As it turns out, Bill Clinton is exactly like we always imagined he would be.

Anson said that those who socialize with Clinton say there's no off switch even when he's relaxed. One unnamed friend said of Clinton, "He just talks. You don't really have a conversation with him. He never asks about you. He never asks you your opinions on anything. He just loves to talk and have an audience.

"He is just self-absorbed. Totally. Not really interested in anything does or what they think. Except what do they think about what he is doing and what he is saying."

Another said, "He's like a walking Google. I don't care what word you put in, he will keep going and going."

Others describe him as a man who hates to be alone and who dominates every social setting he is in.

Which Bob Dylan song are you? Tangled Up In Blue

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

I have always suspected this, but now I finally have the evidence:


You are a MASTER of the English language!


While your English is not exactly perfect,
you are still more grammatically correct than
just about every American. Still, there is
always room for improvement...


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

About five years ago, this short guy with a goatee started coming up to me every Sunday after church. I would be on stage packing up my instrument and he wanted to talk about acoustic guitars and country music. And he knew a lot about both. He knew a lot about talking too, and my sweet wife would usually be ready for some lunch by the time we got through. “James Taylor plays Olsen guitars. They are the greatest acoustics ever. Have you heard that Steve Earle is making a record with Del McCoury and his band? Steve usually plays Gibson acoustics, but I bet he plays a Martin like a good bluegrasser on this record. I have a Taylor with koa sides and back. I play guitar too, and sing. I used to lead worship at my old church.”

I told him that I hoped he would get to play with us soon on a Sunday morning and I meant it. I love playing music with new people, especially people I liked and I was sure that I liked this guy a lot right from the beginning. (That is saying something too, for I am an antisocial creature.)

Finally one Sunday morning I showed up for rehearsal and Mark Currey, the guy that liked to talk about music, was already there, guitar case and a gig bag in hand. Pastor Tim said, “Why don’t you teach the guys your tune to start with.” Mark passed out chord charts to the band. The song looked simple enough. God’s key of G. One verse, then the Chorus repeats one line four times, “We bow down to the Lord our God.”

We played the song down and got to the end, but Mark kept going, leading us on without a plan. He repeated the line from the chorus over and over. And he meant what he was singing. He was worshipping the Lord, and we had to follow him. He was seriously worshipping and church was still an hour and a half away. We bow down to the Lord our God. We bow down to the Lord our God . . . Mark continued and threw in vocal ad-libs in between and during the line; each pass was more intense. Finally with a quick sideways glance he told us to end it.

Pastor Tim cornered me after church and asked what I thought about the new guy and his song. I said I loved it, that it was exactly what I was looking for in worship music, and that Mark had a great voice and a great song. “That guy really knows how to flip out!” That stuck. Mark became Capt. Flip Out from that moment forward. Mr. Bush could not come up with a more appropriate nickname.

The next fall Celebration decided to have a Harvest Party on Halloween night. Someone asked Mark and me to play some hillbilly tunes. We tore through a passel of favorites, finishing up with Carrie Brown. Carrie Brown is an up tempo bluegrass knee-slapper sung in cornpone two-part harmony about a guy murdering another man over a girl he had just met in line at the grocery store. A killin’song. In church. On Halloween. It is a treasured memory for all who attended.

When Pastor Tim was asked to do the music for the first Sharefest worship service in Alltel Arena, everyone who went to our church and played an instrument got to be in the band. Mark was the only one to be recognized in public later that week. The lady in the car behind him in the Burger King drive-through flagged him down as if he were a rock star – and this was before he had rock star hair.

Besides playing at church, Mark, Dan, Roach and I have played a handful of gigs as The Mark Currey Band. Two of the gigs were in Hot Springs, one of which was our most spiritual experience ever. (Upstairs in a dark loft with thirty high school kids who were ready for the flip out.) Besides that, the most memorable was a concert in Hampton, Arkansas in a huge metal barn. The walls were lined with the taxidermied shoulder-mounts of dozens of wild boar – real Arkansas Razorbacks. The place smelled like the killing floor of a pork slaughterhouse. The audience was a couple of old black ladies, who told us we were too loud and were correct about that. On the long ride back to Little Rock we rescued a poor family who had ran out of gas in a particularly remote stretch of highway. Upon reflection, they were probably the whole reason that God sent us that direction that evening.

