SFBG Blogs

January 13 is Kay Gulbengay Day

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Who is Kay Gulbengay, you ask?
The most knowledgeable person, legislatively speaking, at City Hall, judging from the accolades she received at the Jan. 9 Board of Supervisors meeting, which was dedicated to Gulbengay in honor of the 35 years that the soon to retire deputy Clerk of the Board has served at City Hall, with Board Chair Aaron Peskin also declaring January 13 as Kay Gulbengay Day.
Gulbengay is also, “a wonderful karaoke singer,” according to Sup. Tom Ammiano.
“An awesome power-walker,” according to Sup. Bevan Dufty, who admitted to having crawled back to the relative safety and comfort of the gym after accompanying Gulbengay on one of her many high-speed forays up and down Market Street.
“You didn’t get to know what it’s like to get in her crosshairs and your stuff goes to the bottom of the pile, that’s the story that won’t get told,” Board Chair Aaron Peskin told Sup. Ed Jew, who, as the newest member of Board hasn’t yet had the opportunity to get his legislative knickers in a twist.

Turns out Gulbengay is also a very funny speaker, as witnessed by the crowd of wellwishers that filled the supervisorial chambers to pay their respects.
“I’m touched, but I’m not speechless,” began Gulbengay, adding, “It sounds like I’m dying,” as she began to recall her years at City Hall in the past tense.
“At times you made me feel like a Mother Superior,” said Gulbengay, who is threatening to launch a TV series called Desperate Retirees, along with Clerk of the Board Gloria Young, who is also set to leave City Hall very soon.
“I’ve seen the make-up of the Board got from 11 men, to 10 men and I woman to 9 men and 2 women, to 8 men and three women (which I consider perfect.”
Thank you—and I will be watching.”

January 13 is Kay Gulbengay Day

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January 13 is Kay Gulbengay Day
Who is Kay Gulbengay, you ask?
The most knowledgeable person, legislatively speaking, at City Hall, judging from the accolades she received at the Jan. 9 Board of Supervisors meeting, which was dedicated to Gulbengay in honor of the 35 years that the soon to retire deputy Clerk of the Board has served at City Hall, with Board Chair Aaron Peskin also declaring January 13 as Kay Gulbengay Day.
Gulbengay is also, “a wonderful karaoke singer,” according to Sup. Tom Ammiano.
“An awesome power-walker,” according to Sup. Bevan Dufty, who admitted to having crawled back to the relative safety and comfort of the gym after accompanying Gulbengay on one of her many high-speed forays up and down Market Street.
“You didn’t get to know what it’s like to get in her crosshairs and your stuff goes to the bottom of the pile, that’s the story that won’t get told,” Board Chair Aaron Peskin told Sup. Ed Jew, who, as the newest member of Board hasn’t yet had the opportunity to get his legislative knickers in a twist.

Turns out Gulbengay is also a very funny speaker, as witnessed by the crowd of wellwishers that filled the supervisorial chambers to pay their respects.
“I’m touched, but I’m not speechless,” began Gulbengay, adding, “It sounds like I’m dying,” as she began to recall her years at City Hall in the past tense.
“At times you made me feel like a Mother Superior,” said Gulbengay, who is threatening to launch a TV series called Desperate Retirees, along with Clerk of the Board Gloria Young, who is also set to leave City Hall very soon.
“I’ve seen the make-up of the Board got from 11 men, to 10 men and I woman to 9 men and 2 women, to 8 men and three women (which I consider perfect.”
Thank you—and I will be watching.”

Things you can do with your iPhone

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1) iTootle
2) Screen out stalkers 15 different ways!
3) Blow off iBill collectors 15 different ways!
4) Get telemarketed on several platforms simultaneously
5) Chat with your avatar. (“Hey Marke3! What’s up?” “Oh, you know, just being you. But, like, in a giant vat of digital pudding with three stripper wrestler guys.”)
6) Order more custom-made utilikilts and flashing LCD belt buckles online (“I heart Apple!” “Jobs Rules!” “Desperate!”)
7) Bask in your lousy superiortechnolity, while the world goes to hell. But it’s OK, you can order the iVid for later and watch it on your hi-def AppleTV box.
8) Get sued by Cisco for telling people you have an iPhone

I still want one, though.

