Takedown of the Privileged White Patriarchy

We think the judge has got something to hide here - quid pro quo with the Pumpernickel administration of exoneration in return for an appointment?  Clearly, Anger-Bear Brett doesn't want to talk about this, and clearly, the Republicans don't want the questions asked.

Iowa Wrap-Up

As you've seen, The Work Desk had us in Iowa last week to do some field sampling for a national industrial client. The Music Desk resents that we missed two good shows (Mothers at Aisle 5 and St. Paul & The Broken Bones at the Fox) while we were away, although based on recent behavior, we might not have gone to the shows anyway. The cats, after we were gone for three consecutive nights, assumed that we were dead.

Most people our age don't do much field work anymore, and to be perfectly honest, we don't do all that much these days either.  We recently ran into some old colleagues of ours, people we used to direct in the field literally decades ago, and they told us that they all have managerial positions now and haven't done field work themselves in years.  We wondered what was wrong with us and where our career went off the tracks that we're still outside filling sample jars with soil at the age of 64, but then we remembered that it's pointless to compare ourselves to our perceptions of others, and that happiness is found in accepting ourselves for who we are and not by constantly benchmarking ourselves against others.  No matter how successful one is, there will always be someone doing even better, and focusing on that instead of what one actually has accomplished will always lead to inevitable disappointment,  Besides, we like getting out every once in a while and it's actually kind of a nice change of pace to be outdoors and working hard for a few days.  An adventure, if you will. 

The weather was favorable to us and the Iowa morning were cool (upper 40s), but it warmed up to the low 70s as the day progressed.  We finished the job around 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, and had some time left over to explore the Iowa countryside.

There really wasn't that much exploring to be done - not to be dismissive, but you've seen one cornfield, you've seen them all.  We flipped on the car radio as we drove around and heard some bitter talk-show host complain about the congressional hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh that was being held that day.

"This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election," he snarled with typical partisan rancor over the radio.  "This is a circus," he added.  He dismissed the proceedings as "revenge on behalf of the Clintons" and he imagined that millions of dollars were pouring in from "outside left-wing opposition groups."

"The consequences will be with us for decades," he warned. "This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country."

We were appalled by the bitterness in his voice and were  reminded why we don't listen to talk radio, and felt sorry for the Iowans who had to listen to this kind of drivel on a regular basis, and it took us several minutes to realize that the voice we were hearing was not some AM-radio, right-wing nut job, but actually Judge Kavanaugh himself.  We were hearing the live coverage from Washington, D.C., and to our shocked amazement, the angry, resentful voice we were hearing on the radio was not some midwestern pundit but an actual candidate for the Supreme Court of the United States.

Since there was nothing to see in Iowa anyway, we returned to our hotel room and watched the remainder of the testimony on television.  As an aside, our hotel room in Iowa was probably the shittiest we can remember staying in for at least 20 years.  The whole room smelled like stale cigarettes even though numerous "No Smoking" signs were posted everywhere, we ran the A.C. all night and don't think the room temperature dropped one degree or the air got any fresher, truck drivers at the adjacent diesel station kept waking us up by gunning their engines at night beneath our window, and the showerhead didn't work and we had to wash our self by squatting like a barbarian in front of the bathtub faucet and to wash our hair we had to kneel down on all fours to get our head into the flow of water.

But that's not the point.  That was part of "the adventure." The point has to do with Kavanaugh's testimony and is that if we're to be perfectly honest, we admit that we don't actually know for sure what happened at Georgetown Prep some 35 years ago, and although we have our own strong suspicions and our opinions about who is lying and who is telling the truth, we don't know with certainty exactly what happened. We also have our own personal opinions as to whether the actions of a teenager should preclude an adult from a career appointment decades later. 

(Our take is that she's telling the truth and that he's hiding something, and that the particular actions of which Kavanaugh stands accused should prohibit one from taking the particular job he's up for, but then again that's just our personal opinion.)

But we do know this with certainly: the bitter, snarling anger-bear on the stand that afternoon does not have the disposition or temperament to be a judge - Supreme Court, Circuit Court, or any level court.  I wouldn't want him sitting in Traffic Court.  We couldn't believe the sense of entitlement he showed, especially when he repeatedly answered questions about his character and honesty by stating "I was the captain of the basketball team!," as if that trivial accomplishment guaranteed him some licence to have his other, subsequent actions overlooked.  

We're older than Judge Kavanaugh, but we remember the kind of white-boy, prep-school, entitled jocks that he described in his testimony, with their fixation on "brewskis" and "ralphing" and "keggers" and their elitist disdain for those not in their little cliques. Theirs is the frat-boy culture of date rape and privileged entitlement, and when you hold a member of that self-perceived elite accountable for their own actions or deny them the rewards they perceive society owes them, you get the angry, bitter, accusatory testimony that Kavanaugh gave to Congress.

And if you're at all concerned about the safety of your daughters, you should prefer that she associate with the antisocial pot-head "losers" hanging around the convenience store rather than the toxic, male-dominated aristocracy of beer-guzzling, prep-school jocks - gang rapes are much, much more likely to occur at a keg party than between bong hits.  