Mark took me to Eureka Springs once. We performed at the annual folk festival billed as “Ferndale Cutoff.” Our set list was all classic country gold and Steve Earle. We performed in the park while Miss J and Miss Kim chased our kids back and forth in front of the stage. Mark introduced another great killing song by querying the crowd to find out if anyone present had ever murdered anyone, been to prison, or murdered anyone in prison. Never has such a clever joke bombed so hard. The silence was deafening. Crickets were the only sound.

The first time that Ms. J and I went to Mark and Kim’s house for dinner was memorable for several reasons. First of all, earlier that day I had cut my index finger on my left hand very severely and it was stitched up and in a brace. Second was Miss Kim’s wonderful beef stew. Third was my first encounter with Rocky the Yapping Rat Terrier. Oh how Mark despised that animal!

Not long after that Miss J and I decided to host a church small group (Home Team) in our house. Neither of us wanted to lead it, and Mark had some experience in that, so he and his family joined up. We became fast friends that fall over Big K sodas and cheese dip. The meetings usually went like this: Everyone would eat snacks, Mark would play some tunes on his guitar, Mark would introduce a topic or a scripture and we would discuss all around it for far too long. Then we would pray for what seemed like hours. Sometimes we would all pray together, sometimes we would separate and the men would go to the back room. Mark prays beautifully. He never runs out of things to say, but he never says anything extra. This is a rare gift in the semi-charismatic, non-denominational, small group prayer world.

The most special part of Home Team was getting to know the Currey family and watching those beautiful kids grow up. I think everyone in that group felt like they were part of that family. Not the Home Group family, but Mark and Kim’s family. With a dozen adults and a handful of kids in a 900 square foot house, things were rarely boring. During one of our intense prayer times little Caroline – who was about two at the time and potty training – came waddling down the hall with her pants around her ankles exclaiming, “I did it! I pooped in the potty!” Prayer time was over. Everyone cheered for Caroline and laughed together. Miss Kim went after the reward chocolates.

Soon after we met, Mark and I started trading emails almost daily, and our after church chats have only gotten longer over the years. About a year ago I talked Mark into installing MSN Messenger on his computer at work. Since then we have chatted at length almost every day. This past summer when I went to Alaska for a week, I took my laptop so that we could keep in touch. How cool it was to be sitting in downtown Juneau, Alaska, and chat with Mark like we were only 4 miles apart instead of 4000. It made the trip more special to me to be able to describe what I was seeing to my buddy back home.

And really, I have become addicted to these instant message conversations. I can’t imagine how I ever got through a workday without having him around. Sometimes our personalities compliment each other, other times we feed off of each other, but never once have we run out of things to talk about: work, church, family, friends, and especially music. Mark has become a mentor to me.

Mark may be forty, but he is a young forty. Just look at his hip young hairstyle. Like Martin guitars and homemade dill pickles, he just gets better as he gets older. His voice sounds better than ever, he is playing guitar better than ever, and he keeps turning out better and better worship tunes. But more importantly he is still becoming a better father, husband, and friend. Mark’s disposition has changed recently. These days he has the confidence of a man who knows that he is right were he needs to be. Maybe that comes to everyone with age, but I think Mark has worked hard and started to be refined into an insightful Christian gentleman. I love him and hope that he keeps popping up on my computer screen with pithy comments for as long as I am around.

The following are quotes from the speech President Bush delivered to the Republican Governor's Association. I got them from the Bush/Cheney 04 email newsletter. The full text of the speech is available here, and it is a good read. But I thought that the passages highlighted in the newsletter were worth passing along. How could anyone listen to this stump speech and not be swayed? Well, I guess a lot of people are and will be, but this is music to my ears.

First on the economy:

Come November, the voters are going to have a very clear choice. It's a choice between keeping the tax relief that is moving this economy forward, or putting the burden of higher taxes back on the American people.... Our opponents talk about job creation, but they're against every one of these job-creating measures. Empty talk about jobs won't get anybody hired. The way to create jobs is our pro-growth, pro-entrepreneur, pro-small business owner agenda.

Next on Personal Liberty:

The American people will decide between two visions of government: a government that encourages ownership and opportunity and responsibility, or a government that takes your money and makes your choices.... On issue after issue, the American people have a clear choice. Our opponents are against personal retirement accounts, against putting patients in charge of Medicare, against tax relief. They seem to be against every idea that gives Americans more authority, and more choices, and more control over their own lives.... I trust the people, not Washington politicians, to make the best decisions for their own money, their own health, their own retirement, and their own lives.