Foam of the Chosen

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Almost-fabulous intern and alcohol enthusiast Jonathan Beckhardt weighs in on He’Brew….

Despite 5000 years of survival guilt from Noah to Wiesel, Jews have shockingly little presence in the alcohol business. One notable exception: San Francisco’s Schmaltz brewing company, makers of the He’brew line of beers.

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A few weeks ago, The Guardian published a guide to Christmas beers and, to our embarrassment, we overlooked the Chanukah beer from this outfit, “Monumental Jewbelation”. We wish fervently to render reparation here.

In honor of the company’s 10th anniversary, the beer tops out at 10% alcohol. That’s monstrous, but balanced enough to remain steady. A syrupy texture captures the right amount of bitterness to match the malty flavors in the drink. It’s the roasted flavors in this beer, though, that make it the perfect match for your next Christmas ham.

Scooby Doo boo hoo

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I used to have a recurring nightmare as a child that I was trapped in the opening credits of Scooby Doo. It was kind of an erotic nightmare: the rainbow-cartoon swamps, the undulating haunted mansions, the moaning ghosts with their morphenomenal yaws. The dream would go on for hours and I’d wake in the rough heat of my hermetic, carpeted bedroom, the gray footsie-bottoms of my PJs scraping against the cotton sheets. Now, alas, Scooby Doo is dead.

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Or at least his creator is. Animation legend Iwao Takamoto died last week at age 82. This incredibly thoughtful “recycled” piece in Slate by Chris Suellentrop lays out all the influence that Scooby’s had on the world of animation and pop culture. It’s an odd, sad moment. I’ll have to light one up for Shaggy. And pick up a dyke for Velma. But will Scooby haunt my dreams again?

NOISE: Chavez lives, live

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Guardian contributor Michael Harkin caught Chavez’s reunion performance at Slim’s on Dec. 30. Here’s his review:

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Chavez’s return to playing live shows certainly isn’t a comeback of the “we were once stars, and are now in need of money” variety. The ear-ringing muscularity of their take on ‘90s indie rock could conceivably have found a place in the popular consciousness in 1995-1996, but somehow it didn’t work out that way. Very few below-the-radar rock bands sound like Chavez anymore: when the word “indie” gets dropped, people tend to think of the Shins before they think of a band like, say, Shellac. Whatever the status of their popularity, the melodic, often hummable force of Chavez is brutal in the most wonderful way, and San Francisco was lucky enough to experience the flattening steamroll of that force once again.

At Slim’s on Dec. 30, vocalist and guitarist Matt Sweeney, like most of the band, maintained a pretty quiet onstage disposition: why talk when you can play to a big crowd? Going so far as to shush well-meaning guitarist Clay Tarver when he started chatting up San Antonio with the audience, he made clear this was clearly a professional affair. Sweeney — who released Superwolf (Drag City) in 2005 with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and a onetime member of Billy Corgan’s short-lived Zwan — is the band’s most famous face. Chavez’s other members are a bit less known, although not entirely: drummer James Lo played in Live Skull, and everybody’s heard of bass player Scott Marshall’s dad — yep, Garry Marshall, creator of Happy Days.

Kennedy: “Is there any American in this country who thinks the United States Senate would vote to support sending American troops into a civil war in Iraq today?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

This is a quote that makes the critical political point:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), in an interview published in the New York
Times on Tuesday, continued, “Is there any American that believes this? I don’t think so, but that is what’s happening, and we have to do everything we can to to insist on accountability.”

Kennedy said he will introduce legislation on Tuesday to require the president to get new Congressional authority before sending more troops to Iraq, according to a story by Jeff Zeleny. Kennedy is proposing the first bill in the Senate that would prohibit paying for an increase in American troops over their level on Jan. l. The Kennedy plan is intended to provide Democrats with a road map on how to proceed in Iraq.