It was clear that Kavanaugh had no interest in helping Congress get to the truth of the matter, and knowing that each Congressman had only 5 minutes each to ask questions, he filibustered his way through their allotted time by repeating his childhood accomplishments over and over, even when pointedly told not to, by pretending not to understand even the simplest question ("What do you mean, 'a bad drunk'? I'm not sure what you're talking about."), or by throwing the questions back to the Congresspersons to show how insulted he was by their audacity to even ask ("I don't know. Do YOU ever drink too much?  I'm curious to know").  Someone with nothing to hide would not try to stymie an inquiry into the activities. 

     

His performance was so ill-tempered, so unhinged, and so unrestrained, that at some level it doesn't even matter what happened at Georgetown Prep all those years ago, at least with regards to the nomination.  It doesn't matter whether or not it's "fair" to judge an adult by his or her worst adolescent excesses.  Brett Kavanaugh should not be nominated to the Supreme Court simply because he made it abundantly clear by his testimony that he lacks the very character, the moral fortitude, and the restraint needed to hold the highest office of our judiciary.  Not to mention that he made a sham of any prior claim to political impartiality.

In fact, The Politics Desk believes a very strong case could be made that based on his performance he should probably be impeached from his current position as a U.S. Circuit Judge. 

Dreaming of the Masters

In consideration of this week's dismaying display of partisan politics at their worst, we present Charles Mingus' protest song Fables of Faubus for this week's Dreaming of the Masters post. 

Fables of Faubus was one of Mingus's most explicitly political works, written as a direct protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American teenagers.  The song features call-and-response vocals between Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond, and Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone.  The razor-sharp satire portrays Faubus as a mock villain no one takes seriously.

This week America saw the appalling spectacle of a Supreme Court nominee admit to Congress, in what Doreen St. Félix called in The New Yorker a “grotesque display of patriarchal resentment,” that he was a binge drinker in high school and college, living a privileged life of frat-boy excess and debauchery, and then feign shocked dismay that people believe the previous, totally credible testimony of a woman who claims she was sexually assaulted by him during one of those drinking binges. Whether or not the charges are true, or whether his actions of some 35 years ago are still relevant, the uncontrolled anger, the sense of privilege, and the bitter partisan comments by the nominee should alone preclude him from being seated to the bench.

It was either Faubus, or this:

What Iowa Looks Like

 

Iowa

Scientists have determined that I'm apparently in Iowa for some reason, and approximately 45 miles south of Des Moines at that.

IX: IJ T.V. - The Penultimate Infinite Jest

Channel surfing through the Infinite Jest . . . here's Volume IX of the Infinite Jest video series, this one titled Infinite Jest T.V.  It's obviously a concept piece, presenting the various video clips as different channels on an imaginary television, and then flipping back and forth across the channels. It works, and we wonder why we didn't think of this sooner.

Only one more IJ to go - Infinite Jest X will be the last.

You can find the previous eight Infinite Jests by using that search button at the top left of the screen, or checking out this great new website for finding stuff on the internet called "Google."

Once again and as always, I don't own any of the copyrights to this material and don't represent that I own any of the copyrights.  It's all just for fun, okay?, so please don't sue me.  Backup alibi: it's art, sort of like collage or plunderphonics or hip-hop sampling, so just be flattered that your work got included and recognize that no one ever will mistake whatever it is that you do for what we're doing here.  What we're doing here for no profit or money.  Please don't sue us.

Shit We Missed, Part 23

One of The Music Desk's favorite albums of 2016 was Car Seat Headrest's Teens of Denial and one of our favorite shows of that same year was Car Seat Headrest's performance at Terminal West, so much so that we anxiously anticipated their next set in the Atlanta region at the 2017 Shaky Knees Festival.

So imagine our excitement when, well over a year later, CSH returns to Atlanta for a show tonight at Variety Playhouse.  

We instinctively knew not to buy advance tickets, mainly because it was a Monday night show and who knows what might come up on a Monday?  What fresh hell we might have to deal with?  

Our instincts were right, because some stuff did come up (more on that in posts later this week) and we wouldn't have been able to make it.  Or to the Friday night show at The Fox Theater (St. Paul & The Broken Bones) either, for which a dear friend had kindly scored us some tickets.  

We haven't been to a show since last July 17, when Animal Collective performed at Symphony Hall. This may be one of the longest hiatuses outside of the mid-winter doldrums in quite some time.

At least we have David Byrne at The Fox to look forward to next week.  Meanwhile, we'll just have to content ourselves with basking in the nostalgia of past Car Seat Headrest performances.

We at WDW feel it has something to do with yesterday victory by the No. 2 Georgia Bulldogs (4-0) over the University of Misery (you probably pronounce it "Missouri") or with the upcoming showdown between Kavanaugh and Ford or with the announcement of the lineup to next year's Big Ears Festival or with the impending release of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

There can't be more to life than that, can there?

From the Politics Desk

Accused attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh should not be appointed to the Supreme Court.  Frankly, he shouldn't even be given a vote.  

Allegations of attempted rape aside, at least at this point (we'll get to that later), it's obvious that there are two separate reasons why Congressional Republicans and our so-called President want him on the Supreme Court so badly:

1. The Republicans are confident that given the opportunity, Kavanaugh will overturn Roe v. Wade and take the right to abortion away from American women, putting the United States into the same category with certain (but by all means not all) third world African countries and certain small island nations. Even Ireland will have more access to legal abortion that post-Kavanaugh America.   


