I finally checked my yahoo mail and I had this waiting for me.

Natey,

Just read your blog, man. I am amazed. You do great work! You do
have to change one thing, though. Down the page you said that nobody that
reads this blog loves baseball as much as you do. As of this morning, that
statement is no longer true.

Love you, man.

Barber

Thanks buddy,
Love right back at you.

My grandfather, Minice Butler Huffman (I knew him as Pawdy) was born in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana around 1911. I say around because he was born at home, had no birth certificate, did not celebrate birthdays, and no one really knew how old he was. His father was an obese moonshiner who did not care much for him. The story that Pawdy told me most often was of a time when he was about ten years old and his father sent him out into the bayou after dinner. He gave Pawdy a shotgun and two shells. He said to him, “Minice, our family’s dinner depends on you. You have two shots here; I want you to come home with two ducks. If you don’t get two ducks, don’t come home.” Predictably, he merely wounded the second duck and had to chase it through the swamp until twilight. By the time Pawdy was 12 he had left home and his father’s heart had given out.

He fell in love with Louisiana/French girl Clara Leona Chevallier in the neighboring town of Jonesville and regularly walked the twelve miles to court her. They got married in 1937, (they were old by the standards of the day, at twenty-six and twenty-eight) had nine kids, and scratched out a living farming a small patch of ground. In 1959 they moved to Tulip, Arkansas, and purchased the farm where my mother grew up and left home.

By the time I was old enough to know him, Pawdy was a seventy year old curmudgeon, living near Arkadelphia and helping to farm 360 acres that my uncle Hidle (read: the feddle gummit) owned. He left the house every morning at daylight and worked until after dark. Sometimes Granny could get him to come in for lunch by yelling for him out the back door. She eventually got sick of that and started running a dishtowel up the chimney as a signal flag when lunch was on the table. Every night when he came in from the fields after dark, he would crumble up leftover cornbread in a glass of buttermilk for supper. He called whole milk “sweet milk” and refused to put it in the refrigerator. He left it sitting out on the kitchen table and drank it sour. When we would make disgusted faces at him he would say. “You’d do the same if you knew how healthy it is!”

Granny could cook. I mean she could really cook. Her baked duck would melt in your mouth. There was always a perfect bundt cake sitting on the table. She put the urp in purple-hull peas. She could make squirrel and dumplings that would drive a vegan to carnivorous fits. She could do the fried squirrel and gravy thing too, but don’t reach for the head. Pawdy’s got dibs on the squirrel brains. When we had a holiday meal and Granny and her girls would get in that kitchen, the resulting tablescape was such a vista that someone would have to take pictures before the kids were allowed to dig in.

Pawdy raised hogs, cows, and chickens to eat and sell. When he and Granny would butcher an animal themselves, nothing much got thrown away. I can remember cranking the hand powered meat grinder and feeding sausage into the natural casings they had harvested. When my dad and I came back from fishing or a hunting excursion, Pawdy would watch and shake his head in disapproval as we cleaned our game. When we were finished, he would take our bucket of scraps and use them to make dinner.

When Pawdy went hunting it was because the family needed meat; not for “sport,” which he despised. He always rode his old black mare on these hunting trips and refused to wear the blaze orange vests and hats that the law prescribes. His horse was very skittish and he was the only person that she would let ride her, but Pawdy could shoot a gun from her back without spooking her. This was an effective hunting method, too. It turns out that animals that are keen to a human’s presence don’t even notice a horse coming around. One deer season he rode right up to a monstrous twelve-point buck and blasted it at point blank range.

He walked behind this same horse dragging an ancient spade to plow a garden, just like it was done in the middle ages. This even though Hidle (read: the feddle gummit) had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high tech farm equipment that he could have used, and my dad had repeatedly offered him use of his gas powered tiller.

He was part owner of the mineral rights on an oil producing lot back in Louisiana. Every year when my uncle Ronnie came up to Arkansas to visit, he would bring Pawdy a quart jar of crude. Pawdy would hold the jar up to the sun, then screw off the top, dip his index finger in the crude, and take a taste of it. His interest in the mineral rights was a very small percentage and it did not make him any money, but it was worth it to him to get to taste fresh earth every spring.

