If you’re my age, you grew up on the Beastie Boys. In memory of MCA, I’m breaking my silence to post the complete “Paul’s Boutique”, their best album.

It’s a sad day for hardcore, punk rock, and hip-hop.

Hot off the griddle from Scrapple TV. Please share with your xenophobic friends.

And now a thought on Jesus and Joey Vento. No, not Jesus Christ: if he really was Yahweh made flesh, then whatever He and Joey have to talk about is not my concern.

No, I’m talking about Jesus Ayala, who I worked with in the 1990s. Even though I was largely supported by student loans, I worked all the way through college as a cook. As you might expect, I worked with a lot of people from South and Central America: Jesus was from El Salvador. He couldn’t speak a word of English, but he could understand it perfectly. I often wondered if he actually could speak if he wanted to, but was just embarrassed by how thick his accent would be, or maybe he was just afraid if he tried, he’d make a silly mistake and look the fool.

My major was in English, but I was minoring in Spanish. Jesus and I spent about 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, in a basement kitchen together. I credit him with my straight As in Spanish: my professors would remark that my accent was better than any of the other non-native speakers. Some would ask where I sounded like a Salvadoreno.

I had decided to make my job my classroom. Because Jesus understood English, I could ask him how to say a particular word or phrase, but my favorite was learning proper colloquialisms.

“Quiero decir “Bob’s a fucking asshole”, pero no se la palabra,” I would ask.

“Brendo, diga ‘Bob es guay’ o ‘Cabron’,” Jesus would tell me.

I learned a lot during that time of my life, about communication, about other cultures, and about respecting people as individuals. And that’s why I could give a rat’s ass that a xenophobic, racist, classist, arrogant, right-wing asshole like Joey Vento has left this mortal coil.

I hope the sign on the Gate, no matter where the sandwich maker goes, reads “Spanish Only.”

I’m not even sure what videos to post, but I’ll do my best.

Black Lung

The Rebel Girl

Just a Few Old Memories

West Virginia My Home

This is a very sad day.

One of my favorite Dr. Who companions, Sarah Jane Smith, as played by Elisabeth Sladen, has died.

When I first started watching this crazy, obsession-inducing show, Sarah Jane Smith was a constant. She was one of my favorite companions from the classic series, perhaps my favorite. Her re-appearance in the new series was great too.

So in Sladen’s memory, here’s her first appearance ever:

…and her farewell:

Goodbye Sarah Jane.

I just got the news that my old friend Jake Jenkins died in a plane crash outside of his home in Lubbock Texas. His parents were in the plane with him: Jake leaves behind a wife and three young children.

That’s Jake kicking ass on the banjo in the video above, a few months after I met him at a truly insane indoor bluegrass festival. I’m hoping someone’s going to dig up some of Jake’s cowboy poetry, which was as good as his banjo playing.

I’m going to miss you Jake, and so area lot of other people.

The two big Philadelphia newspapers, which are written at a 5th grade level in order to hold the interest of the more than 50% of Philadelphia adults with the reading skills of a ten-year-old (pardon the pdf), have decided to experiment with a paywall. This premise is, to me, ludicrous on its face: if a paywall didn’t work for the New York Times country’s paper of record, who in their right mind would believe a newspaper written for illiterates would successfully implement the same system, when the quality of the content is so dumbed down?

But it gets even better: according to Bucks Local News:

Philly.com readers will still be able to get Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News stories for free, said editor Wendy Warren in response to a report that the media company was planning to institute a pay wall.

Warren added that the company would, however, charge readers who want those stories “laid out like a paper,” via her @WendyWarren Twitter account.

“@fixgear Inquirer, DN articles will still be found on P.com for free. If you want stories laid out like a paper, you’ll have to pay,” Warren tweeted Wednesday night.

Because God knows how difficult it is to read articles formatted for the internet instead of in 1.5″ wide columns, especially in the 15 years since people have grown accustomed to reading the news online. It just makes sense that people will pay for the privilege of reading otherwise free content in a different format… if you live on Planet Stupid, that is.

But it gets even better as you’ll see when you log in, which by the way is difficult: after a few minutes of clicking on “current user? Click here to sign in”, you’ll realize you actually have to click waaay to the right of the sign-in icon.