2. Our so-called President wants Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court because of the positions he's taken on executive privilege and the unimpeachability of the the President.  Since it appears more and more likely with each passing day that Pumpernickel is going to face criminal charges, if he's going to get the chance to hand-pick the judges who'll hear his case, of course he's going to want the guy most likely to rule in his favor. 

Republicans have accused Democrats of trying to stall the selection process until after the mid-term election, when they're likely to at least take control of the House, and you know what?  They're right. Of course they are.  But the reverse is also true - the Republicans are trying to rush through the process before the midterms, as they're not likely to get their anti-choice, pro-President candidate through a Democratic congress after Election Day.

But here's our problem:  the Republican position is fundamentally anti- lower-case-D democratic. The Republicans know the public is against them and they know that recent (July 2018) Gallup polling shows that 64% of Americans believe Roe v. Wade should stand. They are trying, before they get tossed out of office, to subvert the will of the people and implement their own, unpopular policies. It's a last-ditch, 11th-hour attempt to install a radical judge badly out of touch with American values before the People have a chance to speak.

Republican Mitch McConnell famously refused to even allow a vote for Merrick Garland, President Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, because it was his "last year in office" and the people should get a fresh chance to vote for the person who nominates a candidate to the Supreme Court.  By that logic, the people should get a fresh chance to vote for the persons who hold the hearings on the nominee and eventually vote for or against that nominee. Especially with the election only some six weeks away.  Especially when it's already clear that the mood of the electorate has changed.

But, no, the Republicans know that installing an anti-choice zealot onto the bench will fire up their base and keep the Evangelicals in their camp for years to come, and are willing to face the consequences of rushing an unpopular candidate onto the Court.  The so-called President wants to pack the bench with fans of unlimited and unchecked executive power in the hope that it might save him from the impeachment that now seems all but inevitable.

We call on Congress to allow the People to first elect the representatives they want to decide on a matter of the importance of a life-long appointment to the Supreme Court.  We don't apologize if the current Congress is unhappy with what the results of that democratic process are likely to be.

Now on to the charges of attempted rape.  We've heard people wonder why, if the victim were so traumatized by the attempted rape, she didn't report it to her parents or the police those 35 or 36 years ago.  Gee, we wonder, why wouldn't a 15-year-old girl want to tell the parents she was at a party she probably wasn't allowed to go to, where there was drinking going on and she may have been drunk herself, and that she got in over her head with some older boys?  She probably would have been grounded for life, literally, to this very day.  She was probably intimidated at the thought of somehow being blamed herself for what happened (even though she was herself blameless).  She was probably reluctant to come forward for all the reasons so many other victims of rape and abuse have been reluctant to come forward. 

We've heard people say that Kavanaugh, even if the charges were true, has changed since then, and that a grown man shouldn't have to be held accountable for mistakes he made as a juvenile.  Really?  That's the conservative position now? First, let us just leave this here:

And then let us remind you that these same conservatives are calling for the deportation of children, the so-called "Dreamers," who arrived here through no fault of their own as the children of immigrants. So unlike the Central Park Five (every one of whom, by the way, was later found to be not guilty before Pumpernickel got his wish to have them executed) or the so-called "Dreamers" (who did nothing wrong as children and are only guilty of the "crime" of being children of the "wrong" parents), white persons of wealth and privilege can get a free pass on the actions of their youth?  Especially if they appear willing to overturn abortion rights and acquit a guilty president?  Is that the conservative position now?  Or is that just how tortured their logic is in their blind allegiance and loyalty to their tribe?

We've heard people way that there's something "suspicious" about the victim's request for an FBI investigation before she's willing to testify before Congress, that it's really just a stall tactic to delay the confirmation.  Considering that lying to the FBI is a crime punishable by prison, and that she's willing to talk to the FBI but Kavanaugh's supporters don't want the FBI involved, who is more likely to be telling the truth? 

Even if Congress does rush the nomination through before the election, next year's Democratic Congress is likely to impeach Cavanaugh as soon as the rape charges are affirmed, and replace him with a more qualified candidate.  May I suggest they consider Judge Merrick Garland?

Accused attempted rapist Brett Cavanaugh has no business being nominated to the Supreme Court, the current Congress has no business in choosing a judge, and the sitting (duck) president has no business cherry-picking his own jurors. Stop it, all of you, immediately.

Dreaming of the Masters

Okay, if the Montreux Jazz Festival can do it, then we can do it too.  Anna von Hauswolff's music may be a lot of things (post-rock, goth, doom, folk-metal, etc.), but one thing she isn't is jazz.  No one ever has accused her of being a jazz musician or mistaken her music for jazz.

But great music is still great music, and if von Hausswolff can perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival, we can post her here in our Old School Fridays, DOTM series. Here's Goodbye from the LP Ceremony (2012). 

Interesting side note - that's not Anna in the video, although the girl looks just like her, or at least a younger version of her.  At first, I thought the clips might be from von Hausswolff home movies, or of some little sister of hers, but it's actually from a 1974 Czech film titled Robinsonka (Karel Kachyna, dir.).  

This is the young actress Miroslava Safránková:

And this is Anna von Hausswolff:

And here's the poster for Robinsonka (Czech for Robinson Girl).

Very clever mixture of image and music by original poster Sonya Kossta, who does this kind of thing a lot, and very skillfully done, too.

