I Wish It Were Winter Now

The Moscow Times (who knew?) finds the world slouching to Armageddon. Please hurry. Just Another Blog™ can't hold its breath forever. Continuing in the military vein, another twenty-years-in-the-making aircraft.

Nation Of Sheep, Nation Of Sheep/The President's On TV And He's Putting You To Sleep

Image:tvparty.comEventually, Just Another Blog™ will digitize some of its "archive material" (mostly obsolete, unsuccessful aesthetic product) & make it available via the small screen & tinny speakers through which America gets its infotainment these days. Some of it ties in w/ the following (just over three yrs. old) article, referred to by TNR as a result of Reagan's diaries being published. It seemed worth stealing.

REAGAN'S PUNK ROCK. Reagan Youth by Spencer Ackerman Only at TNR OnlinePost date: 06.14.04 [ Editor's Note: This article has been corrected. ] By the time Ronald Reagan was laid to rest this weekend in Simi Valley, it seemed as if every aspect of his character, his presidency, and his legacy had been unearthed and examined. Not without justification--even Reagan's detractors conceded the late president's iconic stature. His supporters deified him, making Reagan almost metaphysically identical to the very concept of human liberty, and proclaiming freedom to be Reagan's greatest bequest. Yet some Reaganites seemed less than confident that their Reagan would be history's. Rush Limbaugh sought to interpret Reagan to the "millions of Americans under the age of 30 [who] have no concrete memory of Ronald Reagan's presidency," explaining in National Review that he "defines the utter beauty and blessing that is America and reminds us all of our destiny." But for a large portion of those under the age of 30, their portrait of Reagan emerged through another of Reagan's gifts to the country--one that went almost completely ignored throughout last week's memorials. They could tell Limbaugh that no accounting of Reagan's cultural legacy is complete without noting a simple truth: Ronald Reagan is responsible for some of the best punk rock ever recorded. While not as eloquent as Reagan's Brandenburg Gate address--Bad Religion perhaps best summarized the contemporaneous punk understanding of Reagan's America by declaring "Fuck Armageddon, this is hell"--the hardcore records of the early 1980s age a lot better than Knute Rockne, All American. As long as there are disaffected teenagers in America able to seek out (and, now, download) that era's music, Reaganites won't just have to battle liberal historians to convince young America that their vision of the Gipper is the right one. They'll have to go up against the Dead Kennedys. If Reagan embodied everything sunny and inspiring about the United States to his supporters, to the preternaturally angry punk rockers of the early '80s, he represented anomie, arbitrary authority, and an ignorance that was socially acceptable, even valued. At the dawn of the Reagan era, pioneering singer and guitarist Bob Mould was a student at St. Paul's Macalaster College. "I remember watching these kids getting up in the morning on my dorm floor, putting on a suit and tie and a briefcase, talking about this guy from California named Ronald Reagan and how he was going to be the next president," Mould told journalist Michael Azerrad. "And I'd be sitting there arguing with those fucks in speech class and poli sci and just hating that, thinking 'This is not acceptable behavior. This is not what we're supposed to be doing with our late teens.'" His response was to start the Minneapolis juggernaut Hüsker Dü, whose musical evolution away from the stifling formula of hardcore punk--blisteringly fast rhythms with the barest patina of melody, performed with all the precision of a prison tattoo--would lead to some of the greatest rock and roll of the decade. The same held for Joey Keithley, who didn't let his Canadian citizenship stand in the way of his Reagan-hatred. "I didn't like the rock 'n' roll I was hearing, and I didn't like Ronald Reagan," he recently recalled, explaining why he started hardcore legend D.O.A. and rechristened himself Joey Shithead. The punk assault on Reagan was relentless. A bunch of Queens high school students called themselves Reagan Youth. Their eponymous anthem took the parallel to its logical conclusion and seig-heiled the president during the chorus. Michigan's gloriously primitive Crucifucks saluted Reagan's would-be assassin in "Hinckley Had a Vision." The Berkeley-based punk