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...He expressed regret that he had said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and enclosed a gift for the Oral Roberts University. After quoting the line "money can't buy me love" from "Can't Buy Me Love" he said, "It's true. The point is this, I want happiness. I don't want to keep on with drugs. Paul told me once, 'You made fun of me for taking drugs, but you will regret it in the end.' Explain to me what Christianity can do for me. Is it phoney? Can He love me? I want out of hell."

John Lennon's Born-Again Phase
comment posted at 11:32 AM on Jan-4-07

Steam Wars is the many decades long dream project of writer/illustrator Larry Blamire. Essentially the story of three soldiers set in a Victorian era war that features giant Jules Verneseque steam-powered mechrobots, the story has kicked around in Blamire's imagination since the 1970s. In an attempt to get the story made into a movie, he's put up a site with concept sketches, full color art & even faux memorabilia from the ficticious wars.
comment posted at 11:22 AM on Jan-4-07

A week before Jimi Hendrix died in London he (probably) recorded the Welsh anthem "Land of our Fathers" (embedded audio). The eight-track recording languished in a corner of a recording studio until recently.
comment posted at 5:57 AM on Jan-1-07

Procol Harum organist wins battle over joint authorship of A Whiter Shade of Pale. Gary Brooker is not amused, but then again it was a Bach ripoff anyway.
comment posted at 10:51 AM on Dec-20-06
comment posted at 12:53 PM on Dec-20-06

Detroit's Tiger Stadium is for sale. A final walk-through opportunity takes place Monday, December 18, only for pre-approved corporate bidders. But it won't be re-purposed into condos. My childhood heroes played there, less than a mile from my house, as well as one of the best ever to play the game. After a long history of baseball on Michigan Trumbull (click the "More Photos" icon), the Tigers took their game to a new stadium in 1999.
comment posted at 10:06 AM on Dec-18-06

Sly talks! Rounds [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9-10][11][12][13].

Let’s face it; my powers of communication were a little bit below that of a knuckle-dragging, ooze-dwelling cretin from another galaxy. Actually, I haven’t progressed that much. I just lie better. A 13 (so far)-part interview where Rocko/Ramby answers fans with oodles of extremely quotable, self-deprecating, sarcastic one-liners about the (few) ups and (many) downs of a Hollywood career. Tips on: how to get Sharon Stone naked, how to use the 3 seashells, how to direct dancers with a "crotch tartar" problem and how to bench press with owls. We also learn the final truth about some guy named Rocky - an inbred, druid outcast from Stonehenge whose specialty is weaving whistle chains and leaping face down onto pointed objects - and another one named Rambo - a savage turned loose in Microsoft’s headquarters.
comment posted at 7:46 AM on Dec-14-06

The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush. “Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”
comment posted at 12:53 PM on Nov-30-06

"Sit down, shut up, and listen to Ragtime!" Ragtime at the Library of Congress.
comment posted at 1:24 PM on Nov-22-06
comment posted at 6:25 AM on Nov-23-06

Michael ("Cosmo Kramer") Richards loses his mind. On stage at the Laugh Factory in L.A. last Friday, Richards flipped out at heckler and launched into a stream of racist taunts, all caught on video. The Seinfeld Curse strikes again.
comment posted at 11:00 AM on Nov-20-06

Where are you going? Where we came from. Where have we come from? Every place and no place, so come, let’s go.
comment posted at 8:26 AM on Nov-20-06

"Please Stay Tuned For A Message From Your Savior." If yesterday's discussion of the Apocalypse was just not enough for you, consider Stephen Buell's Video. Video was originally published in 2004 as a five-issue mini-series from Lost in the Dark Press. The premise is simple. How might the modern world deal with an actual Second Coming? The trade collection, including improved artwork and concept sketches, will arrive in shops next Wednesday. For your further consideration, a 22-page preview has been provided.
comment posted at 1:30 PM on Nov-15-06