Kennedy said that Congress interceded during conflicts in Vietnam and Lebanon, and Democrats should not hesitate to do so in Iraq.

“By law,” the article said, “Congress can limit the nature of troop deployment, cap the size of military deployments and cut financing for existing or prospective deployments.” To those who claim Congress ought not to cut off funds or intercede, the article pointed out that “since l970, there have been dozens of occasions in which Congress has tried to step into military action, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo,” and it pointed its source as a memorandum being circulated Tuesday to Congress by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

The memorandum, linked below, cites specific examples of congressional intervention from the l970 Church-Cooper amendment that prohibited the use of any funds for the introduction of U.S. troops into Cambodia to the June l998 Congressional prohibition of funding for Bosnia after June 30, l998. It also included additional examples where congressional efforts to influence policy were not enacted into law, from a l994 move by then Senator Jesse Helms to prohibit funding for any U.S. military operations on Haiti to the prescient 2002 move by Rep. Spratt to require the president to seek congressional authority before using military force against Iraq without a UN resolution.

As the memo sums up, the “defeated provisions reflect attempts by Congress to shape the president’s policy on military deployments. Taken alongside the several examples listed above that were enacted into law, they demonstrate that the president should expect that Congress can and will shape U.S.
policy as it relates to military deployments.”

So: there is plenty of precedent and no excuse for Congress not to fight back fast and effectively to the president’s upcoming surge speech. Nancy? Nancy Pelosi to her credit is speaking up and rightlyi calling the surge “escalation” and proposing that Democrats consider blocking funds for any increase in troops. Keep it up. Support the Kennedy proposal or anything stronger. Keep the pressure on Nancy and the Congress. If these moves don’t work, as they probably won’t, then the question is: impeachment or continuing to waste the blood and treasure of the U.S. in a civil war without end. Alas, there is no other choice. B3

Center for American Progress: Congressional Limitations and Requirements for Military Deployments and Funding

Your tax dollars at work

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By Tim Redmond

Robert Byrd is 89 years old, and still truckin’ along. He lnterrupted the Senate’s opening prayer this week, shouting “Yes Lord” and “yes in Jesus’s name.” Ted Kennedy pantomimed tuppling from a bottle during the high points of the Byrd show.

The Star Trek mayor

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By Tim Redmond

Has anyone else noticed how much Gavin Newsom is starting to look like Lt. Commander Data?

Out on the Bloc

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OK, OK I know we’re beyond the gawker-closet phase (“OMG he’s gay???). I ain’t no Valley Girl. But — MEOW. One of my favorite singers ever just stepped gingerly over the shoe-tree threshhold. Kele Okereke from Bloc Party.

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According to this article on Towleroad, which recounts some juicy details of an interview in the Guardian UK (how’s that for twisted blogoreference?), Kele felt he had to start talkiing more about his sexuality because the content of some of the songs on the new Bloc Party album A Weekend in the City practically begged for it. (One song explicitly references the beating death of gay bartender David Morley, who was killed so people could record the death on their cell phones. Neat!)

“Okereke’s cautious coming out is colored by [what he sees as] ‘definite homophobic bias-slash-persecution” he sees from the music press regarding out gay people,'” according to Towleroad. And of course this is great publicity for the new album. But of course I would have bought it anyway. Now I have to go write some unabashed mash notes to the fan site ….

PS: On the new BP song “The Prayer” does Kele sing “I will dazzle them with my weave” in the chorus?

Fortwo foryou

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Yes, I’m from Detroit, where the frickin’ autoshow was shoved down my throat constantly. (It’s so huge now, they’re threatening to tear down the host site, Cobo Arena, and build a bigger showplace — uh, I thought the car companies were as broke as Dennis Rodman’s penis up Madonna…) And yes, innumerable Detroiters laughingly forwarded me that piece from the New York Times last week about San Francisco parking rage. (We’re killing each other for spaces!). But look! All the rage at this year’s autoshow is the debut — well, in 2008 — of the eminently parkable two-seater we’ve been tempted by for years and years — the SmartCar.

