Happy 75th birthday to Tom Waits. The gravel swirling round in his pan always has a trace of gold in it.
Oh and the things you can’t remember
Tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint
In every dream
Month: December 2024
The winter of our dissed content
At The Atlantic, Noah “Fargo” Hawley advises us that too many reporters are writing fiction.
In a fund-raising email from Mother Jones, David Corn warns us (with one hand casually searching our wallet pockets and purses) that the legacy media’s value-neutral, highly inaccurate reviews of the various hams auditioning for parts in the Pestilence-Erect’s latest play are a form of “sanewashing.’
And at Radio Free Dogpatch, well — our little purse pooch of a podcast may not lift the biggest leg on the block, but it dearly loves a good pissing contest. Why not squeak in a little squirt of our own?
So lend an ear to the latest, massively hydrated edition of Radio Free Dogpatch, even though it may be, as The Bard had Richard declaim:
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before [its] time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up. …
Shit, now that I think of it, the title may be the best part of the whole damn thing. …
• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. The music, “Black Fedora” and “On the Job,” and the people networking and chanting all come from Zapsplat. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.
Chew on this
December is National Fruitcake Month, which should surprise exactly no one paying attention to the shenanigans in the nation’s capital.
But let’s not go there, hey? Whaddaya say? Tom Nichols at The Atlantic has posited that our latest Long National Nightmare will not be at an end for the better part of quite some time. It is a marathon, not a sprint, says Tom.
So let’s just jog gently along for a bit, as though we were trying to sweat out the whiskey from a long night of debauchery and hoping to forget (or perhaps remember) all the stupid shit we did while in our cups.
December always feels like an ending to me. Or perhaps the beginning of the end. Rarely am I in a celebratory state of mind.
For instance, this December I will enjoy not one, but two visits to the dentist. The first, yesterday, was for a routine cleaning; the other will be for replacement of a couple fillings that date back to my tenure as a union copy editor at The Pueblo Chieftain, 40 years ago.
“I don’t have the truck I was driving then, so I guess it’s time to get rid of these old fillings,” I quipped as the dentist Indiana Jones’d his way around the archaeology of my piehole.
“Mmm hmm,” he replied, no doubt thinking of his RV payment. “Keep up that home care.”
I was already the Mad Dog in 1984, but it would be seven years, a couple extended stretches of unemployment, and two more newspapers before I finally hopped the rickety fence of unsteady employment and went kyoodling after the bicycles, full speed ahead, damn the health insurance, sick leave, and dentistry.
Fortunate I am to have escaped the dental fate that befell Shane MacGowan. ’Tis a wonder that I have teefers to fill at all so.
Mad Blog Media 