Marie Rudisill, of "Ask the Fruitcake Lady" fame, and Truman Capote's aunt, passed away last week. (Leno's farewell.)
comment posted at 1:05 PM on Nov-10-06

The Rolling Stones have produced a few of the Greatest Albums of All Time. Now Exile on Main Street, said by many to be The Stones their best work, has had its demo tracks and outtakes leaked on to the web. via
comment posted at 11:25 AM on Nov-7-06

I find my interest piqued by some of Dr Satoshi Kanazawa's ideas. Especially regarding The conformist culture of Asia. But also: The Myth of Racial Discrimination in Pay in the United States[pdf]. He works hard thinking.
comment posted at 9:43 AM on Nov-7-06

Awake, My Soul is a new documentary on Sacred Harp singing, an American musical tradition that's strange, beautiful, and very much alive. Previously discussed and beautifully explicated in this post.
comment posted at 10:02 AM on Nov-7-06

Christ of the Deep.
comment posted at 11:17 AM on Nov-6-06

Fisher Poets You've heard of cowboy poetry, sure, but how about the verse of modern-day fishermen and women? Taking the Cowboy Poetry Gathering as their model, fisher poets have plunged into the celebration of occupational culture with their own annual festival in Astoria, Oregon. Get a glimpse into this difficult, dangerous, and unpredictable way of making a living through the work of Erin Frestad, Geno Leech, Toby Sullivan, and others. Listen to the sounds of the gathering on this piece from PRI's Here & Now, too.
comment posted at 9:17 AM on Nov-3-06

A recent article recently came out in the Wall Street Journal, which cited new study from Stanford about animal consciousness. Elephants grieve, bees create mental maps, dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors. Snakes have more brain cells than humans, and chickens worry about the future. What are your thoughts? Does this change the way we treat animals?
comment posted at 9:26 AM on Nov-3-06

1. Everyone thinks insurance is impenetrable and boring.
2. Everyone is wrong.

The Insurance Transparency Project blog is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dean Starkman, who is currently a Katrina Media Fellow sponsored by the Open Society Institute, funded and chaired by George Soros.
comment posted at 9:29 AM on Nov-3-06

William Styron, R.I.P The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis. One of the true 20th century American masters, is gone from pneumonia, at the age of 81. A writer of some the most fluent prose I have ever had the privilege to read, he also wrote one of the best first-person accounts of clinical depression ever written.
comment posted at 1:39 PM on Nov-2-06

Garbage In/Gold Out Which is more important: recycling or the garbage collector's bottom line? Some Oregon cities are backing up the garbage collectors over recyclers. Too bad. First time I've ever seen a dumpster diving company who has a web page with testimonials from police officers.
comment posted at 2:39 PM on Oct-28-06
comment posted at 6:54 AM on Oct-29-06

A 10 minute home movie taken by an SS officer has been discovered in an English church. It shows SS officers and secretaries relaxing in the summer of 1942 in southern Russia. The last couple of minutes shows footage from a slave labor camp in that area. The footage was taken at the height of the German success in Russia, a few months before the turning point in the Russian campaign - and probably the turning point in the Second World War.
comment posted at 11:43 AM on Oct-26-06

Pope Benedict XVI wants to bring back the latin mass. This could be the start of a return to the old Catholic traditionalism and the undoing of Vatican II.
comment posted at 1:43 PM on Oct-23-06

The Smithsonian's Sackler gallery opened a unique and wide-ranging new exhibit yesterday featuring fragments of Bibles from before the year 1000. "Most of the manuscripts have never been seen outside the countries where they are stored. [Some Smithsonian-owned documents in the exhibition] have never been exhibited and two have not been shown since 1978." Fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus are included in the exhibit. Along with the archaeological interest, these fragments can pose theological and historical challenges for Christians. Some, like UNC's Bart Ehrman, have lost their faith as a result of studying early Bibles; some, like Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory, believing that Christianity is about a common cultural and spiritual experience, are unmoved by the "corruptions" and differences in the New Testament over time; other Christians try to refute (MeFi link) claims that the text has changed.
comment posted at 12:35 PM on Oct-23-06