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The model us Merikkkans get is called the Fortwo, which already killed ’em in Canadaland. Forget the clouds of Hybrid smug, Cartman, soon these will be insufferably and necessarily omnipresent among the do-good celeb classes. Of course, DaimlerChrysler, the US distributor, hopes folks, buy it as a second car for city driving — no need to compact that Benz just yet. Still, for this car not to inspire a riot among hemi-bling Detroiters means the ecology’s come a long way …. now about the trans fat from all them biscuits ….

Gonzalez on the fence?

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By Tim Redmond

I think Luke Thomas at FCJ is the first one to officially claim to have unofficially announced that Matt Gonzalez is really running for mayor. But everyone in town is talking about it, and the typical discussion is around not whether but when he will join the race.

There are two conflicting schools of thought here. Some think Gonzalez would need to get in soon if he’s going to raise money and be taken seriously. Others (including, I suspect, Matt himself) would rather wait until the end of the summer and get in at the last minute.

Personally, I think the late-entry plan is a mistake. Four yeas ago, nobody expected Gonzalez to enter the race; he wasn’t even a factor in the discussions. I was on a tv show with him about three months before he wound up entering the race, and we both agreed that it was unlikely there would be any candidates beyond Gavin Newsom, Tom Ammiano and Angela Alioto. There really was a last-minute draft-Gonzalez movement when it became clear that Newsom was headed for an easy victory; part of his appeal was the novelty of it all.

Of course, he pissed a lot of people off, especially in the queer community, but jumping in and effectlively shooting down Ammiano’s campaign. But I don’t think it was a sneaky pre-meditated strategy. Gonzalez can be an impulsive guy; he just decided one day to go for it.

This time, anything he does late in the game will be seen as nothing more than a political strategy. It will look as if he’s intentionally holding back to see who else runs, to let the race play out a bit, and to give himself an advantage. That won’t fly so well in 2007.

There’s already too much talk; too many people have too much riding on this. We need a progressive candidate, and if it’s not Gonzalez, then perhaps someone else will enter (and Gonzalez will look like a spoiler at the end). If he’s going to run — and I hope he does — he should decide soon and get on with it.

I called Gonzalez today, and he insisted that he hasn’t made any announcement, prive or public, official or unofficial. “I’m not running for mayor,” he said. “I’ve made that point over and over again. I have said that I’ve thought about it, and I have. But I’m not getting in anyone’s way, and if another strong candidate wants to run, they should go ahead.”

I told him that I think he needs to make a final decision soon, and rule himself out if he isn’t going to run. “I agree with that,” he said.

Nerd party!

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Will there be tape on their mojito glasses? Will everyone be “doin’ the snarf”? It’s the annual Macworld Blast this Tuesday “night” (8-11pm, duh) — and I wasn’t invited!

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Promising “live entertainment” (The Klezmatics, mayhaps?), a chance to “mix and mingle with fellow Macworld attendees, speakers, and staff,” and a grand location (“The Moscone Center, in the South Hall at the bottom of the escalator”), Macworld Blast is something I’m dying to infiltrate — it’s sold out at $40 a ticket.

So I figure I’ll just hang out outside the Moscone and jump tipsy Macaddicts for their iPods (and maybe nifty new iPhones). That shit’ll Ebay my way to Cancun, baby! I loves me some Macworld Expo …

State of the union …

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Posted this morning outside my Dumpster: Plain as day. — Marke B.

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The case of the multiplying ironies for the Hearst, Singleton, McClatchy, Gannett, and Stephens chains

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

As attentive B3 blog readers will remember, I sent my previous blog raising the tantalizing questions about why Hearst et al were for sunlight in Santa Clara County Superior Court and for darkness in San Francisco federal court to Hearst corporate in New York City via Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega and Editor Phil Bronstein.

No reply as yet. However, a short Chronicle follow story was relegated from the front page of the Friday business section to the bottom left of the second page of the Saturday business section (see link below). Once again, the Chronicle reported without blushing that its attorneys argued that records in the backdating scandal involving the Mercury Interactive Corp. ought to be unsealed. Chronicle attorneys asked “to have the documents made public, arguing they would shed light on how the Mountain View company manipulated stock options,” according to the story.