Around 1990, the feddle gummit finally came to collect the copious amounts of money that my uncle had borrowed. When he could not pay, they took the farm instead and he ran away into a north Arkansas whiskey bottle. Granny’s health was getting pretty bad, and by chance the house next to my parents was empty, so she and Pawdy moved in. Granny continued to deteriorate, and Pawdy spent the last several years of her life as her private nurse. He cooked for her, bathed her, moved her from the bed to the chair and back, and generally kept her out of a nursing home – which was where she would have been otherwise. Neither of them left the house for a long time.

Granny died on a Wednesday afternoon in the hospital in Arkadelphia. She took her last breath with my family standing in a circle around her, holding hands. We got home that night and Pawdy said, “Well I reckun’ I’ll go home and go to bed. I got to go there sometime.” And he did. He just walked home and went on with his life.

The next spring he discovered my dad’s gas powered tiller. He never had used a tiller before, why bother when he had a good horse and plow? But he quickly found out why everyone had embraced the gas powered tiller. Pawdy proceeded to plow up his entire yard and plant it in vegetables. When that was finished he plowed up my parent’s yard. By mid-summer he had the grandest suburban vegetable garden the world had ever seen. There were okra plants twelve feet high. The surplus was more than we could eat and more than we could give away.

It was so good to hear from my old friend John Barber last night. His sweet wife, Jana was in town and stayed the night with Ms. J and I. John called from their place in Baltimore to tell Jana goodnight. I took the phone to say hi (we have not spoken in at least a year, maybe longer) and I think I ended up talking to him longer than Jana did.

The best thing about hearing from John: He loves his job! I mean he said that several times. He like what he does, he likes the people that he works with. Praise God! That is amazing. He used to be just as disillusioned and unhappy at work as me, but things got better. Apparently lots better. That gives me hope that I have not had in months, perhaps years. I think I might have resigned myself to thinking that no one anywhere got to make a living doing something that they could stomach. A very depressing thought indeed.

Also we discovered that we now both work for the same huge defense company. Imagine that, we are coworkers. Colleagues. The difference, he does something enjoyable and I do something banal.

The second best part about hearing from John: While we were catching up, I mentioned this modest little blog. He happened to be sitting at a computer and surfed on over. He immediately said, “Wow, your links on the left hand side there are all of the sites that I have bookmarked and read every day.” He promised to keep an eye on my site too. Hopefully he will be a regular contributor to the comments section. John is one of the best music listeners and true fans that I have ever known. And he has impeccable taste. I am looking forward to John turning us on to some great new artists. He has already blown me away with finds like Vigilantes of Love and Over the Rhine.

This picture is for you, dear friend . . .

The Evolution of the Musician

I realize that I tell you people all the time to read Tony Pierce, but this morning he sets a new standard in blogging. His first post for 9/11 is a letter from President Bush to Osama. I would really like to post the whole thing, but Ill let you click over and read it instead. Here is an excerpt:

hi, my name is george w. bush.

i'm the president of the united states of america.

i have a message to osama bin laden.

osama, im calling you out.

i want to meet with you at an agreed-upon location and i want to beat your ass.

man to man.

face to face.

i'm sick, quite frankly, of this cat and mouse kiddie game of hide and seek and i am giving you one week to stand up to me as a man and take the licking you so deserve.

if you're so badass, why don't you meet me, the american white devil, anywhere you want so i can slap that stupid look off your face.

i know you're probably thinking that this is a trap, that the armed forces of the united states, or the u.n., or the northern alliance will jump out from the bushes and capture your sorry ass, and imprison you.

but i'm hereby giving you temporary immunity. you have no excuse to decline this offer.

i swear upon my word as president, on my word as a Christian, on my word as an American citizen that your safety will be guaranteed up to your meeting with me. and if you survive the single handed texas asskicking that i will deliver on your person, i will assure your safety back into whatever dusty hole you're currently hiding in.

but the only way you'll get home is through me, osama, and only you would call that gopher hole home.

After doing without for a few weeks, Ms. J finally complained enough that I went out and found a new comment hosting service.
Please friends, click the link under whatever post you want to make fun of and comment away!

I have joined this ad exchange service called "blogsnob." I am looking forward to new traffic and I am also excited about the new sites that it will turn me on to. It is a text based ad and you can see it on the left at the top of my links list. They claim to be family friendly and I hope that is the case. I encourage you to click on the site that is advertised if it looks interesting to you. If not, don’t. What do I care?

I have recently discovered that I am addicted to Tony Pierce. I can not explain it. We both like baseball and we both enjoy writing, but that is about all that we have in common. I have found myself going to his site several times a day hoping for new material. If Rolling Stone magazine wanted to save themselves and regain some of that street credibility that they used to have, they should start sending Tony on the road with bands. The articles he sent back would be well worth the cover price.

