Djangled

Djangled
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

(Django Reinhardt photo by the great William Gottlieb.) I stumbled across this terrific CD in a used bookstore (where else?) and have been listening to it all weekend. I first heard a Django Reinhardt recording when I was about 17 -- I'd found a cheap re-release of some kind, along with several other guitar-instrumental LPs I was collecting for inspiration. The sound quality was lousy, and I didn't spend much time really appreciating Django's stylings. 25 years later he's one of many, many guitarists I listen to, but I only recently learned this: his right hand was badly burned when he and his young family were trying to escape a fire. The last two fingers - you can see the scarring in the photo above - were permanently curled from tendon damage. To accomodate his new reality, he reconfigured all of his chord patterns, and developed solos he could play with his two good fingers! That makes his playing all the more amazing to me. Give him a listen some time, if you haven't. (He also couldn't read or write music, so he never played a solo the same way twice.)

• And God created Pierolapithecus catalaunicus and madeth it to appear very old (13 million years) and buried it near Barcelona, deep, but not too deep... (If your kids are in Philly's Dover school district, they probably won't be hearing about this fascinating find; then again, if you've got your kids in that school district, you probably don't want them hearing about this, eh?)
  
  
• Point - Counterpoint:
  
  

  "I guess you could say I'm a good steward of the land..." GW Bush, in the second presidential debate this year.
  
  "The Sierra Club today released documents showing that the Bush administration gave special treatment to Texas-based Davis Brothers Oil Producers, Inc., when it reversed a longstanding policy in order to allow oil and gas drilling underneath certain national parks, preserves and refuges regardless of potential environmental impacts. More than a dozen National Park Service areas could be impacted by the rule, including Big Thicket National Preserve and Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, New River Gorge in West Virginia, and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida.
  
  Documents obtained by Sierra Club through the Freedom of Information Act show that the Bush administration changed the rule specifically at the request of Ross Davis, who runs Davis Brothers Oil Producers.
  
  Moreover, the administration made its decision in secret and bypassed the regular rulemaking process, which allows for public input and a high degree of transparency."

• "It's like experimenting with drugs," Davies said. "You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?" Can someone please get Delana Davies the help she so desperately needs? Her children, too, if they're to have any hope of a normal life. Davies forced her son's school district to cancel one of its traditional homecoming week gags, a "cross-dressing" day. They will all wear military camouflage gear instead.
  
  
• Ohio's Green Party and Ohio Honest Elections Campaign will try to force a recount after gathering mounds of evidence on deliberate vote suppression, electronic voting disparities, and confusion over provisional balloting. Meanwhile, the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study suggesting that electronic voting machines "may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election." The study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/. (Kevin Drum links to a couple of studies that question the Berkeley findings, however.)
  
  
• Just trying to keep up here: the Pentagon is pressing for US-imposed "regime change" in Iran, even as the US considers boosting troop levels in the existing mess in Iraq, which we apparently can only do by calling up aging and out of shape military retirees? By the way, Bob Simon had a segment on 60 Minutes tonight dealing with the military's shameful disregard of non-combat casualties from the Iraq war. Between 15,000 (military estimate provided to Simon in a letter - not provided to news media on a daily basis!) and 30,000 (estimate from Globalsecurity.org) men and women have been evacuated from Iraq due to illness or injury. That's a far cry more than the approximately 5000 figure we're more likely to hear in the press. That's because the military - undoubtedly concerned about losing public support for the "action" - doesn't include the men and women injured in "non-combat" situations (in once case, a tank awaiting action tumbled into the Tigris when the land beneath it gave way; two men were killed, and another was paralyzed from the neck down. None of them are listed as casualties.). Conveniently, this also denies a host of benefits to these men and women. Beyond reprehensible.
  
  
• Harold Myerson and James Carville are among the latest to opine that Democrats need a "theme." Someone somewhere else derided the Democratic party's "laundry list." (I can't find the link.) Oliver Willis has gone so far as to create a whole (admittedly creative) "branding" campaign. Even ZZ Packer, in a smart piece on Democratic marginalizing of the religious voices in the party, plugs the "theme" theme: "...What we Democrats need is our own political brand of evangelism. The conservatives have a well-wrought message, but no works. We have the substantive works, but no message, and certainly no overarching vision..." I have fallen on both sides, and smack on the fence, on this issue, but today, I'm of this mind: it's pathetic that we are talking this way. It's gross. It's Republican. I know that great segments of the electorate are giving other segments of the electorate good reasons to puzzle deeply over their cognitive processes, but at this moment, the whole idea of branding and creating a party "theme" strikes me as the height of manipulative cynicism. If Democrats are not recognizeable by their works, convictions and priorities, then it is because we are losing sight of them ourselves, and are beginning to hybridize and mutate. (I might be picking up on some of Thomas Frank's observations here.) There is nothing uninformative about a "litany" or a "list" if it reflects the priorities of the person(s) who created it. I run my whole life on lists: I make a "to-do" list, and trust that the items I put on it are going to bear some approximation or relationship to the values I hold. To the world around me, those values will - I hope - become clear in my daily conduct. Not once has one of my lists tricked me into doing something against my convictions! "Let's see... #4... 'Support legislation to lower vehicle emission standards and open more roadless areas in national forests to off-road vehicles.' Done. Wait! Dammit! How'd that get on my list?!" Perhaps we can trust that the American people -- maybe at least half of them -- have the inductive reasoning abilities to recognize a few governing principles, and to develop expectations, from the actions we Democrats take? (OK, true, we'll need to work fast, because this administration is working doubletime to restrict advanced education.)
  
  For those who continue to insist on a theme, I think the terrific Pax Christi campaign covers everything: Life does not end at birth.
  
  
• Here's how members of the Moral Values Party react when a journalist, in the process of doing his job, reports an unpleasant truth about an American soldier...
  
  
• Republicans yesterday tried to sneak a line through a massive omnibus spending bill that would have given any committee chair and his/her staffers the right to look at ANY AMERICAN'S TAX RETURN. Daily Kos contributors caught the action on CSPAN. That spending bill passed, by the way - and includes the very special provision that allows hospitals and doctors to refuse abortions without sacrificing state or federal money. The Senate added a "range of priorities" that included a presidential yacht. In what moral value system can a "yacht" appear as a "priority"? Why, that of the ruling majority, of course. MyDD has more on the urgency of that budget item, and Atrios thinks the DNC should have some commercials out this week.
  
  
• I guess now that Bush is safely back in office, Greenspan can admit that we're nearing economic catastrophe...
  
  
• If the Washington Post doesn't have an apology or a good explanation for this, I will join the boycott. You'll have to find your WaPo links elsewhere. Here is some follow-up on the quackpot whose work the supplement cites. I'll check WaPo a few times to see if they've accounted for their judgement, but no further.

My cold medicine is kicking in. I'd better get back to my books while the words still appear in straight lines.