The digital edition is laid out sort of like a photoshop document, with layer upon layer of distracting menus on all four sides. When the paper opens, it’s too small to read the text, so you click the “zoom” tool (which you don’t need for the free version at philly.com), and it zooms in so close you can’t read more than a few words. That’s when you learn the zoom has two settings: too far out or too close.

Not only that, the zoom tool sits on this dashboard thing that covers up half of the text in whatever you’re trying to read. And boy oh boy, is the emphasis on “trying”, because to read any single article, you have to scroll up and down and side to side. But every time you try to scroll, the dashboard appears and blocks the scroll bar. If your mouse passes over the headline, a pop-up balloon appears, covering the text of the article. In that balloon? The same text you were trying to read to begin with.

After two minutes I gave up on trying to navigate this…. this thing. I felt like I was back in highschool, navigating microfilm, except that the microfiche viewer was easier to use and didn’t have a menu of icons blocking half the text. The Daily News application was almost entirely useless, and if the “front page” of the digital Inquirer, littered with green balloons pointing out which page each article starts on, is any indication, the Inky is even worse.

Honestly, I don’t know who is going to use the digital edition voluntarily, never mind paying for the privilege. The whole format hurts my eyes and gives me a headache. I wish i could tell you that one feature or another worked well, but I can’t. Calling the digital version of the newspapers “a piece of shit” is too kind… to fecal matter.

So, to recap: the digital edition doesn’t work very well, is unsightly and hard to read, and provides (for a fee) the same information you get at no charge at the parent company’s website. The whole enterprise makes no sense no matter how you look at it: no one’s going to pay to use an ungainly application to read dumbed-down news written the functional illiterates who are the majority in this city.

Whoever came up with the digital edition should be fired, and probably hauled out and shot, for wasting money. It’s a fucking disaster, and please note: my comments have nothing to do with content and everything to do with presentation, ease of use, user-friendliness, and format.

“Americans Make Too Much Money, an argument for lower wages (predicated on the idea that desperate people with children to feed will be more likely to accept lower wages, depressing paychecks for everyone), and “We can’t Sustain Public Pensions”, which argues that governments can’t pay pensions at a time when people’s 401Ks and other retirement plans are bleeding dry like a hemophiliac in a car accident.

Is it really any wonder that the paper that brought you the intellectual contributions of such giants as Rick “man on dog” Santorum and John “the president can crush a child’s testicles” Yoo is bankrupt?

Around the 6:33 mark, the narrator/filmer, John Wathen, comes to a pod of 36 dolphins stranded in oil, “struggling just to breathe”. Another 18 are discovered later, and then A GODDMAN FUCKING SPERM WHALE TRAPPED IN OIL UP TO ITS GODDAMN BLOWHOLE. “Across his back we could see red patches of crude as if he’d been basted for boiling,” says the narrator, before cutting to ANOTHER pod of dead and dying dolphins.

It’s one of the saddest things I have ever seen, and makes me wonder why, if God exists, He hasn’t struck down humanity yet. Or as my buddy Tim put it, “we’re the new dinosaurs, this is our greed-driven asteroid.”

Fuck you BP. fuck you Tony Hayward. Fuck You Carl-Henric Svanberg. I hope all of you die slow, miserable deaths. I hope the good people of the Gulf have the capacity to kidnap one of you, stuff you into a burlap sack and keelhaul you through the muck before exercising their new SCOTUS-decided individual rights to bear arms.

And for that matter, FUCK YOU US GOVERNMENT for letting BP take the lead in this, for allowing them to harass and chase of journalists, for allowing them to continue to lie and cover-up, and for believing them in the first place when they have 760 fucking safety violations.

Fuck all ya’ll. YOU FUCKING SUCK SHIT YOU ASSHOLE FUCKING SHITBAGS.

What’s not so well-known about Robert Byrd was that he was a lifelong fiddle player, a much more respectable career than “politician”. So here are a few videos of Byrd fiddling, inspired by Christy Hardin Smith, whose presence on the internets I’ve missed.

Goodbye Senator Byrd.