Monthly Archives: July 2009

ODS

This sign lives a couple of miles from my house. I didn't stop to see if there were any other signs, or pamphlets, or court documents which detailed what Obama's crimes are alleged to be.

LG NV

So, when I got home, I did a little Googling to see if anyone had a list of these crimes. Most of the results were crazy people talking about Obama's birth certificate. But that's totally fucking paste-eating stupid. Like Ruprecht stupid:

So that couldn't be what this person was all upset about. Right? Nobody that dumb lives in my little town. Couldn't.

A little more digging turns up this article which talks about the

17 crimes

Obama had committed between 88 and 91, when he was a student at Harvard. That's info the country really needs to know about!

Wake up, America, your President has an extensive criminal past!

Stop him before he parks illegally, again!

Start Your iPods

And on the first day, there was shuffling:

  1. Matt Pond PA - Closest (Look Out)
  2. Talking Heads - Life During Wartime
  3. Beastie Boys - The Cousin Of Death. also, BB news...
  4. The Clash - The Right Profile
  5. Spoon - Sister Jack (demo)
  6. Tift Merritt - Laid a Highway
  7. The Kinks - Polly
  8. Madeleine Peyroux - I'll Look Around
  9. The Flaming Lips - I Want To Kill My Brother; The Cymbal Head
  10. Rachel's - Lloyd's Register

And it was good.

What tunage hast thou?

Listening To...

Shit I been listening to:

  • Wilco - Wilco (the album). I'm going to guess that the self-referential title apparently refers to the way many of the songs here sound like they were grown from clippings of old Wilco songs. For example, "I'll Fight" sounds like a reworking of "On and On and On" from the last Wilco record (Sky Blue Sky); the verses in "Wilco (the song)" reminds me of something from Mermaid Avenue; and there are subtler echoes of other songs scattered throughout. Or maybe that's not the point. I haven't read any interviews about this, so I don't know the official explanation for the title. But, either way, many of the songs here remind me of songs on other Wilco records, and the new songs just aren't as good as the ones they remind me of - a lot of the songs feel lifeless or bored. And that's a problem. It's one thing to have less-than-stellar songs, but when those songs remind you of older, better songs, it makes the new songs seem like a real letdown. And that hurts my heart.

    Two raquos: » »

  • The Breeders -Mountain Battles. The Breeders, too, have echoes of their older stuff, on this new record. But, to be fair (and really, to be fair to Wilco, as well), a lot of that is simply style. Unlike Wilco, however, The Breeders wrote an album with a bunch of interesting songs. Well, they're interesting if you dug the weird, angular minimalism of their Last Splash and/or Pod records from way back in the early 90's, that is (the whole albums, not just "Cannonball" and "Divine Hammer" - there's nothing like either of those on this record). There is a version of the old Mexican classic ballad, "Regalame Esta Noche", however, which somehow doesn't seem strange, and in fact shows off how surprisingly nice Kim Deal's voice can be. I like it. I've missed The Breeders.

    All Wave Recording.

    Four raquos: » » » »

  • Polvo - Polvo (EP). This was their first release. It's really raw and the songs aren't quite as strong as things they'd do later on, and the mixes are pretty rough. But, it's a good first step.

    Review updated after i gave it a listen with open ears, and a quart of Brooklyn Local 1! It makes everything better. Also, I've discovered that it's trivially easy to play along to any Polvo song - play a note on the B string, and strum all three bottom strings, then play a note two frets higher with a lot of vibrato. Slide up and down the string every now and then. As long as you keep in time with the drums, it'll work just fine.

    Three raquos: » » »

  • Black Sabbath - Volume 4. I like the previous two (Paranoid and Master of Reality) much better. And if only somebody had stopped Ozzy from doing the ballad on this record, the world may have been spared decades of subsequent Ozzy ballads. And the strings? Blech. If only someone could've stepped in and said "No, this is not metal! Bad Ozzy!" that shit could've been nipped in the bud. Two songs, "Supernaut" and "Snowblind", save the record from being completely horrible, though.

    Two raquos: » »

You?

The Case of the Missing Permissive Action Links

Bruce G. Blair, Ph.D.:

Last month I asked Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, what he believed back in the 1960s was the status of technical locks on the Minuteman intercontinental missiles. These long-range nuclear-tipped missiles first came on line during the Cuban missile crisis and grew to a force of 1,000 during the McNamara years — the backbone of the U.S. strategic deterrent through the late 1960s. McNamara replied, in his trade-mark, assertively confident manner that he personally saw to it that these special locks (known to wonks as “Permissive Action Links”) were installed on the Minuteman force, and that he regarded them as essential to strict central control and preventing unauthorized launch.

When the history of the nuclear cold war is finally comprehensively written, this McNamara vignette will be one of a long litany of items pointing to the ignorance of presidents and defense secretaries and other nuclear security officials about the true state of nuclear affairs during their time in the saddle. What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” What he had just learned from me was that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.