A bizarre oversight is finally being corrected: Edward D. Wood Jr., the writer-producer-director of Plan 9 From Outer Space, has a chance to get the Hollywood Blvd star he deserves.
comment posted at 7:54 AM on Oct-22-06

The world according to Mike Tyson
comment posted at 10:00 AM on Oct-20-06

...Would it surprise you to learn that if the Johns Hopkins estimates of 400,000 to 800,000 deaths are correct -- and many experts in the survey field seem to suggest they probably are -- that the supposedly not-yet-civil-war in Iraq has already cost more lives, per capita, than our own Civil War (one in 40 of all Iraqis alive in 2003) ? And that these losses are comparable to what some European nations suffered in World War II ? You'd never know it from mainstream press coverage in the U.S. "Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied," Leonard Cohen once sang. The question the new study raises: How many will go down with the ship, and will the press finally hold the captain fully accountable ?

Iraqi Death Rate May Top Our Civil War -- But Will the Press Confirm It ?
See also Debating the Body Count in Iraq
See also Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters
See also The Science of Counting the Dead
See also How the Media Covered The Lancet’s Iraqi Casualty Study
See also More deadly than Saddam
comment posted at 9:33 AM on Oct-20-06

Kira Salak is a writer who embodies an old-fashioned spirit of adventure. She has kayaked the Niger River solo; during her time in Africa, she freed a slave. On another trip, she sampled Ayahuasca in the Peruvian jungle. At the age of 24, she trekked alone through the tribal violence of Papua New Guinea. Her work is a wonderful alternative to the blandness and narrowness of contemporary consumer society, in which there is nothing new to be discovered and everything can be reduced to lucre.
comment posted at 2:10 PM on Oct-17-06

Leonardo comes to life. A stunning collection of short animations based on Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbooks. Watch a man running, a human heart beating, a tank moving, a bird flying, or a geometrical model rotating. Then visit the Universal Leonardo website to find out more about the man himself.
comment posted at 1:51 PM on Oct-12-06

Emitt Rhodes "still doesn’t know what hit him. Thirty years ago, he was the new Paul McCartney, an ambitious kid who craved the perfect pop song. Then he got blindsided into submission by the heartless business of music. Now he’s just another sad guy with a boatload of talent that got buried in a black hole of depression."
comment posted at 12:56 PM on Oct-12-06
comment posted at 1:45 PM on Oct-12-06
comment posted at 7:16 PM on Oct-12-06

Plane/Helicopter Crashes into NYC high rise. ???
comment posted at 12:54 PM on Oct-11-06

No running in PE. I was talking to my kids about school the other day. We were discussing what they do in their different classes and the conversation came around to physical education (PE). I was shocked when they told me that their gym teacher forbids running in PE class. What?! No running in PE? It’s true.
comment posted at 5:38 PM on Oct-7-06

Hi, mom ! Mars Orbiter takes a picture of Mars Rover on the lip of Victoria Crater with the HiRISE camera.
comment posted at 5:45 PM on Oct-7-06

An interesting link breaking apart the myths of religious affiliation and the divorce rate. They also take on divorce rates in interfaith couples.
comment posted at 1:46 PM on Oct-6-06

Folkstreams.net has two goals. One is to build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures. The other is to give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet. The films were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities. The filmmakers were driven more by sheer engagement with the people and their traditions than by commercial hopes. Their films have unusual subjects, odd lengths, and talkers who do not speak "broadcast English." Although they won prizes at film festivals, were used in college classes, and occasionally were shown on PBS, they found few outlets in venues like theaters, video shops or commercial television. But they have permanent value...

