Domestic Terrorism

Top 5 songs of 1939:

Judy Garland - Over the Rainbow

Glenn Miller - Moonlight Serenade

Kate Smith - God Bless America

Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit

Louis Armstrong - When the Saints Go Marching In

Unlike 49, or 59, or 69, I know all these. 1939 must've been quite a year.

Not satisfied with the GOP's alienation of Hispanics over Obama's Supreme Court nominee (really, it's so blatant, offensive and random, it's like watching a Tourette's sufferer at a Cinco De Mayo parade - wait, did i just kill my own point? evs), G. Gordon Liddy opens fire on women, too:

"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when [Sotomayor]'s menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

Soon, the only Republicans will be grumpy old white men.

For real:

Problem: When you try to return data from Microsoft Query 97 to a Microsoft Excel 97 worksheet, the spinning globe icon (which signifies that a query is processing) may appear for a long time, and then the query returns no data to your worksheet.

Method 1: Turn Off the Enable Background Refresh Setting

To prevent the query from running in the background, follow these
steps:
... [blahblahblah] ...

Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer

If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being
returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the
mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return
the results of your query to the worksheet.

WTF

Too Many Prisons, Not Enough Crooks

Since we don’t have health care rationing here in the US, I must have dreamed that MedCo called me up today and told me they couldn’t fill the prescription my doctor wrote because my insurance doesn’t cover the drug my doctor thought I should have.

U! S! A!
U! S! A!

The lovely and charming Mrs Cleek and I went to beautiful Beaufort, NC, this past weekend. On the first of our many stops at the wine bar, we met the man who, from the mid-70's through the mid-80's, owned the legendary NC music club, the Cat's Cradle. We started out arguing over who is a great guitar player and who isn't (I still say Eddie Van Halen is underrated by people who dismiss him because of his pyrotechnics... anyway...); but we eventually got him into telling us stories about the various bands he'd booked over the years. For example, the only band he ever told not to play because of their attitude: Red Hot Chili Peppers. And once, while waiting for the Replacements to come on, the manager saw some guy, drunk and passed-out, in the middle of the stage. When he sent somebody to get the guy out of the way so the band could start, they discovered the drunk guy was actually Paul Westerberg, the singer. And, he once declined to book R.E.M. because he couldn't give them a $500 guarantee.

He also told us that he knew the person who did the bookings for the old Perry Como Show, and that that person had told him that the Beatles were booked to make their US TV debut on that show. They were going to do a skit where Perry Como, formerly a barber, was going to cut their hair. But that fell through and they ended up on Ed Sullivan, instead. I tried to verify this one with some quick Google-fu, but nothing came up.

We told him he needed to put all this stuff in a book; I think he said he was working on something.

Then, we met a nice old guy from Luxembourg. He told us all kinds of fun things about his country: the size, the climate, the language, the number of times it was overrun by the Germans in WWII, etc.. He thinks Americans are fat and have lousy coffee, but appreciates that the US kicked Germany out of his country. He was in Beaufort because all the different Beauforts in the world (there are like a dozen of them in France) sent people to Beaufort, NC for a convention of sorts.