I have finally watched all of Game of Thrones and eagerly await the next season. I’m not usually big on fantasy series, but GOT is pretty damned amazing. The plot twists, the casting, the action, and yes…the gratuitous sex. All with the standard level of HBO edge. I can’t wait to see what HBO does with Stephen King’s Dark Tower (if that project ever sees the light of day in my lifetime.) –Uncle Eb/John

Sorry for the long blackout, but it looks like I will be able to get back to regular posting soon. –John/Uncle Eb

In 1996 I was in Rainbow Records in Blue Bell, PA looking around for some new music and I suddenly decided I wanted to check out jazz. I had been playing drums in rock bands for almost ten years and pretty much had the rock thing down pretty well. I had never listened to or studied jazz, but I knew alot of drummers who swore that the jazz cats were where it’s at. I really had no idea where to begin. I knew Rich and Krupa but wasn’t really thinking that old big band would be my thing. I wanted to see something a little more rockin’. The first name that I could remember was Billy Cobham. I had seen his name in lots of drum magazines and knew that he had his own line of sticks. And I vaguely recalled that he was known for being one of the more bombastic drummers in the jazz world. So I strolled through the miniscule “jazz” aisle which had only a couple dozen tape cassettes, and found an album called Spectrum.

I had no idea how lucky I was. Not only is Spectrum widely considered Cobham’s greatest album, but it is probably the gold standard of jazz fusion. Unlike Bitches Brew, Weather Report, Return to Forever, Headhunters and Lifetime, Spectrum’s songs are surprisingly accessible to non-jazz listeners. Legend has it that when the album came out in 1972, it was so well-received and innovative that people held listening parties to imbibe in their favorite recreational substance, kick back and lost them selves in the deep grooves.

Cobham has that rare ability to go from machine gun fills to a deep-pocket groove and back in the blink of an eye.

He takes a no-holds-barred, athletic approach to the drumkit. His dexterity at moving around the kit and using complex cross-sticking patterns is one of his specialties.

But does it with tremendous touch, groove and creativity.

What I particularly love about Cobham’s playing is his amazingly tight snare-work. Alot of jazz drummers play fast patterns on the snare that end up sounding like a wash or buzz. With Cobham’s rolls you can hear every little hit.

He is also pretty widely known to be a real class-act of a man. Here’s a great interview with Billy telling a story about a legendary session:

And here is the cut that he’s talking about. Talk about a heavy groove:

Enjoy– Uncle Eb/John

To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)

The independents, too ignorant or inexperienced to recognize these basic facts, are the people most susceptible to lying flattery. They are called the good folk too inner-directed to follow a party line or run with the herd. They are like the idealistic imperialists “with clean hands” in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—they should wear leper bells to warn people of their vicinity.

The etherialists who are too good to stoop toward the “lesser evil” of politics—as if there were ever anything better than the lesser evil there—naively assume that if they just bring down the current system, or one part of it that has disappointed them, they can build a new and better thing of beauty out of the ruins. Of course they never get the tabula rasa on which to draw their ideal schemes. What they normally do is damage the party closest to their professed ideals. Third parties are run by people who make the best the enemy of their own good and bring down that good. Theodore Roosevelt’s’ Bull Moose variant of his own Republican Party drained enough Republican votes to let the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, win. (His voters, believing he would not “send our boys to war,” saw the prince become a frog in World War I.) George H. W. Bush rightly believes he was sabotaged by the crypto-Republican Ross Perot, who helped Bill Clinton win. Ralph Nader siphoned crucial votes from Al Gore to give us George W. Bush.

All these brave “independents” say that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, and claim they can start history over, with candidates suddenly become as good as they are themselves. What they do is give us the worst of evils. If Professor Unger gets his way, and destroys President Obama, he will give us a Romney deeply in political debt to the party he slimily wooed all through the primaries. He will be in a position to turn the Supreme Court from a mainly reactionary body to an almost entirely reactionary one.

