Customer support
The squeaky wheel gets the grease? We’ll see.
Maybe Twitter is the ultimate accountability tool.
"The perfect dad band"
Look, this is not going to come out right but Band of Horses is the perfect dad rock band. Whiskey, cigars, silent trips out to western scenery. This is what dad is listening to while you shut the fuck up in the back and play the license plate game. And then when you get old enough to raid your dad’s record collection, you go see them play at that awesome psychedelic club in Tuscon or wherever that is in this video. Then when you become your dad you show old videos of your youth like in this video. Band of Horses is the male cycle of growth distilled. Just because you have tattoos doesn’t mean you can’t raise a family and just because you’re a dad doesn’t mean you can’t jam.
Of the legacies I’d like to leave for Gus, cultivating a taste in good music is one that is particularly important. I do believe that Band of Horses is part of that plan. Since receiving Infinite Arms for Father’s Day (see?), and after seeing them play in Minneapolis last weekend, my love for the band has been growing, as evidenced by their meteoric rise to the upper tier of my Last.fm library.
(I’d also like for Gus to appreciate good beer and violently oppose all coercion by his future uninformed teen-aged peers to rip it up at a bonfire with a case of Old Miller-Bud Genuine Light 2025 Bull. Yes, I have high hopes for that boy.)
Washington II Washington
Organized by Found Magazine creator Davy Rothbart, Washington II Washington is a hike organized in memory of Emmanuel Durant, Jr., a friend of Davy’s who was murdered on New Year’s Eve, 2009. It’s a very deserving idea in need of some microfinance to help bring 28 city kids from D.C. and Michigan to the wildnerness of Mt. Washington.
Where the money went
Strong Towns:
The wealth of our nation has been squandered, neighborhood by neighborhood, building and maintaining streets such as these. In Brainerd the cost is easily in the tens of millions of dollars for all of the extra wide streets, paved and then not properly maintained. Nationwide the number is easily in the hundreds of billions, probably more. There is no city that has embraced this approach that has the wherewithal financially to maintain this excess.
Stuck amidst a thousand other cars in a traffic jam outside of Minneapolis on Friday night due to construction at a critical choke point in the city’s interstate loop, the profundity of our collective misdirected wealth was almost too much to bear. Here we are, at the probable eve of the American empire, and our last great hope is road resurfacing? “Your tax dollars at work,” indeed. We’ll never catch up.
No fly zone
Arielle and Gus are in the midst of a daylong trip back home from visiting her grandparents in North Carolina. A day that started at 4 a.m. and, due to a 3 hour delay and then a cancelled flight in Detroit, shows no immediate sign of ending. Thanks Delta.
And thanks, U.S.A., for dumbly following the vapors of air travel to the point that we are left with no serious transcontinental alternatives. The death of the airline industry and resurgence in trains — if indeed we are still financially and socially capable of re-surging anything anymore — can’t come soon enough.
“I did it! I dooed the music! It playing through Netflix!”
(Last.fm, but still…)
One of the many joys of working from home.
Oysters: From The Gulf To The Table
Towards the end of the first interview with oyster processor Patrick Fahey, host Michele Norris notes the wearisome tone of his voice; his unguarded, candid reply is touching, and, vegetarian or not, makes me feel for the guy.
If It Was My Home: Visualizing the BP Oil Disaster
A Google Maps mashup that gives a personal sense of scale to the debacle.
The Leroy Stick
@BPGlobalPR is a wonderful use of the internet, via Twitter, to heap some well-deserved abuse at a scoundrel of a recipient. Sometimes the tedium of programming administrative-level web applications is almost too much to bear, but it’s shit like this that keeps me excited about the medium, and about mankind’s potential for disruptive social commentary done through alternate means. Banksy comes to mind.
Anyway, 100,000+ followers can’t be wrong. Satire is honesty without pretension.
I ponied up $25 for the t-shirt. I’ve spent more on far more spurious causes.