The War on Terror:

It is a choice between an America that leads the world with strength and confidence, or an America that is uncertain in the face of danger.... Our opponents say they approve of bold action in the world, but only if no other government disagrees. I'm all for united action, and so are the 34 coalition partners we have in Iraq right now. But America must never out-source America's national security decisions to the leaders of other governments. Some of our opponents are skeptical that the war on terror is really a war at all. They view terrorism more as a crime -- a problem to be solved with law enforcement and indictments.... After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States -- and war is what they got.

Damn, that is tough!

This stump stuff is pretty good, (a lot of it is rhetoric and will be quickly refuted for example, "against putting patients in charge of Medicare." I doubt Mr. Kerry will let that stand.) but will get tuned up and better as the campaign trail goes on. I would say that conservatives should be pretty optimistic right now about November. That said, it is a long way off and there is still plenty of time for the topic of conversation to get shifted. I hope this gay marriage thing blows over soon.

Dan has created a new Yahoo Group for our band. You can join in the fun here:

Subscribe to cosmicdebrisband
Powered by launch.groups.yahoo.com

The Institute of Medicine in Washington and Health Canada have determined that you do not necessarily need eight glasses of water a day. Furthermore, Beer and Coffee do not have a diuretic affect on the human body, but rather add net water to your system.

The independent institute sets nutrition recommendations. The nutrition, pediatrics and geriatrics experts concluded the average North American woman requires about 2.7 litres of fluid a day and men need 3.7 litres.

The fluid doesn't all have to come in form of water. Milk, juice and soup all add up, and even a cold beer or caffeinated coffee count.

The belief that beer or coffee draw fluid from the body is mostly a myth, according to University of Alberta physiology Prof. Susan Jacobs-Kaufman.

"It has very, very little if any diuretic effect," said Jacobs-Kaufman. "Overall, you're still gaining fluid for it to go back out of the kidney ultimately."

I am a big water drinker, but I am also a big coffee drinker and a big booze drinker. Lucky for me, they are all healthy!

Dude, I would totally drive this.

Finally some press! Jim Harris writes about the Musician's Showcase this week in the Arkansas Times. Here is the money paragraph:

Poeboy Society barely escaped a strong performance by first-timers Cosmic Debris. Obviously, Cosmic Debris members have played somewhere, a lot, and for such a new band were amazingly tight with their jazz-influenced rock. Poeboy's edge came in the overall stage presence and crowd response, as the musicianship edge clearly was in Cosmic's show.

Upcoming Fox TV shows:

1. The Littlest Groom. 12 female dwarfs compete for the love of a hunk; well make that a chunk of burning 4 foot 5 inch love. Just when you have accepted this premise, a group of normal sized babes are brought in to compete against the little ladies.
2. When Animals Attract. A National Geographic show about mating rituals among animals. It should include plenty of doggystyle.
3. Celebrity Spelling Bee. Nothing else needs to be said about this one.

Honestly, you can not parody this. Fox’s New Development team is a load of freaking geniuses.

For anyone who cares, and I know that John Barber does, here is the board tape from last Thursday’s show at Juanita’s. First a few notes, or reasons why this sounds so crappy:

This was our first gig in front of a live audience. We were playing in the Arkansas Times’ Musicians Showcase, and were the third act of four that performed that night. We arrived while the first band was playing and stood outside on the sidewalk while until they finished and loaded out. When they were out of the way, we moved all of our gear into a closet next to the stage while the second act was setting up. When the second act was done, we waited patiently for them to break down, and then had fifteen minutes to set up and start playing. We got no sound check, or even time to tune our guitars. The first time I tried my mic was the first time I sang a note on Chevy Nova. I had nothing in my monitor at all. Because of this, my background vocals occasionally sound like I am doing a Linda McCartney impression.

Now for a word about the curious genera of Rock and Roll board tapes. When you play in a small club like Juanita’s, you are in a small room, maybe 1000 square feet. You have a loud ass drum set, moderately loud guitar amps, Dan’s holy thunder bass amp, a fairly quiet sax, and very quiet voices. All of these things go into a 12,000 watt PA to be mixed to equal levels in the room. Obviously, the things that are the loudest on stage are going to be at the lowest levels in the mix – the things that are quietest on stage become the loudest in the mix. If you have a good sound man, and Juanita’s has the best, then all of this sounds perfectly balanced in the room.

When you get a board tape, you get the levels as set on the board. The stage volume is not a factor, since you are not in the room and can not hear the actual guitar amps and drums. Therefore you get very little drums, a little more guitar (Luke’s guitar is louder than mine on the tape because I had mine turned up louder on stage), a lot of sax, and an uncomfortable amount of vocals. There is no singer in the world whose voice will stand up to the scrutiny of a board tape without some gaffes. (An exception to this is Mark Currey, who always sounds pitch perfect and soulful on even the most horrible mixes.) Luke weathers this very well, but you should listen to it while cutting him some slack.