This week is my first real test of the fall semester. I have two papers to write for school and a gig to prepare for this Sunday. I am going to lose it. Just thinking about it has got me all sleepy.

My hippie brother-in-law called last night and said, “Would you happen to be the leader of some outfit called ‘The Nathaniel Greer Trio?’”
I’m afraid so, I said.
He had seen an ad for Take Five Jazz in the newspaper. He said he was coming to the show. That will be great. He is an ardent supporter of the arts, and hippies are always fun at shows.
Hippie brother-in-law is actually doing pretty well these days, or seems to be. At least he has held a job for several months in a row. That makes me proud. I want to like him and welcome him around. Every little boy should get to have a hippie uncle.
I remember seeing my uncle Pete from New Jersey. He was tall and thin. His hair was receding in the front and pulled into a scraggly ponytail in the back. He smoked cigarettes (and he only knows what else) and was a great auto mechanic. One time he passed through in a big old renovated school bus with this funny hippie lady and a couple of her little hippieletts. He was helping them drive that bus cross country to Arizona, seemingly just because they needed the help. I thought that he was the coolest guy I had ever seen. I wanted to take him to show and tell.
When I was about thirteen or fourteen he came to town for Granny and Pawdy’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. He stuck around longer than everyone else and on his last day he wanted me to go for a ride with him. He wanted me to lead him to some horrible souvenir shops so he could get cheesy gifts for friends back east. Before we left I suggested that we find some good stuff in my cassette collection to listen to. He looked it over and declared Jane’s Addiction as high quality. I could not argue with that. After that one was over I played him some Ice Cube. Pete thought that was hilarious.
He said to me, “Hey man, does your dad every play you any Pink Floyd?”
I confessed that I had never heard of that dude.
He said, “Where is the nearest record store.”
I led him to the mall and he marched straight in and bought me a copy of Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon." Also he told me it was a band, not a dude. For that I will be forever grateful. I still have that cassette, even though it has long since worn out. My hippie uncle was the coolest.

---

We moved the boy, Wylie in to a big boy bed last night for the first time. He only fell off once, and that was at 7:00 this morning. Boy did it upset him. Ms. J said that it was all that he talked about all morning. He has my sister’s old daybed and we pulled the trundle out about half way so that he would have something soft to land on if he fell. Well, I heard a dull thud this morning on the hardwood floor (and when I say hardwood floor, what I mean is hard, wood floor) and skedaddled in there. He was sitting up in the floor and crying about half way across the room from his bed. I don’t know if that was where he rolled to or what, perhaps rolled off so hard and fast that he missed the trundle all together.
Ms J. and the boy had to go to the store this afternoon. Wylie fell asleep on the way home and she slipped him out of his seat with that lovin’ momma touch and carried him in the house. As she was easing him down on to the bed she said that he quietly mumbled, “No, not the big boy bed . . .” and went right back to sleep.

I have just spent the better part of the day (in-between phone calls) reading this incredible article in the New Yorker about Saddam's genocide campaign against the Kurds of Northern Iraq, and Iraq's link to al Qaeda. (Linked to by Andrew Sullivan) It is a very long article, but well worth the read. It is sickening that the international community has allowed that creep to stay in power as long as he has. I will offer a few excerpts to give you the idea without having to spend the better part of your day reading it.

Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years ago—that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. "For Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population," she said. "They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery."

Increased rates of infertility, he said, are having a profound effect on Kurdish society, which places great importance on large families. "You have men divorcing their wives because they could not give birth, and then marrying again, and then their second wives can't give birth, either," he said. "Still, they don't blame their own problem with spermatogenesis."

Baban told me that the initial results of the Halabja Medical Institute-sponsored survey show abnormally high rates of many diseases. He said that he compared rates of colon cancer in Halabja with those in the city of Chamchamal, which was not attacked with chemical weapons. "We are seeing rates of colon cancer five times higher in Halabja than in Chamchamal," he said.

There are other anomalies as well, Baban said. The rate of miscarriage in Halabja, according to initial survey results, is fourteen times the rate of miscarriage in Chamchamal; rates of infertility among men and women in the affected population are many times higher than normal. "We're finding Hiroshima levels of sterility," he said.

Then, there is the suspicion about snakes. "Have you heard about the snakes?" he asked as we drove. I told him that I had heard rumors. "We don't know if a genetic mutation in the snakes has made them more toxic," Baban went on, "or if the birds that eat the snakes were killed off in the attacks, but there seem to be more snakebites, of greater toxicity, in Halabja now than before."

