Catblogger/Jim's Big Ego/Too Hot for TNR (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #4)

Friday Catblogging

Karina is tuckered out from a long evening spent editing all my spelling errors and grammatical mistakes as I post another blog entry.

Friday's Concert Clip

Today, we'll go with a favorite from my grad school days in Boston. The band is Jim's Big Ego, one of the bands I saw live upward of twenty times. Jim is a cool guy, a great songwriter, and something of a visionary. Their last album was released under a Creative Commons license, allowing listeners to do basically what they like with it, including redistribute it, use it to make videos, or sample it into other forms. You can buy either the CD version or the downloadable e-album here. Back in the day, he used to post the band's songs to Napster, before the big fish decided to kill it off, and he also designs websites.

In honor of my very busy week, here's a youtube video for Stress, his ode to caffeine, more caffeine, and getting away from it all, set to video with clips from the anime series Cowboy Bebop. I cannot begin to tell you how funny the song is. Listen to it right now.

Also hilarious, especially as a historical document, is the flash animation he himself made for Y2K Hooray, his song about the end of the world. Little did we know that armageddon would skip January 1, 2000 and hit us instead on November 7 that year.

Finally, for those who want an extended sample, check out this free concert recording from archive.org, and check out the free stuff at his website.

Better Know a Blog

Today we'll go with the first of several bloggers who also write for The American Prospect, America's finest liberal political magazine. He is Spencer Ackerman, and his blog is called Too Hot for TNR, in honor of The New Republic, which canned him because he's not a crazy neoconservative Likudnik hawk. Rather, he is one of the finest journalists we have in the country on matters of Middle East foreign policy. I particularly recommend the first story he wrote after joining the staff at TAP, in which he argues that we should make human rights the centerpiece of American foreign policy, rather than democracy promotion (see Iraq for an example of the latter not working so well just yet). See also why he predicts that the current escalation "surge" "augmentation" will fail.

Lest anyone think he is just another boring reporter, I should relate the story that he once tried to prove to the yahoos at TNR that one could be against the Iraq war but still hate terrorists by volunteering to “skullfuck” the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides. He's also a courageous guy, who signed up for an embedded tour of Iraq for stories that will appear at some point in TAP, The Nation, or a similar as yet undetermined source. Basically, he's a foul-mouthed guy with a fantastic grasp of Iraqi policy, and he's more than proving that at least in the case of The New Republic, age does not bring the slightest drop of wisdom. Check out his blog and you will learn some shit.