration in our nation's governance. Just as we saw in Wall Street's devastating economic disaster and in Massey Energy's murderous explosion inside its Upper Big Branch coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring an ugly truth that We the People must finally face: We are living under de facto corporate rule that has rendered our government impotent. Thirty years of laissez-faire, ideological nonsense (pushed upon us with a vengeance in the past decade) has transformed government into a subsidiary of corporate power. Wall Street, Massey, BP and its partners — all were allowed to become their own "regulators" and officially encouraged to put their short-term profit interests over the public interest. Let's not forget that on April 2, barely two weeks before Deepwater Horizon blew and 11 people perished on the spot, the public's No. 1 official, Barack Obama, trumpeted his support for more deepwater oil drilling, blithely regurgitating Big Oil's big lie: "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills." He and his advisors had not bothered to check the truth of that — they simply took the industry's word. That's not governing, it's aiding and abetting profiteers, and it's a pathetic performance. But that was only the start of Washington's oily confession that it has surrendered control to corporate arrogance and avarice. With an unprecedented volume of crude gushing from the well and the magnitude of the disaster multiplying geometrically by the day, who was in charge of coping with that? Not the White House, not the interior secretary, not the EPA. As we saw when Wall Street's greed exploded our economy, the polluting scoundrels were left in charge!” (Click here for the rest)

Click here for The Pogues

The secret word is Uncaring

“BRING ME THE HEAD OF TONY HAYWARD!”

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Dunbar Frozdick took safe sex very seriously.

SPACE OPERA

Click here for Rage Against The Machine

ENOUGH GODDAMN IT!

Not content with foisting the asinine theories of Creationism/Intelligent Design on both the rational public and unsuspecting school kids, one bunch of bloody Christians is determinedly insisting the Earth is the center of the universe and everything else revolves around it because the Bible told them so. Doubtless they’ll loudly demand this end-run to the 15th century be included in Texas textbooks. I shudder in disbelief. Check out the following. This country is eating itself.

“To hear tell, geocentrism, the ancient doctrine that the earth is fixed motionless at the center of the universe, died over four centuries ago. At that time Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish canon who dabbled in astrology, claimed that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the universe. His idea is known as heliocentrism. It took a hundred years for heliocentrism to become the dominant opinion, and it did so with a complete lack of evidence in its favor. Yet the victory of heliocentrism has been less than total. Over the years geocentrism has had its spokesmen. Among scientists who adhered to the centrality of the earth were three generations of Cassinis: a family of astronomers who dominated French astronomy from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Astronomers, pastors, and educators in the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church maintained the geocentric truths well into the twentieth century. They, with the reformers such as Luther, saw that the embracing of heliocentrism would weaken not only science, but also the authority of the Bible.” (Click here for more of this crap)

Click here for Sun Ra (always heliocentric.)

The secret word is Arrant

A HIGH-TRASH HISTORY LESSON

Cuban Rebel Girls (also know as Assault Of The Rebel Girls) -- the impenetrable sexploitation saga of a gang of teenage girls out to support Fidel Castro in the overthrow of Batista -- not only rivals any Ed Wood movie as the worst film ever made, but also contains insider footage of the Cuban Revolution. The Wikipedia entry is curt...

“Cuban Rebel Girls is a 1959 film and the last film for Errol Flynn. It co-starred Beverly Aadland, then Flynn’s girlfriend, and was produced and directed by Barry Mahon. Written and narrated by Flynn, who was sympathetic to Fidel Castro at the time, the film is a semi-documentary. It is filmed in black and white with a screen time of 68 minutes. The storyline follows a group of mercenaries helping Castro against Fulgencio Batista.

The films significance lies in that, to save money, Flynn filmed during the actual Cuban revolution and shot some amazing documentary footage. (According to legend, he even encountered Che Guevara in Santa Clara.) Thus Cuban Rebel Girls poses a triple threat with its dire acting and plot, the pathetic spectacle of Errol Flynn coming terminally unglued, and the images of the real world victory over Batista, and for that it should be remembered.

Click here for a clip

A STARFLEET ADVISORY

Carefully guard your phaser when close to green women. (Image lifted from Adam Gorightly)

ORGIES ARE NOT WHAT THEY USED TO BE #2

But click here for Kylie’s 2010 pop orgy

SATAN ‘SHROOM SLAY

What the hell is going on in Northern California? Bad acid, disgruntled pot growers, and now diabolic mushroom murders…

“CRESCENT CITY -- Witnesses in Del Norte County Superior Court on Wednesday laid out a chaotic series of events surrounding a March killing in Klamath, weaving a twisted picture of a drug-filled night that led to the alleged torture and slaying of a 21-year-old Crescent City man. The accounts of the night are clouded by statements made by the four people in the house at the time of the incident or leading up to it, all of whom are believed to have taken psychedelic mushrooms. The victim and the suspect, according to the testimony, became preoccupied with the idea that a tidal wave was coming, that the end of the world was upon them and that a struggle between God and the devil was taking place. Del Norte County Superior Court Judge William Follett ruled after hours of testimony that there was sufficient evidence to hold Jarrod Wyatt, 26, in the alleged murder of his friend Taylor Powell. Wyatt will also have to answer to charges of aggravated mayhem and torture. The prosecution called two Del Norte County Sheriff's deputies to testify about what they found at the Requa house in which the killing took place in the early morning hours of March 21. The prosecution also called a detective who interviewed Wyatt after his arrest. The defense, in a move to dilute the charges against Wyatt, called his ex-girlfriend, who was at the residence that night and witnessed some of the events before Powell's death.” (Click here for more)