Good point. So the ironies continue: how can the Chronicle argue to unseal Santa Clara County court records to shed light on financial manipulations and at the same time argue in San Francisco federal court to keep sealed the records of its financial manipulations with Singleton et al? Why don’t they explain the irony? After all, these financial records would shed some light on a story that is terribly important for the staffs of all Hearst/Singleton newspapers in Northern California, their communities, the free press, and the First Amendment. Back to Hearst corporate, Vega, and Bronstein. (Watch for a more complete report on manipulations and ironies by G.W.Schulz by G.W. Schulz in Wednesday’s Guardian and website.)

Note to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat/New York Times: you are now the only non-Hearst/Singleton daily in the Bay Area. Why don’t you start acting “competitive” and start covering the story your “competitors” are censoring. B3

SF Chronicle: Judge to hear Mercury arguments

Call the pedophile police

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I just spent an inordinate amount of important mirror time in thrall to 16-year Brit sensation Lil Chris. Somebody shoot me. Winner of some sort of British Idol-like contest progged by Gene Simmons from Kiss, he’s like Hanson singing Buzzcocks songs. Yes this is enormous sacrilege — but didn’t we know that pop music was spinning in this direction?

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His producers are doing everything they can to “sex him up” with all the double entendres and accidental shirt-lifts they can. But he’s really just this tiny teenager “rocking out” and clearly pleased to be alive — something distinctly missing in his female counterparts (let alone Justin … or even Aaron Carter, where’d he go? Popsicle rehab?) Either that or he’s constipated. The vid for “Getting Enough??” is reason alone for me to want to marry him in several, several years. Tiny tiny tiny!

NOISE: 21 Grams…? For a Rogue cause

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You love Gram Parsons, you know you do. Hot Burritos are your real-deal meal. Nudie suits are so cute. Dark ends of streets are where we meet.

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So you know you wanna c’mon down to the seventh annual “Sleepless Nights,” Gram Parsons tribute and benefit concert, Saturday, Jan. 13, at Great American Music Hall. Especially ’cause the show benefits the Pat Spurgeon Kidney Foundation, the organization started on behalf of the Rogue Wave drummer. This year’s hoedown in honor of the country-rock pioneer includes Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days, Red Meat, a Mover reunion, Real Sippin’ Whiskeys, Paula Frazer and Patrick Main, Elisa Randazzo (of Fairechild) and Ben Ashley (of the Shore), Sweetbriar and Eric Shea (solo). Former Parchman Farmer Shea is all over here because it’s his baby – he began the event seven years ago.

“Pat Spurgeon from Rogue Wave is an incredible drummer and an even more incredible human being. He was born with one kidney and it totally failed on him,” Shea states. “Pat was able to get a transplant in 1993, but that kidney is failing and he’s in urgent need of a new one.”

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Spurgeon has been on dialysis since April and is hoping desperately to find a donor, the organizers say. Provided he finds a donor, there will be an enormous amount of costs that both Pat and his donor will incur. In a logical world, medical insurance would cover his donor’s and his expenses after the procedure, but it does not; so he and his family must carry the financial burden. The expenses can be huge. To learn more about Pat’s plight, organizers bid you to go to www.RogueWaveMusic.com

“Sleepless Nights” happens at the Great American Music Hall , 859 O’Farrell, SF. The show starts at 9 p.m. Tickets are $10 advance/$12 door. (415) 885-0750.

NOISE: Imagine Mac World Weir-ed

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Not-dead Dead member alert! Macworld plug alert!

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The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, a nonprofit state-of-the-art mobile recording and multimedia studio, will pulling into the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco and stopping for a spell, from Monday, Jan. 8, through Thursday, Jan. 12. The mobile studio gives free workshops to students throughout the country, and Pulitzer Prize-winning shooter Vincent Laforet will take a group photograph of the first 250 attendees who come to the bus to commemorate its decade of edutainment.

