Violent Death Will Be Unavailable

"Violent Death will be unavailable from 08:00 Sunday 01/16/05 until further notice."

You heard it here first.

I'm at NPR's site listening to an excerpt from a new Son Volt song called "Afterglow 61". It sounds really great.

I spent New Year's Eve with Marv and Old Man Standiford at a few taverns. A day or 2 after that, The Dulcinea and I talked and got back together. While there is much more to be said about this, it will have to wait for a later time. But I will say that it's been fun. Last weekend, I went to see Spamalot! with Dogger, Mel, and Old Man Standiford. It was awesome! Tim Curry walked by us in the lobby as we were waiting. If Standiford had know the cast were to be coming through the front door, he'd have had a Rocky Horror Picture Show line ready for him. I think a lot of the secondary cast members thought we were somehow associated with the show as they acknowledged our presence as they traipsed on by. We were the only audience members in that part of the lobby as we had Mel in her wheelchair and the usher said that we could wait there.

I got a special mini-issue of Progression which was dedicated to the career of Gentle Giant and now I can stop listening to them. I've got a CD here that has a medley of "Knots" & "The Advent of Panurge" from a 1974 concert recorded by the King Biscuit Flower Hour. The opening of "Knots" has John Weathers just pounding the living fuck out of the drums.

Freethinkers is quite good so far. A lot about Thomas Paine. At this point, I'm in mid-19th century and so the role of freethinkers in the abolition movement is the central topic. However, Jacoby has also brought in the women's rights movement and is discussing how the 2 interacted and how freethinkers in each camp were perceived.

Here's what's in my craw at the moment: reality TV. I am so fucking tired of Monster Garage, Monster House, Monster Outhouse, Monster Dinghy, etc. Remember back in the 90s when Beverly Hills 90125 spawned all those imitators? The shows were labeled "rich kids with problems". Today we find ourselves with a glut of "men arguing while remodeling" shows. It really disappoints me that most of this crap is on The Learning Channel and the Discovery Channel. I have no desire to learn about how a father & son fight over a motorcyle rim or discover how some slacker doesn't pull his weight and gets booted. I give the makers of these shows credit for the use of editing and staging. They impose a dramatic narrative on a really boring and almost narrative-free series of events.

How Stevie can sit around for hours on end watching this crap is beyond me. It's not that I seek to ban these shows but - christ! - how many of them does a channel need? For every one of these atrocities on the air, it fills time that could potentially be filled with something interesting. It's just done to death. These shows have as much educational value as Coke has nutrition.