Swimming to the Other Side

Here's an interesting story about a song that apparently got a lot of attention in the folk community and is making its way to the general populace. The text on the page isn't the interesting part; listen to the audio track ("Marika Partridge's profile...") to hear several passages from the song and a much more engaging description of it all.

Pat Humphries, Swimming to the Other Side [NPR]     1 comment(s)  

It's a very nice song. And it reminds me that I don't listen to folk music as much as I should. I'm adding her cd to my next Amazon order.
      ...posted by Mrs. NowThis (aka Medley) on May 26, 2002 3:06 PM

Add a comment...

 republican bloodhounds

Sometimes I'm embarrassed to live in this town.

Republicans Play Ruff [Washington Post]

It is just after 11:30 a.m. when Republican Sens. Trent Lott, Larry Craig and Bill Frist lead three 100-plus-pound bloodhounds into the LBJ Room on the Senate side of the Capitol. They create a commotion, which is the idea.

"We're on the hunt for bills," Lott is saying as one of the hounds he is holding on a leash -- an 8-year-old named Sage -- sniffs the crotch of a staffer. For the metaphorically dense, the Republicans have enlisted three hounds to, in Lott's words, "track down some legislation."

That, in a year of Democratic control, they contend, is hard to find. Thus bloodhounds.

It would probably make for an effective cartoon; Lott & Co. could even have made a little iMovie showing bloodhounds leading them around the Capitol and it would make their point in a dumb but still kinda funny and effective way. But standing around in a Senate conference room saying 'Looky, looky, I brought a dog!' just makes them look like stupid, stupid boys trying to get away with a prank on their teacher. (And yes, I think Democrats would pull something similarly moronic if the positions were reversed.)

This is yet another reason why I loathe the two-party system. No matter what the issue is, your party says the party that isn't yours is not just wrong but hates people like you and your way of life and needs to be beaten for the sake of all that is good and decent (otherwise people just won't pay attention or contribute money, right?) and so we shall ridicule them with silly props because they are so self-evidently wrong about everything that we don't even need to make a coherent argument, just a spectacle. Ha ha, take that, voters! You love it!

How many government policy decisions really fit into that mold? And if there were a viable third party, how would the conversation change? Why, people might start talking about tradeoffs and balancing competing values instead of painting everything as black & white, St. George & dragon, heroes vs. oppressors.

I know, that's not how it would work, and it'll never happen anyway. These are our senators, this is how it is. Woof. Bad government.  

 washington times + rev. moon

Moon Speech Raises Old Ghosts as the [Washington] Times Turns 20 [Washington Post]

[Rev. Sun Myung] Moon's sermon tossed gasoline on the long-smoldering embers that some Times staffers have spent two decades trying to extinguish: the accusation that their paper is a mouthpiece for Moon's religious movement, the Unification Church... The charges were not helped by allegations of former reporters, who say stories were changed to favor conservatives; by editors who quit, claiming church tampering; or by obscurity surrounding the paper's finances. It has been years since many of those incidents, though ... For the past few years, the Times has enjoyed a relatively Moon-free zone.

Now, that has changed.

 

 low-gravity water balloons

Way cool movies: Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? [NASA, via Breaching the Web] Note: the MPEG movie files are smaller than the QuickTime files, but produce a bigger image; try those first.