Holy shit!  Here's the incredible Anna von Hausswolff with her sister, Maria von Hausswolff, at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Stravinsky Hall, July 12th, 2018.  If you give this performance some room to breathe and let it grow, its epic scale is almost breathtaking.

The Music Desk has had Anna's Dead Magic on heavy rotation on the car's iPod (our daily commute has become our primary music-appreciation time) for a couple months now, and it just gets better with repeat listening. Come Wander With Me/Deliverance is from her 2015 album The Miraculous, however.

Infinite Jest VIII: Florence

Before bringing it to conclusion, we're still tying up some loose ends on the Infinite Jest videos, this time by making a companion piece to the totally random Infinite Jest IV.

I consider this edition, subtitled Florence, to be an artistic failure.  I wanted to contrast the frenetic IJ IV with the most static, totally boring video I could possibly make, but somehow the music added some unexpected drama to the opening sequence, and then the single-shot video itself has a trance-like, hypnotic effect.  Basically, the companion piece to IV, which briefly referenced Hurricane Sandy, became a meditation on Low Country landscape and what existed before the recent Hurricane Florence, so yes, it's boring, but no, not as boring as I had hoped.  Sorry about that.

You can access the entire Infinite Jest series by clicking on the Infinite Jest label at the bottom of this post.

While I usually say at this point that I don't hold the copyrights to any of this material, in this case, I do - I actually shot the video myself with my iPhone.  So, yes, I DO own the rights to at least the visual component of this piece, but I give it freely to the world to do whatever you wish with it.  If you've figured out a way to make a profit off it, good for you!  You must be a very, very clever person and I wish you well.  However, I don't own the copyright to the soundtrack (please don't sue me) and don't represent that I own the copyright (please don't sue me).  I make no profit off these videos, either directly or indirectly, and it's all just for fun.  Please don't sue me.

  

What We Like About The South

Before we get to the actual point of this post, the Sports Desk insists on pointing out that the AP sportswriters overcame their groupthink and did the right thing yesterday, moving the Georgia Bulldogs up to the No. 2 spot on the college football Top 25 list, passing the Clemson Tigers and putting the Dogs right behind the archrival Alabama Crimson Tide.  We're No. 2, baby!  

Also, the Weather Desk notes that the first drop of Florence rainfall has yet to fall on the Atlanta area.

But with all that out of the way, today the Politics Desk noticed an article in the New York Times discussing several new publications and webzines that cover the so-called New South, beyond the NRA and NASCAR stereotypes.  The forums discuss progressive politics, cuisine other than biscuits-and-gravy and sweet tea, and southern art and literature.  Which is all fine and good, but what interested us more were the reader comments that followed the article.

Even though the author pointed out that stereotypes many outside of the South have about this region are often outdated and obsolete, and that predisposition against the South and of Southerners is one of the last remaining non-taboo prejudices, the fine readers of the Journal of Record couldn't help but pile their antipathy onto the South.  "Nice try," someone wrote from Portland, Oregon, but they've met people from the South, and found them to be close-minded and bigoted.  The commenter ought to educate him- or herself about the history of formerly "whites only" Portland before passing judgement on the bigotry of other areas.      

The South "is still an enclave for racists of the white persuasion and people who do not value diversity, education, change, etc.," someone else wrote, effectively profiling everyone who lives in one quarter of the nation with the same outdated brush.  "I traveled through the South four years ago," someone else wrote, adding that they'll never go back again.  Even though a few commenters pointed out that "stereotype" is just another word for prejudice, the primarily non-Southern commenters kept on stereotyping and demeaning the South, raising the question of who the real bigots were here.

We've lived in Georgia since 1981, and to be sure, we've heard more racist comments and seen more intolerance that we care for, but then again our tolerance for that sort of thing is pretty low.  But we've seen just as much racism when we lived in the North, too.  When we were a young child, we attended an all-white parochial school on Long Island and during a field trip to the Bronx Zoo, the kids reacted to the sight of crowds of black schoolchildren enjoying their field day at the zoo by pointing out the windows and screaming "Negro! Negro!" (we'll use the word "Negro" rather than the far more deplorable epithet that was actually used).  What we still don't understand to this day is why the teachers and chaperones didn't try and stop us.  By the way, the parochial school teachers and chaperones were all nuns.

In the early 70s when we attended High School in Northern New Jersey, we were told we had to leave a party because we had arrived with a friend of ours who just so happened to be black. We were told we had to "get the Negro out of there" (the epithet substitution continues).  "You're blowing our minds, dude," they said.  That's never happened to us in the South.

Later in the 70s, we moved to Boston, possibly the most racist city in America, and during a court-ordered school desegregation, saw white adults throwing rocks and bricks and hurling racial epithets at school buses full of terrified black schoolchildren.  

In the 1980s, we (briefly) dated a woman in upstate New York who after several drinks predicted that one day the Negros will elect a Negro President, who will pass a law forcing white women to marry Negro men.  "I don't know what particular date they have in mind," she opined,"But you wait and see, that day will come."

These, of course, are random observations based on the non-scientific polling of our one singular experience, but we are yet to be convinced that racism and intolerance exists in only one part of the country and doesn't exist in others.  All of America, a nation founded on the twin atrocities of African slavery and native genocide, still has a lot of collective karma to be worked out, and although we've come a long way, there's still a lot of progress to be made.