Baban said that in Halabja "there are more abnormal births than normal ones," and other Kurdish doctors told me that they regularly see children born with neural-tube defects and undescended testes and without anal openings. They are seeing—and they showed me—children born with six or seven toes on each foot, children whose fingers and toes are fused, and children who suffer from leukemia and liver cancer.

Most of the Kurds who were murdered in the Anfal were not killed by poison gas; rather, the genocide was carried out, in large part, in the traditional manner, with roundups at night, mass executions, and anonymous burials. The bodies of most of the victims of the Anfal—mainly men and boys—have never been found.

. . .allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam (a terrorist group that operates inside Iraq) has received funds directly from Al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with Al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.

. . .about ten years ago Saddam underwent something of a battlefield conversion to a fundamentalist brand of Islam. "It was gradual, starting the moment he decided on the invasion of Kuwait," in June of 1990, according to Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the University of Haifa. "His calculation was that he needed people in Iraq and the Arab world—as well as God—to be on his side when he invaded. After he invaded, the Islamic rhetorical style became overwhelming"—so overwhelming, Baram continued, that a radical group in Jordan began calling Saddam "the New Caliph Marching from the East." This conversion, cynical though it may be, has opened doors to Saddam in the fundamentalist world. He is now a prime supporter of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and of Hamas, paying families of suicide bombers ten thousand dollars in exchange for their sons' martyrdom. This is part of Saddam's attempt to harness the power of Islamic extremism and direct it against his enemies.

The man they introduced me to the next afternoon was a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian Arab, a smuggler and bandit from the city of Ahvaz. The intelligence officials told me that his most recent employer was bin Laden. When they arrested him, last year, they said, they found a roll of film in his possession. They had the film developed, and the photographs, which they showed me, depicted their prisoner murdering a man with a knife, slicing his ear off and then plunging the knife into the top of the man's head.

One day in 1999, Othman(Osoma bin Laden contact) got a message to Jawad(Al Qaeda smuggler mentioned in the preceeding paragraph), who was then in Iran. He was to smuggle himself across the Iraqi border at Fao, where a car would meet him and take him to a village near Tikrit, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's clan. Jawad was then taken to a meeting at the house of a man called Luay, whom he described as the son of Saddam's father-in-law, Khayr Allah Talfah. (Professor Baram, who has long followed Saddam's family, later told me he believes that Luay, who is about forty years old, is close to Saddam's inner circle.) At the meeting, with Othman present, Mukhabarat officials instructed Jawad to go to Baghdad, where he was to retrieve several cannisters filled with explosives. Then, he said, he was to arrange to smuggle the explosives into Iran, where they would be used to kill anti-Iraqi activists. After this assignment was completed, Jawad said, he was given a thousand Kalashnikov rifles by Iraqi intelligence and told to smuggle them into Afghanistan.

A year later, there was a new development: Othman told Jawad to smuggle several dozen refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Iraqi Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid was attached to each motor. Jawad said that he asked Othman for more information. "I said, 'Othman, what does this contain?' He said, 'My life and your life.' He said they"—the Iraqi agents—"were going to kill us if we didn't do this. That's all I'll say.

"I was given a book of dollars," Jawad went on, meaning ten thousand dollars—a hundred American hundred-dollar bills. "I was told to arrange to smuggle the motors. Othman told me to kill any of the smugglers who helped us once we got there." Vehicles belonging to the Taliban were waiting at the border, and Jawad said that he turned over the liquid-filled refrigerator motors to the Taliban, and then killed the smugglers who had helped him.

I asked (Kurdish Prime Minister) Salih to respond to the criticism, widely aired in the West, that the sanctions have led to the death of thousands of children. "Sanctions don't kill Iraqi children," he said. "The regime kills children."

The Kurds face an institutional disadvantage at the U.N., where, unlike the Palestinians, they have not even been granted official observer status. Salih grew acerbic: "Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don't engage in terror. We don't condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority of Mr. Arafat. We have spent the last ten years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society. What has he built?"

There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East. "The first thing that occurs to any military planner is force protection," Charles Duelfer told me. "If your assessment of the threat is chemical or biological, you can get individual protective equipment and warning systems. If you think he's going to use a nuclear weapon, where are you going to concentrate your forces?"