Click here for Robert Johnson

The secret word is Fungicide

Peter Orlovsky – RIP

THERE GOES THE LEG ROOM

I dimly recall when flying was kinda sophisticated, now it’s a cramped hell that is seemingly about to get worse. This is a letter to The Consumerist, and I can only add that Dallas to Orange County is bad enough, but LA to London or Tokyo could become even more of a painful nightmare.

“I’m a road warrior and fly every week from Dallas DFW to Orange County SNA for work. I’ve been doing this trip for about 6 months so I know the drill. Every week I book my ticket for about 3 weeks out to get the best fares and to get the seats that I like. My preference has been to sit in row 14 as that is the second exit row and the seats can recline. This week I went to book my ticket for the week of June 14th and I noticed that on my outbound flight (to SNA) 14 was the 2nd exit row, however on my return flight which is June 17th row 15 is the 2nd exit row. I figured it must be a mistake or something and checked around. It looks like American is adding in 2 rows to the 737 on or about June 15th. Previously there were only 28 rows on a 737 but now there will be 30. As someone who flies on the plane every week, I can tell you, it isn’t very roomy in coach as it is. When they add two more rows it will definitely suck.” (Click here for more)

Click here for the Byrds

DON’T BE A…

Although how much choice we have is becoming increasingly debatable. And while we debate it, let’s ponder the words of BP boss Tony Hayward on the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. "There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back." At $4.5 million a year, I wouldn’t mind his life either.

Click here for Jimmy Reed

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 76

(But with single payer health care!)

MARILYN SEZ...

“Happy birthday to me.”

HOPPER AND HOLLIDAY

The one time I worked with the late Dennis Hopper was when he cut the voice-over track for the TV documentary based on my book The Black Leather Jacket. I had to fly with the TV sound crew to Glenwood Springs, Colorado because Hopper was shooting the movie Flashback in which he played an Abbie Hoffman-like character who had been hiding from the feds for over twenty years – and also delivered the lame and less than prophetic line, “The 90's are going to make the 60's look like the 50's.” Although it strained the documentary’s budget I was happy to spend a few days in the Colorado Rockies because I knew Doc Holliday was reputedly buried in the Glenwood Springs’ Linwood Cemetery (although no one’s too sure) after dying in the local sanatorium. My objective was to make a pilgrimage to his grave, but, I was regretfully defeated by my unwilling lungs. At close to 6000 feet the air is kinda rarified (and you get drunk real easy) and when I discovered that Linwood Cemetery was three quarters of a mile up an overgrown rocky trail up a serious mountain, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. Returning to the hotel, I encountered Hopper in the lounge. When I recounted my tail of failure and thwarted plans, he laughed. “Hell, Doc made it up there.”
But when I replied that Doc was already dead and must have been carried up the trail, he saw my point.

Click here for The Black Leather Jacket

The secret word is Altitude

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Eva Paine-Frozdick’s footwear was excessive by any standard.

THE ELECTRIC LADYLAND LIBERATION FRONT

(You may have to be nearly as old as I am to get the joke.)

Click here for Jimi

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

Donuts? Yes, donuts. Hardly the breakfast of champions, but how about law enforcement or Homer Simpson? With a coffee, or a coke, or even a glass of milk? Plus a shot of Jack if it’s one of those mornings, and certainly a joint. Maybe it’s inviting a heart attack but it really does help when you're trying figure out how the nephilim will react when they return to Earth and see what’s happened to the ten thousand year-old genetic experiment, and how Victor Renquist will deal with that reaction.

Click here for Rebel Rouser

The secret word is Dough

KNOW YOUR PSYCHO #1

"This is what psychopaths can't do. ... They are missing the primal emotional cues that the rest of us use as guides when making moral decisions. The psychopath's brain is bored by expressions of terror. The main problem seems to be a broken amygdala, a brain area responsible for propagating aversive emotions such as fear and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad. ... Hurting someone else is just another way of getting what he wants, a perfectly reasonable way to satisfy desires. The absence of emotion makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible. G. K. Chesterton was right: 'The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” – Jonah Lehrer: How We Decide

KNOW YOUR PSYCHO #2

“Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.” – anonymous McCain aide

Click here for P.J. Harvey

THE FRACTAL DIVE

Our pal Faux Smoke supplied this gem…

Click here for something amazing.

DON’T DROP THAT ATOMIC BOMB ON ME!

Click here Keith and Mingus, which is audio amazing – if inexplicable.