With all of this in mind, go and enjoy. Tell me what you think.

Matt Labash is in New Hampshire this week.

Up at the campus's Dominic Hill, John Kerry prepares to march down to the debate with a firefighter's union and their bagpiping corps, who are playing something that sounds like Dean funeral music. For a moment, Kerry's bus, the "Real Deal Express," almost grinds its candidate into the pavement as it hurtles down the hill. A line of Deaniacs obstruct the way, causing Kerry and company to knock into the back of their bagpipers, who are getting their kilts flipped up and worse. The Deaniacs then burst through the line, and the Kerry supporters start pushing back. The whole thing plays like a battle scene from "Braveheart," or it would've if "Braveheart" had featured a man dressed like a giant penis getting hip-checked into a snow-bank.

The debate itself, as has now been well-documented, is boring beyond description. In the light of Dean's meltdown, all the frontrunners seem intent on being their campaign-brochure selves, only less so. After sustaining a sore throat and a week of nightmare press, Howard Dean appears to be sucking back his own words even as he says them, causing Joshua Green of the Atlantic Monthly, sitting next to me in the press room, to comment, "It sounds like a guy trying to hold in a bong hit."

With karate I'll kick your ass
Here to Tiennamen Square.

Tonight was our first time to play in front of people, and it went really well, almost perfect. We performed to the best of our abilities and received a huge crowd response. We did not win and will not be advancing to the finals of the Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase, but then again, we never really expected to. This was our first gig for Pete’s sake.

All in all, I am very proud of our performance. We accomplished everything that we set out for. We played the songs perfectly. We had a great time. We got to play at Juanita’s – on a stage where I have seen Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Warren Haynes, Melvin Seals, North Mississippi All-Stars, Merl Saunders, Oteil Burbridge, Duane Betts, Victor Wooten, J.D. Blair, Chris Duarte, Ian Moore, and many more of my heroes. We impressed a more experienced band to the point of them offering us opening slots. And I feel certain that the Juanita’s people will invite us back to play again.

So lookout for Cosmic Debris (suddenly and consistently pronounced Kos-mick Dee-Briss). We reign. Runner up.

And furthermore - Look for a tape of our performance on this blog in the next few days.

I realize that I am late on finding this article that Matt Labash published last Friday. Matt, an admitted reality TV junkie, rips into Nicole Richie from Fox's The Simple Life with his trademark sardonic wit. Here is a sample:

Critics, always in need of finding larger social implications, have misguidedly written thousands of words on how the ascendance of Paris Hilton means our culture is now so addicted to celebrity that we are willing to reward people with fame who've done nothing to earn it. Last summer, an Associated Press writer even diagnosed the condition with the coinage "PAC"--for "pre-achievement celebrity." But it's hardly a new grievance. Andy Warhol marked the same phenomenon in the '80s. And Homer took notice of it well before then, having written, in the "Iliad," "How vain, without the merit, is the name."

But if critics have correctly diagnosed the problem, they've undersold it's severity by pegging it to the wrong poster girl. The mystery isn't why Paris Hilton can become famous for having done nothing (she did, after all, allegedly make out with former Madonna girl-toy Ingrid Casaras in a bar). The true mystery is how someone like the charmless Nicole Richie can become famous for nothing more than being the friend of someone who's famous for nothing.

This is one of the acts we will be competing against. Things are not looking good for Cosmic Debris. We don't even have a web site! Be sure and check out the lyrics.

Up in dog town 72115
We’re coming up Yeah we’re bring it Live
Up in dog town 72115
We will get you off and leave you to die

Wait a second. 72115 - Dog Town - These guys are my neighbors.

My new band finally got our first gig. We will be playing at Juanita's tomorrow night in the Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase. Soon the world will be ours. Cosmic Debris - We Reign. Supreme.

Comments are back up. Feel free to tell me what you think about previous posts.

Dennis Miller's new CNBC show is starting soon. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reprinted a New York Times article about him and it.

"Did you see the Democratic debate the other night?" he asked. "To me, Dennis Kucinich's politics are more scrambled than Rod Steiger's dream journal. And Clark? He's a wizard in many ways, but when I hear him speak, it's almost like he's slumming. There's a mensch discrepancy there. At least John Edwards, who to me is a reasonably shallow guy, at least he can dog-paddle around in that park and not look out of place."

For Sale: 1/6 scale model of Christopher Walken's head.