play it all night long

"Grandpa pissed his pants again
He don't give a damn
Brother Billy has both guns drawn
He ain't been right since Vietnam"

Tonight is the first late night of the semester. It won't be the last. There is a certain tranquility in the overcaffienated haze that sets in around 2:19 in the am when you are typing away, digging out some really good quotes, and then mid-sentence you look up and realize you have no idea what your point is or what you were trying to say.

But you are working hard, and that is what counts. . . . right?

"Daddy's doing Sister Sally
Grandma's dying of cancer now
The cattle all have brucellosis
We'll get through somehow"

Apparently there are some elections going on, and everyone thinks they are going to win. I only really know that because last night when I tried to take th eevening and enjoy myself watching football I was subjected to the same lame negative political add at almost every single commercial break. The other guy didn't run a single add - I;m not sure if that means that he thinks he has it in the bag, is totally screwed, or is simply more in touch with the fact that the demographic watching Sunday Night Football is not exacty "likely to vote."

I probably would have been annoyed that this guy kept butting into my evening with the same lame political commercial, but I was too busy being annoyed at my football team as they proceeded to make every mistake imaginabe en-route to giving up 35 unanswered points and getting embarassed on national tv.

Of course, that also meant that I had to wear my team t-shirt today. There is nothing more annoying than front-running fans, and for some reason last year with the Steelers in the Superbowl was even worse than normal. All of a sudden everyone was breaking out their sweatshirts etc. I wear my gear when we lose. The team doesn't need my support when we win.

"Sweet home Alabama"
Play that dead band's song
Turn those speakers up full blast
Play it all night long

on the iPod:
The Drive By Truckers, 10/26/06, Cannery Ballroom, Nashville, TN
(covering Warren Zevon)

changing expectations

you'd think that if I am only posting here once a week (or less) that I could come up with some kind of original material - instead, I will just let you enjoy the begining of this article from today's Washington Post:

Bush's New Tack Steers Clear of 'Stay the Course'

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2006; A01

President Bush and his aides are annoyed that people keep misinterpreting his Iraq policy as "stay the course." A complete distortion, they say. "That is not a stay-the-course policy," White House press secretary Tony Snow declared yesterday.

Where would anyone have gotten that idea? Well, maybe from Bush.

"We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed," he said in Salt Lake City in August.

"We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course," he said in Milwaukee in July.

"I saw people wondering whether the United States would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed," he said after returning from Baghdad in June.

But the White House is cutting and running from "stay the course." A phrase meant to connote steely resolve instead has become a symbol for being out of touch and rigid in the face of a war that seems to grow worse by the week, Republican strategists say. Democrats have now turned "stay the course" into an attack line in campaign commercials, and the Bush team is busy explaining that "stay the course" does not actually mean stay the course.

full article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/23/AR2006102301053.html

on the iPod:

The Clash, London Calling

Jamie Cullum, Twentysomething

swimmin

If you check your voicemail while going to the bathroom, you might drop your phone in the toilet. You can wash your hand after reaching in, but your phone will probably still be broken.

Cardtoons

Anyone remember these? When they were printed, did anyone tink they would be leading teams in the 2006 LCS? Even if you would have beleived it, would you have beleived it would be the Tigers & the Mets?

Where's the Beef?

"Neutral-seeming ads influence people's social and political attitudes, and themselves arouse political controversy. "Where's the Beef?" turned from an advertising catchphrase into the only really memorable thing about the 1984 presidential campaign. Four years later, Michael Dukakis called George Bush "the Joe Isuzu of American politics.""

White v. Samsung Elec. Am., Inc., 989 F.2d 1512, 1520 (9th Cir. 1993) (Kozinski, J. dissenting)

typographical error #2

if you hit the "y" instead of the "u" when spelling "antitrust" you get "antitryst"

how old are you?

Do you remember when Listerine was advertised as a cold remedy? Me neither - the Federal Trade Commission made them stop the 100 year old campaign in 1977.

FYI - Excepting the new flavors, Listerine's formula has not been changed since 1879.

mix it up

My iTunes library is up to 554 albums by 267 artists taking up just under 50GB of hard drive and constituting 27.6 days of continuous music. Granted, 101 of those albums and 25GB of the memory is devoted to live WSP I pulled down from Digital Panic . org. But still, that only counts for 8 days of music (while I do convert the songs to mp4, I use a higher sample rate, so the files are about twice as big as traditional mp3s)

Needless to say, this is really an unmanageable amount of music. There are hours and hours - probably days - worth of music that I have never listened to since I got my iPod last January.

And that, I assume, is why Apple invented the shuffle function. Here's the song list that I got this morning:

Freak Mama, Mudhoney & Sir Mixalot, Judgment Night Soundtrack
Stop Go, WSP, 6/28/96
Horn, Nick Drake, Pink Moon
L.A., WSP, 6/22/01
Dr. Butcher, Psycho-Possum, Assorted Fruit Flavors (Ghostmeat Records compilation)
Come Closer, Porter Davis, Bootleg Series Vol. 1
You Could Be Mine, Guns & Roses, Live Era '87-'93

fear germs

I was at the grocery store the other day and right beside the entrance, next to the carts, was a "disinfectant wipes" dispenser, and a diagram of a hand wiping down the handle of a shopping cart. Seriously. I don't know about you, but my brother and I grew up going to the grocery store with my mom and we pushed & rode in the cart and to my knowledge she never used a disinfectant wipe to wipe down the cart. She probably let us eat the free cookies without giving our hands a bath in Purell. Both of us have turned out pretty well - there might be some argument about that, but at least we are not sickly people, we never contracted a life threatening disease from the grocery cart or got sick from some germs on our hands.

Nevertheless, now that this amazing new technology is available, I'm sure parents everywhere will be going that extra mile to shop at the grocer that has disinfectant wipes for the carts.