the frig blig

I was mad at former President Bush when he spent billions of dollars to kill people (in Iraq).

And today folks are mad at President Obama for spending billions of dollars to help people (in America).

Go figure.

Christopher Cox makes a case for no-stress consumption of the mollusks in his Slate article with the famously stolen title.

A new poll of Tea Party (TP) backers, as reported by this NY Times article, says that TP-ers’s “…animosity towards Washington and the President…is rooted in…the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”

Personally I think it’s about time we started providing more help to the poor in this country. There are more now than ever, and most of the homeless folks I run into deserve as much help as they can get. The rich can help themselves, as they always have.

So I’m proposing the formation of a new party, which gives priority to helping the poor. I propose we call it the Coffee Party. We can proclaim our support by buying homeless people a cup of coffee.

National Labor Committee report

If you came down to Pioneer Square looking for Elliott Bay Books you may be shocked to discover that the storefront is empty. Signs say they’re moving to Capitol Hill.

Metro 5 riders heading downtown from Fremont should appreciate the new mini bus shelter with iron bench at the stop across the street from Lighthouse Roasters. Especially on days like this morning when it’s raining.

The mission of the Secret Service, l learned in grade school, is protecting the President of the U.S. from bodily harm. Lately I’ve been wondering if the agency might have another hidden mission: protecting the President from non-vetted communications from the public (the ‘unwashed masses’). Keep him insulated, as it were, from contact with ordinary people.

[If my keyboard had a key to type the equivalence rather than equals sign, sigh…]

Much has been written by musicians over the past several weeks about the influence Alex Chilton had on their various careers etc.

I myself was never a fan, since I didn’t particularly care for ‘The Letter’ (AC’s big hit). I may have even seen AC once in the 1980s in Tallahassee. If I did, I wasn’t impressed.

But all the recent attention motivated me to download the third Big Star album ‘Third/Sister Lovers’, which I have been listening to on the Metro 16 on my way to work.

And now I hear what I missed. This morning during ‘Nature Boy’ I felt a similarity between AC and Syd Barrett. In the way they approach songwriting; their actual music, voices and styles are not overtly similar.

Who knew? Apparently lots of people, I’m just late to the club.

Firefox 3.6.3 on XP/SP3 with ‘block popup windows’ checked did not prevent this sneaky popup on Activestate’s website.

And the beat goes on…