Dead dad Bob Weir lead a student recording session Monday (reservations only) and will be at a book signing Tuesday, January 9th for Come Together: The Official John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Guide to Music and Video (Thomson). Free daily tours of the Bus and seminars featuring introductions to all of the latest gear are available daily at Macworld. It’s happening at Moscone Center, 747 Howard, SF.

Tantalizing question: How can the Chronicle/Hearst say one thing in superior court in Santa Clara County and the opposite in federal court in San Francisco?

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

In Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle, below the fold in the business section, there was a tantalizing head with a tantalizing lead that raised a tantalizing question: how can Hearst say one thing in Santa Clara Superior Court and another in federal court in San Francisco in a similar public records case?

The head: “Media seeking backdating info, Mercury Interactive documents provide details on practice.” The lead:
“A Santa Clara County Court judge will hear arguments today from media companies, including the Chronicle, seeking to unseal documents related to stock options backdating at Mercury Interactive Corp.”

The story: Chronicle reporter Carolyn Said wrote that the Chronicle and the Recorder and Bloomberg News went into court “requesting access to court filings related to widespread manipulation of stock options at Mountain View’s Mercury, which makes business software.” At the end of the story, Said reported that “the three media outlets are seeking to unseal documents Mercury provided in the shareholder lawsuit under a confidentiality order. They say the documents might reveal the inside story on how backdating occurred.”

Good for Hearst, the Recorder, and Bloomberg News and Karl Olson, the Hearst media attorney who made a strong case to open the records. He even told the judge that as he was driving from San Francisco to Santa Clara for the hearing he realized what a beautiful sunny day it was. “Sunshine is the best bet,” he said. We hope they win. The judge said he would consider arguments in hte case.

Meanwhile, in federal court in San Francisco, Hearst is taking the opposite side of the issue in a similar records sealing case. Significantly, this case involves Hearst itself and Singleton (and their chain newspaper allies McClatchy, Gannett, Stephens) in the Reilly vs. Hearst antitrust case. The chain gang is stonewalling so hard and so high that the Guardian and the Media Alliance were forced to go into federal court to try to unseal the records and shed sunlight on this major national story: the deal that would destroy newspaper competition in the Bay Area and impose regional monopoly. The First Amendment Project in Oakland is handling the suit.

Ironically, Reilly and the Guardian are using the same argument Hearst used in Santa Clara to unseal the Hearst records in San Francisco: that they will “reveal the inside story” of how Hearst and Singleton secretly cooked up the monopolizing deal. As our Dec. 27 editorial put it, “The way the big chains have set things up, there’s no way for the public to find out much of anything–except what Hearst and MediaNews want us to know. Under the terms of a court order the chains wrote and got approved anything–evidence, briefs, depositions, even legal motions–the newspaper barons want to mark secret is automatically sealed…In other words, the newspapers–which, after all, are accused of trying to violate antitrust laws and create a media monopoly in the region–have complete control of what information does and doesn’t come out of the trial. That’s exactly how they want it–and that’s exactly how things will go if they get their way.”

And so the questions still tantalize: how can Hearst be for sunshine in Santa Clara Superior Court and for darkness in San Francisco federal court? How can Hearst report these stories with obvious contradictory positions without comment and without blushing? Don’t the contradictory positions hurt not just the Hearst case in Santa Clara but the journalistic and public interest arguments in all open records court cases? I am posing these questions by email to Hearst corporate in New York via Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega and Editor Phil Bronstein.” Check our Wednesday Guardian paper and website for a bigger story on the backdating scandal and Hearst ironies by reporter G.W. Schutz. He covered the hearing for the Guardian. B3

SF Chronicle: Media seeking backdating info – Mercury Interactive documents could provide details on practice

Cops behaving badly

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By Tim Redmond

Three interesting items today that reflect on the state of the SFPD:

David Hill is convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of Officer Isaac Espinoza. That means he’ll get life without parole — but not the death penalty. From the start of this case, D.A. Kamala Harris refused to push for death, in part because she doesn’t support the death penalty but also because she insisted that it was very unlikely a jury would return a verdict of first-degree murder here. The cops went batshit on her. Guess what? She was right.