Another problem with painting all of the South with the same brush is that the area is simply so large and diverse, no single set of characteristics could ever define it.  Georgia alone is large enough that one could fit all on the six New England states inside of it, except for a portion of the northern Maine wilderness.  The area extending from Virginia down to Florida, and extending westward to Louisiana and Arkansas (we'll leave Texas and Oklahoma out, thank you) is almost as large as New England, the mid-Atlantic, and most of the northern mid-West combined, an area that no one would try to characterize with a single sweeping generalization (other than the derogatory Southern term, "Yankees").

Whatever else you think about the South, we'll tell you this: here in Atlanta, we can take you on a short walking tour starting at the Nelson Mandela memorial in Piedmont Park, and then walk along the Freedom Park Trail to a sculptural tribute to our congressman, the civil-rights icon John Lewis, and from there over to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and then back around to the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthplace and National Historic Center.   Did you just feel that?  That was your predisposed attitude about the South just changing a little bit. And just wait until you see just how hard the Blue Wave hits the Southern states this November to really shake up your misconceptions.

And hey, our deeply divisive and racist so-called "President," the white supremacist Donald Pumpernickel, is from New York City, y'all, not Montgomery or Tallahassee or Macon or Baton Rouge or anywhere from the South for that matter. Down here, our millionaires typically tend to be more like philanthropists Ted Turner and Jimmy Carter.

But as we were saying, we've lived in the South for some 35 years now, occasionally leaving briefly and then just as quickly returning.  We like it here, we like the weather and we like the food and we like the diverse music and arts and we like the natural beauty of the area. We've told people for literally decades now that we moved here from Massachusetts thinking that the sun rose and set over the Boston Basin, but some combination of the weather, country music, Southern women, and barbeque kept us from ever returning, or at least staying away for long.

Also, the South has got to be one of the most beautiful areas we've ever seen.  Like a doting grandparent, we keep pictures of the beauty on our cell phone, sharing the pics with anyone interested or who can't persuade us to stop.  Here's a picture out our front door in the wintertime (and proving we do indeed enjoy four seasons down here):

      

And here's the view out a back window in the spring:

The Georgia coast on a summer sunset:

And in mid-afternoon:

An autumn afternoon in Athens:

Here's a random graveyard in South Georgia:

Or closer to home, Atlantic Station, just a mile or so south of here:

And Midtown:

Nightlife:

Here's Knoxville on a weekday morning:

Kudzu grows on everything:

In fact, nature's always trying to reclaim everything:

And tries to get a foothold wherever she can:

We could go on and on, and besides, you've probably seen many if not most of these pictures before.  Now, before you start sending us pictures of wherever it is you're from, we'll be the first to admit that there's beauty everywhere if you know where - and how - to look for it and that this isn't a competition.  

Our point here is that the South is a fine and wonderful place to live, and if you're mind is open and not trapped by your own prejudices and preconceived notions of what the South is or isn't, it's a wonderful place to live. 

And we don't need approval or validation of some bigoted Yankees for our opinion, thank you very much.

Florence's rains still haven't reached Atlanta yet.  In fact, it now looks like they won't get here at all - the forecast for this evening calls for only a "slight chance" of showers, although just two hours east of here, Clemson, South Carolina is experiencing an 80% chance of Florence rainfall, proving that even God hates the Clemson Tigers.  

So if you haven't guessed already, this isn't a weather post, this is the Sports Desk talking.  Yesterday, the No. 3-ranked Georgia Bulldogs improved to 3-0 on Week 3 of the college football season.  3, 3, 3 - there has to be some significance in there somewhere.

In our opinion, the Dogs should be ranked at least No. 2.  While they handily defeated a ranked opponent last week, beating then-No. 24 South Carolina 41-17, and then beat unranked Middle Tennessee State 49 -7 this week, the No. 2-ranked Clemson Tigers barely squeaked by Texas A&M last week, needing a missed Aggies two-point conversion to prevent OT, and this week beat unranked Georgia Southern by "only" 38-7.  Georgia has played better and scored more points against better teams, but the AP Poll still keeps Clemson at No. 2 and Georgia at No. 3.

The Sports Desk thinks Hurricane Florence is just God's way of flushing the entire state of South Carolina - the overranked Clemson Tigers, the overrated South Carolina Gamecocks, Lindsey Graham, their ridiculous mustard-based barbeque, and everything - back into the ocean and the primordial ooze from which they crawled.

Of course, the big news down here is that Auburn lost a heartbreaker to LSU, 22-21, on a last-second field goal.  We're disappointed to see a team in the Three-Hour Drive lose to a team from outside the radius, and are concerned because Georgia has both LSU (at Death Valley) and Auburn (between the hedges) on it's schedule later this season.  Both games should be challenges, as well as a showcase for Georgia to make their case for a No. 1 ranking. 

Tennessee (also on Georgia's schedule later this season) won their game, as did Alabama (we'll probably be seeing them in the SEC Championship game), although both Georgia Tech and Georgia State lost theirs.  The Tech and State losses give those two teams losing records so far on the season, and as they're both here in Atlanta and in the very center of the Three-Hour Drive, it makes the Sports Desk wonder if the geometry of the 3HD isn't actually a simple circle but more like a donut with a hole in the middle.  