folkstreams.net Currently streaming are the films The Land Where the Blues Began , Cajun Country , Jazz Parades: Feet Don't Fail Me Now , Talking Feet: Solo Southern Dance: Buck, Flatfoot and Tap , Ray Lum: Mule Trader and Pizza Pizza Daddy-O , among many others.
comment posted at 9:34 AM on Oct-6-06
comment posted at 1:55 PM on Oct-6-06
comment posted at 5:54 PM on Oct-7-06

America's worst school violence ever was not a recent event, but the Bath School disaster of 1927. Andrew Kehoe, a school board member upset with his tax bill, used dynamite and some pyrotol from WWI-era military surplus to blow himself up along with the elementary school of Bath Township, Michigan, leaving 45 dead and 58 injured. See a 1927 book on the disaster, a list of victims, the coroner's inquest, a historical marker, a memorial park, an oral history from a witness, and a 1920s KKK rant denouncing Kehoe as an agent of the Roman Catholic conspiracy.
comment posted at 1:56 PM on Oct-5-06

The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive Is the recently aired work of Stephen Fry. [1][2] a well know english comedian diagnosed as manic-depressive.Now also know as bipolar disorder manic-depression is a class of mood disorders in which the person experiences clinical depression and/or mania, hypomania, and/or mixed states; a rollercoaster of highs and lows.Fry's work and personal involvment help shine a spotlight on a condition obscured by the stigma associated with mental disorders.
comment posted at 10:30 AM on Oct-5-06
comment posted at 11:16 AM on Oct-5-06

Music in the Head
comment posted at 11:04 AM on Oct-5-06

Here is the Mississippi John Hurt Blues Foundation, the website, which is the creation of one Frank Delaney of Spokane. There's a great deal of guitar related material and a page of mp3's by fans, which includes several interesting originals by one Fred Bolden, a grand nephew. I always knew he had a son who played guitar and wondered why no one had ever tried to record him. Now there is a grand nephew playing, if nowhere near as sublimely as his great uncle, in roughly the same style.

Here is an interview of John Hurt from 1963, courtesy of Stefan Grossman's guitar video empire. It is a real delight.

Consider this a follow up to this post. Not all of the links there are good. The Mississippi John Hurt Guitar Tab Book, for instance, is now available only in PDF format but well worth the download. And here is an illustrated discography of John Hurt by another Stefan, Stefan Wirz, a subject of yet another post back in the day.
comment posted at 11:31 AM on Oct-5-06

Peekskill Riots The Peekskill Riots were anti-communist riots (with anti-black undertones) in the city of Peekskill, New York in 1949. The catalyst for the rioting was an announced concert by black singer Paul Robeson, who was well known for his strong stand on civil rights and his communist sympathies. The concert, organized as a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress, was scheduled to take place on August 27. Before Robeson arrived, a mob of locals attacked concertgoers...many names you might recall were involved in this blot on American history, and Howard Fast, the novelist, recalled his involvement in his book Being Red (1990), Howard Fast's memoir of his life on the left. Additionally, some later writers recalled the involvement of relatives and/or friends.. Pete Seeger, present during the riot, wrote a song about it Later, gathering some of the rocks tossed at the lefty participants of the concert, he used the "ammo" to build a chimney on the cabin where he lived. The Lefty -sympathizing wonderful actress Judy Holliday was summoned before the congressional committe in charge of rooting out communists during the anti-communist days, and gave a lengthy testimony about herself and many others. And though the riots were sparked in part by local newspapers, editoriallizing against the "visitors" to their serene area, they and the good citizens of Peekskill quickly tried to ignore, forget, or bury lthe disgraceful riots. But the memory lives on for some, and this sad event remains memorialized, a reminder perhaps of what hate, aggression, and just plain nastiness can bring about.
comment posted at 8:26 AM on Oct-4-06

Polkarama
comment posted at 8:25 AM on Sep-21-06

Why should we get excited about such a lacklustre topic as the future of Europe?
comment posted at 10:27 AM on Sep-20-06