Sunday, July 10, 2005

The B-52s saved me from dorkitude. 1989 was an overall a shitty year. I moved from what any reasonable person would deem as red state hell into a red state hell that put the previous red state hell to shame. Indeed, the small town we moved to was so small and backwards, it made El Paso look like a fucking metropolis. We moved to 1957, a joke that still gets me laughs to this day. To make things even worse, it was my first year of junior high school. I failed a bunch of classes, girls and boys both wanted to beat me up, I was so scared of the vile bitches that cornered me on the playground and demanded to know why I wore "boys'" shoes (at the time, athletic sneakers were popular in big towns but not in 1957 West Texas where they were considered unfeminine), I threw up but not to control my weight and I menstruated but not in a cool Judy Blume novel way. Shit sucked bad. And the music was worse. The "cool" kids all like Milli Vanilli, which I didn't give two shits about. I gave a helluva effort to seem like I like the boy bands of the time, but mostly I was scared. 1989 was the year that the B-52s released their extremely stupid song "Love Shack". Being a dumb shit kid, I loved it. My aunt, who was a few years older than me, loved the B-52s and latched onto my love of the song to bestow upon me a copied tape that had their first album on side one and and Wild Planet on side two. I loved it. I am surprised I did not fry it I played it so much. The first album especially grabbed my attention--it was weird, decadent, beautiful and the song "Dance This Mess Around" in particular was fucking perfect. They sang about sexual decadence, dancing 'til dawn, but more than anything they sang about how gorgeous music is and could be. I didn't know their entire story then--I didn't know about how they were just jamming and having fun and how Ricky Wilson played on a Sears Silvertone and how they got swept into the New York scene and how they inspired John Lennon to get back into writing music and how Ricky, whose underrated guitar work was the backbone of the band, died of AIDS and how their popularity on the mainstream charts came after they lost his brillance or anything like that. If I had known those things, maybe I wouldn't have learned the prejudice that was hard to unwind that bands peak early and decline. Who knows what they would have been, after all, if Ricky had lived? But I did learn something that would fuck me up from then on--I related to the B-52s, which made me a weirdo and I would never, ever fit in. I came out with my secret love my junior year of high school and put the tape of their first album on for my friends and tried to get them to understand the punk rock awesomeness of "52 Girls" and the downright Dusty Springfriend-esque surreal beauty of "Dance This Mess Around". I played them "Rock Lobster", thinking that its strange pop appeal would break through, but it was sort of long and they got bored and thought it was stupid. [Pandagon] 9:30:00 PM     Christian cop tries to convert during arrest.  [The Raw Story | A rational voice - Alternative news] 9:28:49 PM     UK And US Secretly Planning Iraq Pullout Britain And America are secretly preparing to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq - despite warnings of the grave consequences for the region. The British newspaper The Mail reports:A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six... - canuk [CanadianPerspective] 9:28:04 PM     When Did The White House Plame Outing Really Start?. Hmm. Via a Paul Lukasiak posting at TPMCafe comes this July 6th 2005 Walter Pincus piece that I'd seen previously, but I admit I didn't really "get" the potential importance of the nut grafs the first time I read it: On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction. I didn't write about that information at that time because I did not believe it true that she had arranged his Niger trip. But I did disclose it in an October 12, 2003 story [here] in The Washington Post. By that time there was a Justice Department criminal investigation into a leak to columnist Robert Novak who published it on July 14, 2003 and identified Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Under certain circumstances a government official's disclosure of her name could be a violation of federal law. The call with me had taken place two days before Novak's column appeared. Now, here's the thing about that bolded sentence. Even presuming Novak's column was seen at the White House before publication: Novak's column didn't say that. [Daily Kos] 9:25:54 PM     JOURNAL: The Controlled Chaos Exit Option. Reuters has published details of a leaked memo from the British Ministry of Defense. The memo indicates that both the US and the UK will draw down troop levels in Iraq over the next year (8,500 to 3,000 for the... [Global Guerrillas] 9:24:51 PM

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