rock bible Maximumrocknroll published anti-Reagan screeds in practically every issue. MRR also released what many consider to be the greatest hardcore compilation LP of all time, Welcome To 1984, whose cover featured a mohawked punk defacing a stylized poster of Reagan. The 1983 Rock Against Reagan tour united some of the most potent hardcore bands of the time, including D.R.I. and M.D.C., in a common purpose, and in July of that year they unleashed their vitriol on the National Mall. But no band inveighed against the president with the intensity of the Rock Against Reagan tour's headliners: San Francisco's Dead Kennedys. The DK's first record, Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, was an eclectic and sardonic take on late '70s California. Reagan drained practically all the subtlety out of the band. In 1981, they released their greatest post-Fresh Fruit offering, the raw and furious EP In God We Trust Inc. The sleeve featured a gold Jesus crucified on a cross of dollar bills. On "Moral Majority," singer Jello Biafra got to the point: "Blow it out your ass, Ronald Reagan." That was nothing compared to "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now," a reworking of Fresh Fruit's classic "California Uber Alles," which skewered the "suede-denim secret police" led by Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown. The new version unloaded on "Emperor Ronald Reagan/Born again with fascist cravings" as it built from a low-key lounge groove to a scorched-earth crescendo. In case anyone missed the point, the band took the stage at a show nearby the 1984 Democratic National Convention in Klan hoods, which they removed to reveal rubber Reagan masks. Of course, not every punk rocker used Reagan as a foil. The very existence of any form of human civilization was sufficient to raise the Nietzschean ire of L.A.'s Black Flag, the greatest of all American hardcore bands. Others, deploring the de rigeur anti-Reagan politics of the punk scene, embraced the president. Beloved New York hardcore band Murphy's Law enthused, "Ronnie Reagan, he's our man/If he can't do it, no one can!" The singer of Chicago's Effigies, John Kezdy, ended up a prosecutor and member of the conservative Federalist Society. (He explained, "There is nothing punk rock about voting for a party that wants to put more government in your life.") Still, without Reagan to use as shorthand for everything undesirable about America, punk's intensity lost a certain focus. As punk rock lurched through the Clinton years, California's NOFX released a 1996 EP of retro hardcore, justifying the project by warbling, "Guess what, nostalgia sucks/But I miss the days of Reagan punk." The band's front man, Fat Mike, is actively trying to bring those days back. In April, he released the Rock Against Bush compilation, which brought together 26 contemporary punk bands to rail against Reagan's self-proclaimed ideological successor. He wasn't the only one. Tobi Vail, who drummed for groundbreaking punk band Bikini Kill, wrote a widely circulated essay celebrating the Rock Against Reagan phenomenon before declaring, "[T]he time is ripe for Bands Against Bush." Last October, "Bands Against Bush" concerts were held in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and other cities. This time, however, the bands involved are hardly the obscure denizens of marginal record labels. Rock Against Bush features multi-platinum acts like Sum 41 and the Offspring. But the project also acknowledges the debt it owes to Reagan-era punk rock: included is a new track, "That's Progress," by Jello Biafra and D.O.A. Their presence on the compilation is a tacit nod to the inadvertent and surely undesired punk-rock legacy of Ronald Reagan. All that's left is for the Reagan Library to reserve wall space for the In God We Trust Inc. cover art. Correction: The quote taken from former Effigies singer John Kezdy--not Kazdy, as the article misreported--"There is nothing punk rock about voting for a party that wants to put more government in your life," should have credited the source from where it originally appeared: an article entitled, "Punk Rock the Vote" by reporter Steve Miller in the March 3 edition of The Washington Times. The author sincerely apologizes for the omission. Spencer Ackerman, a former associate editor of The New Republic, is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. ©2004 The New Republic

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Friday Mucus MembraneMusic Mumble