Next week, the Bulldogs travel to Missouri, where they historically have had their troubles.  Clemson comes to Atlanta to play Georgia Tech, Alabama hosts A&M, and Auburn hosts Arkansas.  All should be good games.

Anyway, you know the schedules and you know the scores - there's no big reveal here - you have the internet, you've watched the games, and you know what happened.  It's just that the Sports Desk believes that this is going to be Georgia's year (we thought that last year, too, but oh well) and is stoked over the quality of their play this year and the quality of the competition, and we are going to keep posting about our Dogs until they bring the CFB Championship back to Athens where it belongs.  

Meanwhile, we're looking forward to watching former Bulldogs running back Sony Michel's NFL debut with the New England Patriots later this afternoon.  You better play him, Belichick, and not keep him on the sidelines and exclusively run Rex Burkhead . . .

Finally, we're pleased to see that Michel's former Bulldog teammate, Nick Chubb, has carried twice so far today for 14 yards for the Cleveland Browns.  Last week, he carried three times for 21 yards, so 7-yards-per-carry seems to be Chubb's M.O.  We just wish he were on a better team with more potential (a Burkhead-for-Chubb trade, Belichick?).    

Letter To The Gas Company

WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE?  While the whole rest of the country is keeping an eye on Hurricane Florence, towns in the Merrimack River Valley (home of Jack Kerouac as well as my Mom, sister and brother-in-law) are suffering catastrophic natural gas explosions.  One dead, dozens injured, scores of homes damaged or destroyed, thousands evacuated or displaced, and I still haven't heard a convincing explanation of exactly what happened, or why, other than it seems to be due to the incompetence of something called the Columbia Gas Company.

This reminds me on an infamous letter written to the Hartford Gas Company back in 1891:

Dear Sirs: 

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed, goddamned fashion of shutting your goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again today. 

Haven’t you a telephone? 

Ys,
Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)

  The man had a way with words. . . . 

Dreaming of the Masters

It was only a matter of time before the DOTM series got around to Herbie Hancock, but we here at the Music Desk think it might have been Hurricane Florence that reminded us of this particular composition and finally got us to post some Herbie.  

More to follow, we're sure.

Trackin' Florence

People are asking if those of us here in Atlanta are going to be safe from Hurricane Florence's impending landfall, and the answer, fortunately, is yes.

There was some initial uncertainty about exactly where the storm was going to hit the coast, but almost all estimates had it landing somewhere in either North or South Carolina.  While that sucks for Carolinians, it never put Atlanta in the line of danger.  While the Carolina coast may get up to 40 inches of rain, current forecasts are now saying Atlanta will get less than a half-inch of rain, probably arriving sometime Sunday evening.  Wind is not expected to me much of a factor here, either, although I'm still glad I had those trees taken down.

After settling for a bit over Clemson, the storm is now expected to then turn north and travel up to somewhere around Syracuse, New York.

Hurricane prediction is big business for weatherpersons and newscasters though, and no one gets more excited when a hurricane is about to make landfall than television meteorologists.

After playing all of those stealth and shooter games (Bio-Shock Infinite, Assassin's Creed: Origins, Borderlands, and the Dishonored trilogy), the Fantasy Desk wanted a change of pace and, boy, did we ever get it!

No Man's Sky is close to plotless - there's some sequential quests and tasks you can make your way through if you so choose, although they're eminently ignorable and you're not only free but actually encouraged to just go explore on your own.  Your player, your on-screen avatar, is nameless and faceless and totally devoid of any personality other than what you instill into it.  Not unlike Minecraft, which it actually resembles in a number of ways, the game is basically just about exploring an infinite universe and making your own way through the cosmos.

The selling point of No Man's Sky, it's hook if you will, is that the player can travel among a literally endless series of computer-generated worlds.  The claim is that every world is unique, devised by a computer algorithm that determines the planet's temperature, the chemistry of the atmosphere, the flora and fauna present, the minerals, and the level of danger.  Since the computer spontaneously generates each world at which you arrive, the variety and number of planets is virtually limitless.  I've read that the game is capable of generating over 18 quintillion unique planets.  That's a lot of places to visit.

The reality is that after visiting a dozen or so planets, they all start to look the same, or at least fall into one of a half dozen of so categories (Earth-like planet, desert planet, weirdo planet, ice planet, etc.).  You've seen those mineral formations before, those little animals, those gangly trees, and so on.  Each planet has identical "cargo drops" from other spacecraft to find, and "broken machinery" to repair for bonus points, and alien artifacts to discover.  Maybe it's not exactly the same, and the geography is certainly always different, but each planet is most certainly not a completely unexpected experience. 

But that's okay, it's still fun harvesting a few resources from one planet and then blasting off in your little starship to the next, or visiting a space station to buy and sell supplies, or constructing a home base.  So basically, the game is Minecraft - you explore a procedurally generated., deterministic, open world environment, collect stuff, bring it home and craft your stuff into gear, a home, fuel, and other useful stuff.   With no boss adversary to defeat, you basically can keep playing for weeks or months or even years - you can keep going until you're finally bored of the game and are ready to play something else.

Since Labor Day Monday when we downloaded the game, we've played for some 45 hours so far and are willing to keep going some more, at least for now, especially since we've finally starting to get the hang of it and have learned how to find or craft most of the stuff we need for our space journey.  But just like in real life, the nagging question still remains - what is the point of it all?