There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons. When I talked about Saddam's past with the medical geneticist Christine Gosden, she said, "Please understand, the Kurds were for practice."

I was driving Wylie home tonight when he says, "It's Dark!"
"Yeah," I said, "That means that it is almost time to go night-night"
The boy bristles, "No, I not go night-night. I not tired."
I replied, "But Wylie, it is so much fun to go night-night. I love going to bed."
The boy gets a smug look on his face, "But Dadoe . . . you sleep in Momma's bed."

The most amazing coincidence happened yesterday. When I got home from work my mom was there waiting for me with two pairs of brand new slacks. She had not read my post, she just loves me!

James Lileks is amazing today. Really amazing. I am not going to reprint an excerpt because you need to click over and read the whole thing.

Ode to my Favorite Pants

Two sizes too big in the waist, two inches too long in the legs. My favorite pants that I have ever owned came from J.C. Penney’s and were not purchased on sale. There were a gift from my momma for Christmas, but she let me pick them out. They were gray, and I might have preferred olive green, but that did not keep them from becoming my favorite pants of all time.

They were big and wide in the legs and pleated in the front which made plenty of room in the crotch. The pleats also made plenty of room in the butt, which is more important. I am bulky in the moneymaker. These fantastic slacks had cuffs folded over at the bottom of the legs that would collect dirt and lint and perhaps even crumbs while I was eating. If I had on sandals, the back side of the cuffs would tuck under my foot, between heel and sandal. If I had on sneakers or my favorite shoes (which are a whole other story) the cuffs at the bottom of the legs would tuck under the heel of my shoes and get walked on.


These were the very definition of comfort. Sliding my legs into them was like putting on a fresh coat of love. My flesh swam around in them all day and was never constricted. I wore them often – at least twice a week, sometimes more – for they made me feel like a man. I rarely dared to place them in the dirty clothes hamper, for who knew when they might return? These pants had to desperately need a washing to get one. If you love someone set them free, you might say? Not me with these fair slacks.

On Sunday mornings I would stand in front of my closet and contemplate, “How many Sundays in a row have I worn these. Have people started to notice? Does that even matter? There would be plenty of time to wash them from Sunday to Sunday. These people do not know that I wore them to work on Monday and Thursday. They are the most comfortable thing I own. I don’t care, I am wearing them.”

Those were the days, the good ole’ days, the days of the Haggar wrinkle free 40x32’s. When I look back on them my mind sees me as thinner, more handsome, smarter, and happier. When I look back on them I see a simpler, more honest time. A time when I was not so scared, not so alone, not so overwhelmed. When I look back on them, I long for them.

I first noticed them wearing out down where they had been walked on. I knew it would happen eventually, but why so soon? This did not seem like a crisis and I ignored it, continuing to wear the pants as if they were brand new and just as stylish and elegant as ever. Soon I noticed that the fraying went all the way around the pants leg. This was very disheartening, for they might not be easily passed off at work or at church any longer. It did not stop me, though. These were my favorite britches I had ever owned. Wearing them was like going home and I would not soon give it up. Perhaps their life could have been extended if at that point I had put them away for extraordinary occasions, but these were not pants that could be retired. These were not pants that would go gentle into the good night. These were rock-and-freaking-roll slacks and they would rather burn out than fade away. I would maintain my strict pants wearing regimen.

It was not long after that. No fabric can stand up indefinitely to the corrosive powers of crotch sweat. One morning I was dressing for work a little disoriented from the long winters nap. I lost my balance and my foot went right through the crotch of my chinos to the floor. There in the dark bedroom I finally had to accept the demise of these perfect britches. I knew they could never be replaced. I knew there was nothing in my closet that would compare. Bent over and pantsless in the twilight, I was overwhelmed. A bleak and lonesome tear slipped down my cheek.

Five glasses of wine a day 'halves risk of second heart attack'

Men who drink wine every day after suffering a heart attack have the risk of having another one cut by half compared with teetotallers, according to a French study.

The study followed 353 men aged between 40 and 60 for four years after their attack as part of a larger investigation aimed at seeing if the Mediterranean diet could prevent further heart problems and strokes.

All the men had suffered heart attacks of a similar level of severity, were taking similar treatments for their condition and led similar lifestyles.

The researchers monitored how much wine each man drank and divided them into groups - teetotal, drinking less than two glasses of wine a day, drinking about two glasses of wine a day and drinking four to five glasses a day.