Just Another Blog™ is pretty damn sure sure this is © by some corporate entity, but we liberated it from a Spanish typing website, which had no obvious credit, so we'll just lay it off on them.
The idiots who listen to their "music" via mp3s through teeny tiny earbuds from their ipods like to put a random "shuffle" of ten items on their "web logs" each Friday, basically because they are pathetic consumerist sheep who want all culture predigested so they don't have to smell it or chew it before it goes down, and, we guess, because in the world of wage-slavery "Friday" means massa has let them have a whole two days in a row away from the cotton fields, so thay can drink enough to have a serious hangover the next morning or early afternoon, in an ultimately futile attempt to forget they are chattel. In a sheepish attempt to be like all the other bloggers, here are ten tunes chosen @ random from the piles of vinyl lying all over the floor here @ the House of Bouffant:

• "Clams Are Groovy" - Beachcomber Bob


• "Bombs Away" - London Terror Plot


• "Love Me, Love My Enema Bag" - English Frank (R. I. P.)


• "What's Your Fucking Problem, Asshole?" - D. Donny Douchebag


• "Concentration Camp Victim" - Hogan's Heroes


• "You Suck, I Hate You, Please Die" - Apartment House & The Salesmen


• "What's A Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This?" - Fester Plank


• "Why?" - The Phone Books


• "Donkey Scrotum & Saran Wrap" - The Fugs


• "Anal Action" - Scum & The Bags


• Bonus Track: "Showbiz Lice" - Nation Of Sheep

Now there's some motherfucking music!!!

Obligatory Weekly Item

Princess Lillie, mellowed considerably since the death of her previous parental unit, attempts to absorb knowledge from a pile of newspapers. (Or maybe she's trying to absorb electricity & telephone calls from the wiring.)

It's Friday. It's a blog. It's a representation of a feline. How clever, original & unheard of.

Obligatory Daily Item

National Review, Revisited (& Updated Continually W/ More LInks)

Although the operating word in Vanity Fair is "vanity," James Wolcott cranks out some good stuff, taking on the National Review Cruise to Fear of The Other, & National Review in general. And the all time winners at deconstructing neo-fascism, Sadly, No! have weighed in as well. (W/ photos!) And CROOKED TIMBER, w/ the activities list for the cruise. You may make your reservations for the next Hate Boat right here. Oh, now NRO responds, indicating you need a TNR subscription to read the article. (Which you don't. Ninny.) NR bemoans the "selective" nature of the TNR article. How right they are. Just Another Blog™ doesn't think nearly enough attention has been paid to the fact that Hitler really, really loved his dogs.

Race to the Bottom

You may remember Just Another Blog™ listed all the "legitimate" (more or less) presidential candidates' websites last week. Naturally, someone (could've been anyone) has done us one better. A listing of virtually all the declared candidates' websites. You of course know where to go: the minor ones from the major party (The Democratic Republic of Corporate Interests & Values) and the independents. Randy Andy of The Daily Dish lead us to this via Mental Floss.

(There is just too much good stuff to read. Just Another Blog™ just can't stand it!)

Slow Boat To Nowhere

The New Republic (neither the magazine nor this republic are that new any more, maybe we should be calling it The Middle-Aged Republic) insinuated its way into one of Just Another Blog's™ in-boxes, but we still missed this story. Thanks to the Google™ News Feed (to the right) we were lead to this Atlantic blog, which lead us to the full story. Alternate titles: Fear & Loathing On The High Seas; If Only Al-Qaeda Had A Submarine & Some Torpedos.

Headlines, Miscellany & Just Plain Idiocy.

