Hey! Found my new new third-favorite concert movie!

Slide down a row, whatever was just below "Stop Making Sense" and "Storefront Hitchcock"! Make way for the insertion of this awesome 1960 movie about both the 1958 Newport Jazz Fest and its audience. Sweet.

The movie shows performances from bands of jazz's heyday, a sampling of what was hip at the time, a bit of what jazz was turning into, and a taste the stuff that would ultimately replace it as the cool music of the day: Louis Armstrong to Thelonius Monk to Chico Hamilton to Chuck Berry. And it's all shot on grainy, streaky, analog film, with sound sync issues and a complete lack of sweeping shots of a flag waving, shirtless, chanting crowd - because every person in the audience there was sitting in an assigned wooden chair and drinking a beer or nodding along smartly in stylish-but-casual 1958 attire, always holding the dope just out of frame and generally behaving like someone having a pre-groovy time. And Mahalia Jackson's ending is just awesome - nearly made me want to take up Jesus, for a minute or so.

Welcome to reality, kids

Toss The Tupolev

1. Make an attempt to solve a mundane problem having to do with a government function - the computerized standardization of US postal addresses, for example.
2. Sell it to companies that do a lot of mailing.
3. Get the government interested in your solution.
4. Get the government to issue standards for the process, hopefully based on your solution.
5. Get the government to form a committee, on which you sit, which will issue periodic updates to the standards.
6. Somehow ensure that the government never compiles and reconciles the original standards and the decades of updates into a single comprehensive document set.
7. Do this for 20 years.

This way, nobody in their right mind will try to implement their own solution because the rules are labyrinths built inside other labyrinths with labyrinths on the walls and ceilings. It will always be cheaper to just buy your solution. Ta-da! You win!

This is all in theory, of course. I don't know if this is precisely why my current job is so mind-bendingly difficult or not. But, something similar must have happened.

Check out these awesome concrete monuments in Yugoslavia. Most of them look like they could be used on Pink Floyd^* covers.

Update: perhaps the link above borrowed its images from here.

* - or any 70's prog rock group, for that matter.

h/t

Wiki:
The State of Franklin, known also as the Free Republic of Franklin or the State of Frankland (the latter being the name submitted to the Continental Congress when it considered the territory's application for statehood), was an autonomous United States territory created in 1784 from part of the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains that had been offered, by North Carolina, as a cession to the federal government (to help pay off debts related to the American Revolutionary War). Its first capital was Jonesboro. Later, the area legally became, once again, part of North Carolina. Franklin encompassed what ultimately comprised a large share of the Tennessee Eastern Division of the Southwest Territory. Franklin was never admitted into the United States — falling two votes short for admission. The extra-legal state existed for only about four and a half years, ostensibly as a republic, before largely being abandoned.

Sarah Palin, "Conservative"

via Boing Boing:

BAIER: What about ending oil subsidies? Subsidies for oil companies. Where do you stand on that?

PALIN: Here's where we need to go there nationally, what I did as Governor of Alaska, which is obviously an energy-producing state. As for the government subsidies that we're hearing Obama flirting with right now, and wanting to decrease those or eliminate those, we're only talking about four billion dollars. Compare that to the 14 trillion dollar debt that he our president has certainly contributed to.

Nope, don't touch those oil subsidies!

New Beastie Boys record came out today. First four songs are great (if you likes the Beasties). Haven't heard the rest yet.

Make Some Noise:

See if you can identify all the people in the video.

Hint: One was a Hobbit.

"The Most Important Moment In American History"

I don't think I've ever seen so many skinny girls in tight black dresses, or so many shirtless muscleheads. Beers are $9. It's almost cheaper to drink Scotch - though not the $1900/glass Macallan 55. We saw Ferraris, Bentleys, Rolls, Maseratis, super-Audis, Lamborghinis. Money money money. More money than I could imagine, I imagine.

Saw some celebrities, paparazzi (we were there when these pictures were taken; and we walked off the beach back to the hotel right behind Adam Shankman, whom Dear Sweet Mrs. had met the night before). All very un-Raleigh. The ocean was warm, teal, and placid. The sun was intense. There were, oddly, no seagulls.

Saw a guy in the park in South Beach doing what we think was Capoeira, the same Brazilian martial art that "Bob's Burgers" made fun of a few episodes back. He was, umm, really into it.