Happy 4th of July! (Although I suspect that if I were living here in Massachusetts during Colonial times I perhaps would have been a Loyalist.)
We’re going to watch the big fireworks show in Boston tonight, and because it starts so late, 10:30, we’ll be staying in town overnight. So there won’t be anything new here until tomorrow night.
We live not too far from Providence, RI, where the Providence Journal has added Peanuts to its comics page lineup. I used to feel that longtime cartoonists should retire and make way for new talent, but later I decided that the merit of a strip, whether new or old, should be the only determining factor.
It appears the managing editor didn’t intend that notice to be published immediately, because it’s dated Sunday. WordPress has an option to schedule the publishing of posts. I haven’t used it often, but I’ve been thinking about coming up with a series of posts on a single subject and scheduling them to appear automatically as sort of a weekly feature.
And out in Minnesota, one of the “150 Minnesota moments we’d just as soon forget” is the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press dropping Schulz’s first comic strip, Li’l Folks.
The Charles M. Schulz Museum has an excellent collection of the Li’l Folks panels called Charles M. Schulz : Li’l Beginnings. At that link you’ll find it under the Biographical section of books.
More songs I’d like to point out. Like The Clash song, these will be testosterone tracks.
I’ve featured David Bowie doing “The Man Who Sold The World,” and Nirvana did a cover version, so I’ll include it, even though it isn’t a particular favorite. If Kurt Cobain were alive, I’d tell him there’s nothing chic about heroin use, let alone addiction, especially when you’re found with your brains splattered everywhere. But I would also tell him that I consider “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to be a quintessential Rock track.
[Ah, well, it seems that Universal Music doesn’t want these videos embedded, so guess what? I won’t use them. Bye-bye, Nirvana.]
One of my top three favorite albums ever is Green Day’s American Idiot. All at once it can be considered derivative, calculated, and manipulative, yet sincere, original and compelling. American Idiot is a brilliant accomplishment, standing on the shoulders of the giants who came and went before, and one out of every three times you ask I will tell you it’s my all-time #1 pick. The 20 seconds that start at 4:35 in “Jesus of Suburbia” distill everything that the Sex Pistols and The Clash were all about.
The list of everything you’ve ever watched on YouTube will soon be in the hands of Viacom. This is ridiculous.
What is Viacom going to find people were watching that belongs to them? Mostly Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and that won’t be news to them. You’d think those guys could put some pressure on the suits and tell them to lay off. Deal with reality and find a way to make it pay without making the fans feel like crooks.
When Laserdisc was the best home video format available, studios would release expensive, deluxe editions of movies with all sorts of extras. I bought a few of them, including a box set from Disney of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It came with a hardcover book that was co-written by none other than Brian Sibley.
OK, here’s another one of seven songs I want to feature, after being tagged by Brian Sibley. You’ll see the artist and title when you play it. This really holds up as a late period psychedelic sci-fi classic.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/JUN/Bowie.mp3]