The research, in the journal of the American Heart Association, Circulation, said that men who drank more than two glasses of wine a day reduced their risk of having another heart attack, a stroke or heart failure by 50 per cent, compared with the non drinkers.

There were 36 of these complications (ie a second heart attack or stroke) among the teetotallers, 34 among men who drank less than two glasses of wine a day, 18 among those who drank about two glasses a day and 16 among the men who drank four or five glasses of wine a day.

Salon has an article this morning detailing the sad world of Christian end-times movies. A world so sad, in fact, that I lost interest after about half of the article. If anyone makes it all the way to the end, tell me what happened. This is the passage that made me change the channel:

The latest van Heerden release, "Deceived," is described in the press kit as inspired by "Contact" and "Seven," but is really closer to the old "Star Trek" episode "The Naked Time." More playful than the dire "Apocalypse" movies, it's set in a deserted observatory (erroneously referred to in the movie as a "space station") where everyone's worst sin emerges. Then a weary-looking Judd Nelson realizes what's going on: SETI@Home, the distributed-computing project for analyzing signals from space, is functioning as no less than Satan's own peer-to-peer AudioGalaxy network.

When a signal arrives with a suspicious duration of 6.66 seconds, the usual archetypal characters from rapture movies have their own plans for it. Louis Gossett Jr., as a power-mad general, wants to control it. A crackpot New Age radio host -- the kind of comic-relief character only found in Christian entertainment -- begins raving about how the signal will "evolve" humans to a "higher consciousness" (evolution frequently appears in these movies in conjunction with madness.) The eyebrow-cocking "dot-com billionaire" wants to sell it, exclaiming: "It'll be the biggest webcast in history!" And the lusty TV reporter, naturally, wants to corrupt Judd.

But when the foxiest lady around, a chaste space scientist and Christian role model (well-toned Michelle Nolden) persuades Nelson that the signal is evil, and thus shouldn't be studied, good wins out. All the un-Christian players who thought they were sophisticated receive comeuppances. The once-proud anchorwoman asks to borrow the Bible. Carl Sagan rolls in his grave.

Hurrah! They figured it out.

With my former optimism for the baseball strike turning to dismay, today I shall prove myself to be an even older fart than anyone (other than Ms. J.) previously thought by discussing the current state of popular music. I caught the last half of the MTV Video Music Awards last night, and then the first few minutes of the replay. That was all I could take. During Jimmy Fallon’s opening number he fell to the ground and James Brown came out to sing to him, “Get up-ah . . . Get on up-ah . . . you gotta’ start the show.” It was all down hill from there. After reflecting on the depressing quagmire of horrible performances last night I have come to the conclusion that the artist with the most influence over today’s pop music scene would have to be Paula Abdul. She was a dancer and good looking, not a singer. In fact it has been alleged that she did not even sing on her records. I think that it is safe to say that she invented the kind of dancing that you see on MTV now, with the artist in the middle flanked by a co-ed group of dancers – all of them doing synchronized jukes and thrusts.

Most of the performers: Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Puffy Puff-Puff Diddio, were introduced as “great entertainers” and not singers or musicians. I don’t think I would agree that they entertained me, certainly not greatly, but I would heartily agree that they are not singers. In the above list of performances, I never heard a single live sound coming from the stage. Not one. Nothing! No live sound. I remember when I was a kid and I loved MTV; yeah most of the pop singers lip-synced, but the rappers would really rap and the talking at the first of the song would not be lip-synced. Last night, there was not a single sound during most of the performances that was not from tape. It was shameless. They did not even try to fool anyone. I do not know why they even insult us with the prop-mic. It obviously does not work, the performers did not even say, “thank you” at the end of the song. At least we were not forced to watch the spectacle of Britney Spears constantly adjusting her fake headset mic as if she is trying to get better reception.

The new rule is that you can not have a performance at the MTV awards now without elaborate sets, blinding lighting displays, constant pyrotechnic explosions, and 250 people on the stage. Each year they try to outdo the last. I think that Puff the Magic Diddy’s performance was the most obnoxious display of excess I have ever seen, with hundres of dancers, people with pogo shoes doing flips, extras shuffling in and out, people swinging by on trapeze, more rappers and fakers coming out and lip-syncing. They will do anything to try to distract people from the reality that none of these people are singing! They even went so far as to shoot the entire show with some kind of choppy, effected look to further distract the viewers. This is supposedly a show about awarding great musical performances, yet there is not a single bit of music being performed. At least most of them did not have a band up there pantomiming. I think Justin Timberlake was the only one to pull that one.