Tonight on Larry Thing on CNN: Ringo, Paul, Yoko & Olivia......Why is the rhythm section still alive, but the git-pickers aren't? W/ The Who, the rhythm section is dead & the front-people can't be stopped...Here's a fookin' supergroup: Daltrey, Townshend, McCartney, Starr...Well, a super old group...World champeen face stuffer/swallower Kobayashi has arthritis of the jaw...Darth Cheney out, Fred Thompson in as veep?...Irony Dep't.: Birthplace of Nazidom bans Scientology cult member Tom Cruise from filming on military bases (Go Krauts!)...Supreme Court: Vast Impersonal Corporate Entities YES, Ordinary Human Beings Who've Been Royally Fucked By Said Corporations NO...Reasons to continue existence in this horrible world: Getting fewer by the moment...Check back for updates...Fug, it's 84°F in here, w/ the fan on medium...(& Just Another Blog™ in its underwear)...sorry for the image...but it's the truth!...Crooks & Liars has all the poop on that sexy Ann Coulter
& her most recent public offenses against decency & common sense...Hard-ball was an exterior shoot today, apparently to allow a claque of Hitler JugendYoung Americans for Freedom to be there screeching their approval of Mme. DeFarge..We all know about her Adam's apple, but aren't those breasts awfully large for someone w/ such a lanky, lithe, figure?...(uh-oh, getting into Althouse territory here)...(on the left [ha ha] or above, or somewhere, depending on Blogger™, is a picture of Ms. Coulter before she so sadly developed anorexia...)

Further Tragedy From the World O' Wrasslin'

Les Benoit in happier days.

The Canadian Crippler appears to have murdered his wife (known professionally as "Woman") & their seven yr. old son over the wknd., then hung himself from a weight machine.

Just Another Blog® used to enjoy wrasslin' (and life itself) in the '80s, but it started to suck more & more, like everything else. And this really sucks. Note bible references. Guess if you leave a bible next to your family/victims, that makes it OK. (All the links you could ever want, and some more besides.)

Mothers, Hide Your Sons (& Chihuahuas)

Released around midnight. Pedestrians (& air polluting car owners/drivers) beware!

Two posts for Tuesday. More than enough.

"Film" Is What Forms On A Stagnant Pond

Limebag commie fishwrapper The Guardian has a list of "1,000 films to see before you die," or something. More opportunities than the recent re-do of the AFI "100 Best" or whatever for people to complain about. Didn't go through the whole thing, but looked like a lot of "shite," as the Scots say. (Why do they say that?) Just Another Blog® hasn't left the apartment to see a film in a theatre for quite some time now. (Well, it did take its recently deceased mother to see Out of Africa for her last still-alive birthday in October, 2006, but that wasn't really voluntary.) Why should it? It has the attention span of Ann Althouse, the intarwebz to amuse itself, and just in case no one else has noticed, there have been no films or movies made worth seeing since about 1985, & very little telvision worth it, either. Oddly enough, the same goes for music. Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

Obligatory Daily Item

To hell w/ it. Just Another Blog® is on summer vacation, or at least a day or ten of rest. If you've truly naught else to do, click here for a mess of crap which may have a few interesting links, etc.

P. S. Is Paris out yet? All America (if not the entire world) holds its collective breath. (Hold it 'till you turn blue, mofos!!)

Hatin' On Google™, & B. S.

Just Another Blog™ understands that its new best friend Göögle, in its continued world-wide effort to provide better everything for everybody, whether it works or not, and whether or not every (or any) body wants it, completely re-did Blogger™ not too long ago, causing aggravation & more among the populace:
Classic buttermilk sky w/ Canterbury Cathedral bycloudman.com.

"I'm going to need a minute, because the dog turds at Google screwed me over again. New password, new email, new bla bla, waste of time, accept new terms of crap, more wasted time, why doesn't somebody just collect every Google employee and use them in nerve gas experiments?"

The part at the end is quite nice. Every single one of them, w/ no exceptions.
But this isn't about righteous disgust w/ the Gûglers. That's nothing new, & at this point all invective directed at Google is doubtless like water off the duck's proverbial back. The lovely quote above comes from a self-professed "angry loner (not violent)" in Manhattan (the island, not Manhattan Beach, you local doofuses) who bills herself as Buttermilk Sky, although there's no B. S. involved. This dame can write! Not an obsessive layabout like Just Another Blog™ & its thrice daily posting, her entire bloggic oeuvre can be read in an hour or so, (as we just did, leading to this item) so why don't you? You may be glad you did, and it's not as if there's anything else to do, is there?