So, you may be wondering, do we like the game or not?  Honestly, we don't really know - we're generally not enthusiastic about firing it up and starting it each evening, although we're not adverse to the idea either, but we find that once we start, we have a difficult time stopping.  So in other words, it's like eating pistachios - you don't care if you have the first one or not, but once you do, you'll finish the whole bag before you're done.

Infinite Jest VII: The Infinite Jest

It's time (past time?) that we start winding down these Infinite Jest films, to bring things to a conclusion as it were.  To tie up some loose ends, so that we can bundle the whole thing up and put it away for good.  

So with that in mind, here's Infinite Jest VII, the companion to III: Loneliness.  Just as I: Romeo was matched with II: Juliet, and V: The Helicopter Gunship was matched with VI: The Hamburger Dipshit, the companion to III: Loneliness is Infinite Jest VII: The Infinite Jest.  See how we're becoming self-referential while at the same time bringing things to closure?  We're surely getting near the end of the series, although we're not quite there yet.  

VII: The Infinite Jest is basically about existentialism and the meaning of it all, which may be itself the ultimate jest.

As always, I don't hold the copyrights to any of this material (please don't sue me) and don't represent that I own any of the copyrights (please don't sue me).  I make no profit off these videos, either directly or indirectly, I just lose hours of sleep creating and posting them for my own and hopefully your amusement.  It's all just for fun.  Please don't sue me.

More Self-Pity From the Music Desk

Four of the Music Desk's favorite bands, Ratboys, Foxing, Ought and Real Estate, all played highly anticipated shows in Atlanta last weekend.  The Music Desk didn't see any of them.

Friday night, Ratboys opened for Foxing at The Masquerade.  The Music Desk blames the Work Desk for making us miss that show by getting us up too early Friday morning, subjecting us to a stressful day at work, and then finally dumping us off into intolerable rush-hour traffic after the day was over to the point where the last thing we wanted to do when we finally got home was to get back into our car and jump back into it all over again.  Besides, we rationalized, there are some great shows we could catch Sunday night instead. 

The Music Desk blames the Sports Desk and the Fantasy Desk (aka the Games Desk) for missing the Sunday night shows.  Sure, there was a choice to be made - the hyper-literate Montreal band Ought was playing in East Atlanta Village at the venerable Earl, while the Brooklyn dream-pop band Real Estate was conveniently just down the road at Terminal West. But the Sports Desk had us watching the New England Patriots-Houston Toxins game Sunday afternoon (the Patriots won!) followed by the surprisingly exciting Chicago-Green Bay game, and then the Fantasy Desk (aka the Games Desk) convinced us that we'd rather stay in and play No Man's Sky (more on that in a later post) that evening instead of going out to hear music.     

So we wound up seeing and hearing absolutely nothing last weekend and just stayed at home watching football and playing video games.  The real irony of all this is that we remembered that part of the reason we didn't go to Raleigh's Hopscotch Festival, briefly mentioned in yesterday's post, was because many of the bands performing at Hopscotch, such as Ought and Real Estate, would be continuing their tours and passing through Atlanta, so not only did we miss going to the festival, we missed the festival coming to us.

The Music Desk is getting paranoid that the Work Desk and the Sports Desk and the Fantasy Desk (aka the Games Desk) have it out for the Music Desk and are trying to sabotage its interests, and the Music Desk would like to remind the other desks that it doesn't do anything to interfere with their interests, so why all the hate?

The Sports Desk is pleased to note that the teams within the Three-Hour Drive did well yesterday, at least those at the top of the order.  It was a little rougher in the lower half of the group.

Most importantly, the Number-Three-ranked Georgia Bulldogs pulled off a convincing win over their SEC neighbors, the No. 24-ranked Gamecocks of the University of South Carolina ("the real USC"). Georgia played a little tentatively at first, leading South Carolina by "only" 10 points at the half, but both the Bulldog offense and defense rose to the occasion in the second half and put the 'Cocks away, 41-17.

We'll be the first to admit we have a bit of an attitude toward South Carolina.  According to Google maps, Columbia, SC is a 3-hour, 9-minute drive from here, so we could easily have included them in the Three-Hour Drive if we had wanted too - it could be argued that we drive just a little bit faster than Google maps anticipates, or we could just move the epicenter of the Three-Hour Drive a mere nine minutes east of the house.  But screw those guys.  I don't want them in our group.  Screw Steve Spurrier and Lou Holtz and all the other superstar coaches who over the years tried to make South Carolina into an SEC contender. Columbia, South Carolina is and always will be the graveyard of coaches, or at least of their reputations, and until some coach at "the real USC" comes up with a winning strategy beyond "Well, first we have to beat Georgia," the team will continue to languish in the basement of the SEC.  Besides, the Gamecock's goofy logo looks like Chick-Fil-A. 

  
 Let's see, what else happened yesterday?

• No. 1-ranked Alabama completely demolished Arkansas State, 57-7, to the surprise of absolutely no one anywhere.  

• No. 2-ranked Clemson had their hands full at College Station, but managed to hold off the SEC's Texas A&M, 28-26.  A failed Aggie two-point conversion in the closing minute would have put the game into overtime, and although a win's still a win, the unimpressive Tiger performance may be enough for Georgia to slip past them in the polls and take the No. 2 spot.

