The very very fine baseball website, baseball-reference.com, posted this clip today, honoring Mel Gibson and his most recent utterances. Gibson is sad, but this will make you laugh.
Not baseball
The Sandinista Project, free!
The Clash album Sandinista! is a big sprawling three-record set that sounds like it could have been made by six or ten bands, which it was in some way. What happened was that the band wanted out of their contract with Columbia records. They saw that they were obligated to deliver three more records before they would be free, and someone had the smart idea to deliver all three at the same time. The sessions include all sorts of guest artists and performances by people in the Clash circle, with songs in a great many styles (some of which don’t really qualify at songs at all) and genres. The record never fails to charm, I don’t think, but some of it sounds like attention was flagging. That may be the dub influence. In the end, the only problem was that the record company counted the three-record set as one release, and so the band moved on to Combat Rock and Cut the Crap in pursuit of freedom, records that have their moments but which lack the epic generous delight of Sandinista!
Jimmy Guterman had the idea of remaking Sandinista! with different bands and artists each tackling a song, something of a tribute album, but to a record rather (despite the line on the cover) to the band. He called it the Sandinista! Project, and somehow managed to record covers of all of the umpteen songs by artists you might have heard of and other you have not. The result is delightful. I had been playing Sandinista! on my iPod last summer when I learned of TSP. Guterman released the mp3s of the tunes for free on Joe Strummer’s birthday. Soon I had both sets of songs intermingling amiably in the mix. The newer recordings often have strikingly different but completely agreeable arrangements, sometimes shifting genres or emphasis, nearly always hitting the mark the Clash set in the first place.
I bring this up now because Guterman is offering the Sandinista! Project for free download for the next few days at the link above. Highly recommended.
You can read more about the project at its blog.
The decades best unread books
The decades best unread books | Books | guardian.co.uk
I love this. And I wonder if I will read any of these.
Soupy Sales is Dead.
Here he is in 1979 in a great sketch with Alice Cooper.
Thanks to boing boing.
That’s How Easy Love Can Be
I found this clip over at boingboing.net and it seems the perfect view with which to remember Michael Jackson, whose music as a young boy is marked by its sweetness and exuberance, but which grew increasingly paranoid and sour as he grew older and it became more reflective of the pains and abuses of those early years.
Women running sprints in high heels
The football magazine is done (well, I’m waiting for the bluelines right now, but that’s it), so there’s time to think of other things. My fantasy teams are schizophrenic. In the American Dream League I’m in second place. In Tout Wars I’m in next to last. In XFL we’re in fourth or fifth, depending on the day. But this morning I find these sporting pictures delightful!
Sign Says IHOP, but Syrup Says Vermont
Part of remaking our economy is paying for quality. The Vermont iHOP charges .99 to serve Vermont made maple syrup rather than corn syrup. For me, and the writer of this NY Times story, that’s a reasonable price to pay.
What interests me is how paying local farmers a fair amount for their efforts results in a stronger local economy, because farmers are no longer impoverished by working. I don’t think anyone knows how this is going to play out, but I have a hard time not believing that most of us (the workers, on many levels) will benefit from more rational pricing. Eventually.
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I used to have my sites registered at registerfly.com, a registrar that was cheap. It seemed, at the time, that since there was little value added by the expensive registrars, and there was little reason to pay three times the annual registration fee.
As godaddy has proved, that assessment was right. Except that registerfly.com was owned by a thief who sucked the company’s capital dry. (Google registerfly.com and prostitutes to get the whole story.) Registerfly.com eventually imploded, stole all the money that was in accounts, and made many of us waste countless hours trying to recover our domain names. Many didn’t make it out.
In the last few weeks I’ve been spammed repeatedly by regfly.com, the NEW regfly.com. The New Regfly.com that doesn’t have a positive balance in my account.
I don’t have any idea why someone would want to remind you of their connection to registerfly.com, but if you sign up with them you can’t say you haven’t been warned. These are stealing liars. Don’t do business with them.
Ludens Loves Zappa!
Frank Zappa music in ads?!?!?
Forsooth!
CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS
When we forget the mistakes of history, we’re doomed to repeat them. Note the date this was published.
I think we will look back in 10 years time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010, said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. I wasnt around during the 1930s or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980s when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.
Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.