The feds put a 60-year-old woman in prison for cutlivating medical marijuana — with the help, Fog City Journal charges, of of a San Francisco cop. Yet another example of the SF cops working with the feds to contravene local law.

The Chron finally reports on the resignation of OCC director Kevin Allen but missed the larger point: The Police Officers Association apparently cheered Allen’s resignation, which was based in part on health issues. When will the chief tell her troops to stop acting like thugs?

NOISE: Sonic Oldster sing-along

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Yeah, everyone’s tired of those Sonic Youth AARP jokes – but this clip takes the cake for the sheer enjoyment – behold Young@Heart singing SY’s “Schizophrenia.”

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NOISE: 10 to the 75

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75 Degrees‘ Rick Bond was late with his holiday year-end Top 10 in terms of the print edition of the Guardian, but it’s never too late for our always-interested, always-ravenous-for-news blogestablishmentarianistic virtual side. Fill our Top 10 void, Rick. Here ’tis, at last:

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75 Degrees of inseparableness. Courtesy of www.rasputinmusic.com

1. 75 DEGREES, “X-MAS CLASSIC (GHOSTRIDE THE SLEIGH)”
NOBODY MAKES A BETTER HIP-HOP BAY AREA HOLIDAY JOINT THEN THE SEVEN FIZZLE!…actually, nobody else ever has.
2. San Quinn, The Rock
3. Mista FAB, “Ghostride It”
So good it hurts.
4. Oakland A’s getting out of the first round of the playoffs!!!
5. Stacy Dash in Playboy
6. Nacho Libre
7. Little Star Pizza
Deep dish classic with pepperoni instead of onions.
8. Glen Goins introducing the Mothership/P-Funk on tour in 1976, YouTube
He sings and plays guitar better than most people who do only one of those things today and he’s just the intro guy.
9. Sly Stone on Merv Griffin singing “If You Want Me To Stay,” YouTube.
10. Aretha Franklin singing “Bridge Over Trouble Water” AND playing piano, YouTube.

Honorable mentions: Flipsyde (shows and album = DOPE), 75 Degrees’ The Last Great Hip-Hop Album being featured on iTunes! and the term: “Strangerous” as in, “Call me girl, why you gotta be so strangerous?”

P.S. 75 Degrees has got a new official Myspace page too: www.myspace.com/seventy5degrees

The Grand Canyon and Noah’s flood

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By Tim Redmond

This one is really amazing, even by the standards of our current theocracy: The National Park Service is selling a book in the Grand Canyon bookstore that argues that the canyon was created by Noah’s flood. And “The Grand Canyon Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush Administration appointees,” the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says.

For starters, after my long years in Catholic school, I think I can pretty safely argue that Noah’s flood didn’t take place in North America; most biblical scholars place it in the Middle East, and say he landed on Mt. Ararat.

But never mind that level of hokum; this suggests that the creationists have gotten so powerful that even basic geology is held hostage.

Rep. George Miller, soon to take over the committee that oversees the park service, might want to look into this.

Another (huge) test for Pelosi

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By Tim Redmond

The NY Times today has it about right on tax policy: The Democrats are ducking for cover while Bush continues to demand that his insane tax cuts be made permanent. Lyndon Johnson was forced to recognize in the 1960s that he couldn’t have both a Great Society and the Vietnam War at the same time without figuring out how to pay for it all, but back then, it wasn’t considered political suicide to raise taxes on the rich. (Let’s remember: Even under RIchard Nixon, the top tax rate for the very very rich reached 80 percent. Today it’s 34 percent.)

At some point, Nancy Pelosi, as the speaker, is going to have to make a choice: Start to cut spending on the war — by a lot — or talk about at the very least repealing the Bush tax cuts.

Of course, the third choice (and perhaps the most likely) is to continue to duck, continue to go into debt, continue to screw up the economy and continue to burden our kids with the results of our greed, fear and stupidity. Nancy?

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