Archive for the 'culture' Category
Lizzie, the Magical Negro, and Families of Choice
I added some thoughts to FOOB: Getting All Racial that I think speak to my larger concerns regarding subtle racism in For Better or For Worse, so before I go on, I hope you’ll pay a visit and read my expanded post. Don’t worry, I wait.
As you’ll see, I wrote a bit about institutionalized [...]
Frank Zappa
John Amato at Crooks and Liarsreminds me that its the 13th Anniversary of Frank Zappa’s death.
I was a big fan of Frank, from the moment I heard “Broken Hearts Are For Assholes” at the tender age of 13. That song had me in hysterics. His stand against the PMRC and the [...]
So What? We Deserve It.
ut the evidence that the human species is in a whole heap of trouble keeps piling up, like the research work in Amazonia (referenced in the Lovelock article) that suggests the world’s largest rain forest is extremely sensitive to drought, and that many of its tree species probably can’t survive more than three years of [...]
Read More..>>More on Hardcore and Political Consciousness
In 1983 I was an angry, lonely, and misunderstood 13-year-old. Most of this was rooted in what was going on at home: my mother had surrendered to her alcoholism and spent half of her time in a staggering, unpredictable drunken rage, and the other half in her room with the door locked, recuperating from [...]
Read More..>>John Yoo: So Full of Shit His Eyes Are Brown.
Yoo: The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents.
“No serious threats”?
What the fuck is John Yoo talking about? or were those ICBM’s the [...]
Thomas Paine
Byl offers a qutoe from Thomas Paine. Little known fact: Paine named our country. He was the first to call our chunk of soil The United States.
He was a free-thinker, a deist, and a revolutionary. He printed Common Sense, the pamphlet that did so much to encourage the Revolution right here in Philadelphia, at [...]
Bill Monroe: Remembering the Father of Bluegrass Music
Today would have been Bill Monroe’s 95th birthday.
For those of you who are not bluegrass freaks, Bill Monroe is widely seen as the Father of Bluegrass Music, which he presented to the Grand Ole Opry audience in the early 1940s.
Bluegrass music, contrary to popular belief, is not particularly old. True enough, Monroe based his [...]
Read More..>>I’ll Give It a Shot
Atrios writes, of upper-class twit and congenital liar Sebastian Mallaby:
I’m not going to claim to have a deep understanding of living life as a member of the working poor – and, no, years of being a relatively impoverished grad student don’t really qualify – but I do know the experience of someone in that situation [...]
Mean and Ignorant
I was at Central Pizza this afternoon to pick up a cheesesteak.
The woman who runs the counter is in her late forties, maybe early fifties, with scrappy brown hair and yellowed teeth. Her skin has that sepia tone that long-term smokers always seem to have. Her legs are rather thin, considering they [...]
Drinking Liberally, 8/22: Armageddon Awaits!
Just a quick reminder that Armageddon or no, we’re still going to be Drinking Liberally at 18th Street and Lombard in Center City Philadelphia from 6-whenever PM! I hope you’ll join us, and if indeed God’s Fire does rain from the sky, or the 12th Imam appears, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster pelts us [...]
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