There were some performances that were live. I did not get to see The Boss perform with the E-Street Band, but I am sure they were live and awesome. He always is. As a matter of fact, he is entirely too classy of a performer for the disgraceful load of garbage that was most of the rest of the show. Sheryl Crow played piano and sang a nice tune. She is always good, especially when you do not have to listen to her live band which is mediocre at best. A band called The Hives played. I have never heard of them, but they looked like they were doing an impression of the Stones from 1964 doing an impression of the Ramones from 1976. They were entertaining and performed their own music live, even if they were not particularly talented. They were immediately followed by a group called The Vines, who sounded like a neo-Nirvana clone; the lead singer had a black eye and they were loud and they smashed their shit at the end of the song.







But the highlight of the night, the moment that will live in infamy, was the surprise performance from Guns and F-ing Roses at the end of the show. When Jimmy Fallon came out in the skull GNR shirt from the 80’s and started whistling Patience, I almost lost it. They played Welcome to the Jungle, they played some crappy new song with lots of synth and a drum loop, and then they played Paradise City. The only original members left in the band are Axl and Izzy, but they are certainly the most important ones as Izzy wrote all of the music and Axl the lyrics. The other musicians are all hired guns; they can all play very well and they all look very disturbing. Axl never sounded better live than he did last night. (But again, in the 80’s he never resorted to lip-syncing, even when he could not even approximate the vocals on the album.) All in all, it rocked, but was not enough to restore my faith in Rock and Roll.













Non-musical highlights include:










Britney Spears gave Michael Jackson a birthday cake and unable to avoid acting like a freak, he gave an acceptance speech from notes as if he had just been awarded the Nobel Weirdo Prize. His speech included the exclamation, “David Blaine, your magic is real and I believe in you!”




























Diamond Dave Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar presented the Best Rock Video award. Dave has a wig that has been fashioned to look just like his hair did in 1980. Sammy looks a whole lot like Mark Currey with blonde hair, but that is just my opinion.























Can you tell that Brandi is a nursing mother of a newborn?



















As depressing as the show was, and it positively moved me to anger, I will watch again next year. I have to. It is the only time all year that I catch up on what is going on in pop. Although I am an old man, I do not want to be out of the loop altogether. But the reason I will always watch the video music awards is that I love to get mad and bitch about the state of the music business. I love to point out how horrible they are and how fake and unholy and without redeeming quality the whole thing is. It makes me feel superior.

A city in Minnesota places a tax on rainwater.

CNN reports that 70,000 Austrailians identified their religion as "Jedi" in the government census last year. Jonah Goldberg points out that it is better than marking "Unitarian"

Master economist Larry Kudlow has an piece on NRO concerning the economics of the baseball strike. While Keith Olbermann reports this morning that the two sides are close to an agreement, Mr. Kudlow makes it very plain who you should be rooting for.

Today's threatened baseball strike is all about the Yankees and their great success. The baseball owners, guilty of class-warfare thinking, would love to take actions that would severely damage the great Yankee franchise. In the process, they would also cripple the standing of the game and the game's players.

Owners want a new revenue-sharing plan that allegedly would take more money from the rich teams and redistribute it to the poor ones. They would also institute an unbelievable 50 percent luxury tax on teams with high payrolls.

Step back a moment and think about this. In today's soft economy, if anyone in Washington proposed a 50 percent tax on luxuries the general public would instantly label them out of their minds. Yet the owners carry on with just such a tax-the-rich campaign. It's a scheme that would make Al Gore blush.

In so doing, the owners would do to the baseball economy what a similar luxury tax would do to the gross domestic product of the United States. They'd cripple it. Don't forget that George Bush the elder raised a luxury tax in 1990 that doomed his presidency and made a mild recession even worse. Instead of sticking it to the rich, the tax threw millions of blue-collar workers — those who produced the goods and services qualifying as luxuries — out of jobs. Major League Baseball players are dead right to oppose this crazy plan and the owners are completely wrong to favor it.

More, if anyone cares to look at the facts, the rich teams they would tax frequently fail. Yes, the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves have dominated the game in the last decade, but that's a result of good management on the field and in the front office. Plenty of other "rich teams" have fared poorly.

Think of the major-media-market Los Angeles Dodgers. Or the Boston Red Sox. Or the other perennial losers in prime locations like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago. The Cubs and the White Sox fail miserably each year, but it's the owners and management — and not the Yankees — who are to blame. The Cubs, in particular, report poor economic performance. But that's a sham. The team's excess revenues are upstreamed to the Tribune Company, which owns the Cubs, rather than back into the team.