• No. 7 Auburn absolutely destroyed Alabama State 63-9.  

• Unranked Tennessee managed to win their first game of the season, annihilating East Tennessee State 59-3 and moving up to 1-1.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the order, things were a bit rougher.

• Georgia Tech lost to the South Florida Bulls in a wild, 49-38 game in Tampa (yes, that's 87 total points), and slipped down to 1-1.

• Georgia State was clobbered by NC State 41-7 in Raleigh, where, the Music Desk insists on adding, the bands Ought,  Grouper, Still Corners, Gang Gang Dance, Speedy Ortiz, Liz Phair, the Detroit proto-metal/punk stalwarts The MC5 (now calling themselves The MC50 these fifty years later), and Deakin of Animal Collective were all performing as part of the annual Hopscotch Festival. Looking over the lineup, the Music Desk wonders how this one got past our radar - we attended Hopscotch in 2014 but haven't been back, although this year's lineup looked stellar (those were just the Saturday performers at the three-day festival, those who played while the Wolfpack were tearing the Yellow Jackets apart in Raleigh). At least the Panther fans had some good music with which to console themselves after the loss. 

So, even with one-loss records for three of the seven 3-Hour Drive teams, no team in the group currently has a losing record, and four of the seven highest-ranked teams in the nation are close-by enough that we could drive there in less time than it would take to watch The Godfather (one of today's NY Times crossword clues was "One of the Corleones in The Godfather").

The answer is "Fredo," but don't tell anyone you heard it here.

One of the little domestic pleasures of our little non-domestic life is sleeping in late on weekends and then doing the NY Times crossword puzzle in bed.  With that exercise, the brain wakes up before the body does.

Today, one of the puzzle's clues was "Only facility in the world to have hosted the Olympics, Super Bowl, and Final Four."  We thought about it for a minute and realized that the Georgia Dome, a mere 4 1/2 miles south of here, a straight-line shot down Northside Drive, hosted many Olympic events back in 1996.  We saw men's basketball and volleyball there.  It's also hosted at least one Super Bowl, maybe more, and just a few years ago hosted the Final Four basketball tournament. But until this morning, we never realized that it was the only facility in the world to have hosted all of those events. 

Of course, now it's been demolished.  According to the on-line discussion of today's puzzle, the Georgia Dome "cost $214 million to build, opened in 1992, seated over 71,000 people and got demolished and replaced in 2017 by the $1.6 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which also seats about 71,000 people."     

"Hopefully, those people are getting significantly more enjoyment from their fancy new stadium!," the Times added sarcastically.

So going back to last weekend's discussion about all the football greatness that occurs within a 3-hour drive of here, we now realize that in the center of that circle is that unique venue, the only one in the world, that's hosted Olympic games, Super Bowls, and the Final Four basketball championship, the Georgia Dome.

We also recognize that the term we coined for that 3-hour drive circle, the "3H ACE" (for 3-Hour Atlanta Circle of Excellence) never caught on.  It's not become an internet meme. ESPN sportscasters don't glibly throw it out assuming everybody knows what it means, athletes aren't getting it tattooed on their biceps,  and young women don't have it written on their thighs. We also realize that it's been a long time since we've seen a young woman's thighs, so for all we know, maybe it is written there (but we doubt it).

The problem may be in the acronym itself.  Saying "3H ACE" is neither fun nor easy we'll be the first to admit.  So instead, from here on in, we'll just say "the three-hour drive" and assume that you'll know that we mean the radius defined by a three-hour drive time from here, that circle within which four of the top seven ranked football teams in the country are located.  In fact, we could say that the three-hour drive is centered around the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which is adjacent to the venerable but sadly former Georgia Dome.   

Today, the No. 3 ranked University of Georgia Bulldogs travelled  9 minutes outside of the three-hour drive and are playing an SEC rival, the No. 24 ranked South Carolina Gamecocks.  Georgia's leading 20-10 at the half, and if anything Georgia is a second-half team, so we're expecting good things. Tomorrow, we'll see how the rest of our fantasy 3-Hour Drive Conference did.

Dreaming of the Masters

No, we were not listening to the Japanese band Soil & "PIMP" Sessions back in the 70s - Soil & "PIMP" Sessions did not even form until 2001.  In fact, we did not even discover these guys until . . . last Wednesday, when we heard someone streaming their music at the Warhorse Coffee Shop in Atlanta's venerable Goat Farm Arts Center.

But they're worth posting here because they're obviously dreaming of many of the same Masters we've been dreaming of, and also to show that jazz music is apparently live and well and living in Japan.

From the Sports Desk

While the rest of our office was off today at the ball game watching the Atlanta Braves blow a 6-run lead against the Red Sox (wee weren't invited to the game because we are Boston fans), we were busy at work.

Today, we drove from home to Fort McPherson, from Fort McPherson to the Goat Farm, from the Goat Farm to the laboratory, from the laboratory to the work office, from the work office back to the laboratory again, from the laboratory to the home office, from the home office back to the Goat Farm again, and from the Goat Farm back home for the third and final time.  

While we were running all around the Greater Atlanta Region, the Red Sox were running all around the bases, scoring six runs in the 8th inning to tie up the game, and another two runs in the 9th to win. 

Teach our officemates not to invite us along to a game again!