League-wide, teams use phony accounting that would make former Enron executives proud. They depreciate stadium-related assets although the taxpayers financed the stadiums. They use phony accounting for minor-league team expenses. And they never open their books for full disclosure — the exact same sin that has sent many corporate CEOs to jail.

Why should poorly managed teams be subsidized in the first place? When sinking companies in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim were subsidized the economists labeled it industrial targeting. In baseball, it's nothing more than crony capitalism.

And since when does America punish success? Taxing success will generate less of it, both for the Yankees and the other teams. For example, when the Yankees go on the road they routinely draw crowds much larger than the home team usually brings to their ballpark. In places like Tampa Bay and Chicago, Yankee magic rubs off on all concerned, including local TV viewers and radio listeners. That the poorer franchises don't build on this success is not the fault of the Yankees. Blaming the Yankees in this way is akin to blaming rich Americans for injecting capital in start-up businesses that in turn create new jobs and greater wealth.

A dearth of taxes is not what ails baseball, but the selfishness of owners. They'd prefer to pick the pockets of players and fans than let poorly managed teams go under. If the baseball economy were based on free-market capitalist principles, poorly-run teams would indeed go under — and rightly so.

Salon.com has an interview with Steve Earle this morning. A few excerpts:

Steve Earle on Poetry:

It's like bluegrass. Deciding to be a poet is a hardcore decision. It's saying, "I'm going to do something that's really hard, that I'll never master, and that will never make me a fucking dime." Bluegrass and poetry have a lot in common.

On Spirituality:

I'd be a really bad Buddhist. I really hate to kill things now but I don't mind that other people kill them so I can eat them. I think it would be really hard on me to get that introspective. My spirituality boils down to that there is a God, and it ain't me. That's what's important for me to remember.

Our attempts to be God are where we fuck up. When we start trying to control shit or control the illusion that we control things, it's bad. The vast majority of times I still want to control everything and I wear myself out and then I have these moments where I'm able to literally let it go and those are the best times.

On Baseball:

It sounds weird but ballparks are the most tranquil structures human beings have ever built. For me, more than any church, more than anything else. I'm a huge Yankees fan. I was 6 years old in 1961 and that's what you got on TV in Texas was the Yankees. But I'll go to any ballpark, it doesn't matter. We have a triple-A team in Nashville and I go a lot. I can walk in and it happens almost immediately. As soon as I get to the top of the steps and see the green, I start feeling better. The shape of the fields, the colors, everything about 'em, I love 'em.

On Texas and Patriotism:

It's funny about Texas. I'll always be a Texan because there's no cure for it. Probably if there was, I'd take it. There are a lot of things about Texas that really bother me and more each time I go back. . . . I'll always be a Texan and I'll always be an American. I may not always live in the U.S., but I'll always be an American. The government can't decide whether I'm an American or not.

Keith Olbermann gives a day by day forecast for the baseball strike that is somewhat encouraging. He sees as a worst case scenario about nine days of strike, and seems to think that the strike will likely be avoided. His reasoning, bankers calling in loans to the owners that they can not pay without baseball games to generate revenue. Here is his play by play for Thursday:

Thursday, Aug. 29, 2002: Sometime on this day the owners -- probably still clinging to the $107 million mark for the luxury tax threshold for all four years of the deal -- will suddenly instruct their mouthpieces to push it up in at least the final three years. If their creditors, TV partners and sponsors have scared them enough, the offer will be sufficient for the players to say yes and to announce a tentative settlement in time for Peter Jennings to nod sagely about it.

If the owners present a lukewarm offer that Don Fehr still thinks he can finesse in short order, some kind of public announcement or leakage of "positive signs," will be made by 6 p.m. EDT. This is pure logistics: Players have to know whether to travel to the cities in which their new weekend series will begin the next day. The union has never sent players into the air to get to games unless it expects those games to be played.


There remains a 50-50 chance that despite all the exterior pressure, all the fear of cataclysmic revenue collapse and ownership financial fatalities, management will still be belligerent. In that event, talks will break off by dinnertime or by midevening at the latest, and the strike will begin at the end of the Tampa Bay at Anaheim game, around 12:30 a.m.

Simple rule of thumb here: If they haven't broken off talks and announced a strike by 7 or 8 p.m., they've probably got a deal, or at worst, are about to get one.