Those who think there is no difference between the parties should look at the state that no longer elects any Democrats, the Texas described so well by Gail Collins, with its schools attacking evolution, its religious leaders denying there was ever any separation of church and state, and its cowboy code of justice. If people like Professor Unger, people too highly principled for us folks who muck around in the real world, get their way, they will not give us a prince turned into a frog, but America turned into Texas.

Indeed, these attacks on women’s rights, unions, equality for homosexuals, public workers, assistance programs for the poor etc., none of this stuff is new. Talk to a Democrat above the age of 50 and they will tell you that the crazyness we are currently seeing with bills to mandate transvaginal probes, defund NPR, raid pensions of public workers etc., are just the most recent (and most successful) attempts to achieve goals that Republicans have been pushing for 50 years. Attempts to further stack the Courts with activist judges, have been a long-term goal of the GOP for decades.

Think about it. We are likely about to have the Supreme Court toss out the biggest, most progressive legislation (Healthcare reform) passed in a century, on a flimsy judicial theory that nobody took seriously even as recently as 2009. This is a direct result of the Court being staffed with the kind of right-wing idealogues who think that corporations are people. Is there any doubt that we would not be facing this prospect if Gore had been president and Roberts, Alito and Thomas had never reached the bench? –Uncle Eb/John

Kelly and I went to Day 1 of the Playboy Jazz Festival last weekend. It was a very fun time, but I have to say a little light on the “jazz.” The LAUSD band and Christian McBride Big Band were both fairly straight-jazz, but otherwise the rest of the bill was more funk (Soul Brothers), Salsa (Global Gumbo Allstars) and blech (Boney James.)

Sheila E put on a fiery show with scantily-clad Carnival dancers and screaming lead guitars. I felt like I was in a Miami Vice episode.

All in all, it was kindof a strange scene. We were up in the very back row where the party was in high gear. The crowd was getting pretty wasted and for the most part oblivious of the music until Sheila showed them a glimpse of the Glamorous Life.

Unfortunately the lineup was undoubtedly representative of the type of music that you hear on it’s sponsor’s station “The Wave.” Boney James (who for those of you who don’t know him is effectively Kenny G with a different hat) was the headliner.

The main highlight of the day was Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings. They rocked the house and had even me dancing.

Sharon Jones, on the other hand, is no stranger to getting a crowd going. As the shade overtook the venue, she and her ten-piece Dap Kings played a set of burning soul that by the end had the crowd dancing in the aisles. Ian Hendrickson-Smith bellowed his baritone saxophone amid the horn lines, drawing a heavy funk in the process. A version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” brought the white handkerchiefs back out, continuing the second line feel of the Soul Rebels.

I still vastly prefer seeing her at someplace like the Wiltern, but she was well worth the price of admission. As for Ozomatli, I was surprised how many people were filing out during their set. I’ve always thought they were a bit overrated…now they are old too. –Uncle Eb/John

It is with great sadness that I have to share the news with you that it looks like your favorite Glampocalyptixplosion-core band, Super Duper, is officially calling it quits. A perfect storm of nightmarish scheduling, work, and other pesky life commitments have led to the realization that we can no longer produce a show to the high the standards that we once set for ourselves, and we agree that rather than serve up something less-than-amazing that we would rather pull the plug on this noble endeavor. We will be playing a final performance at Burbstock, where the band was officially hatched 5 years ago. We hope you will all be there to join us for one last dance. At the very least it will give us the chance to thank you for all your support over the years.

While the parting is indeed sweet sorrow, it is also just an example of life moving on. We are all still friends. Many of us will continue in other projects, perhaps even together. And we will all look back fondly on what has been one hell of a ride. Cheers –Uncle Eb/John

One of the hardest things in life is finding out that so many things you believe in, are not true. The Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Pro Wrestling, God…

But this one hits especially close to home. One of my guilty pleasures for the past year or so has been watching the show House Hunters International with Kelly. It’s a great way to see awesome architecture in remote and exotic parts of the world. But I can’t say that this story was much of a surprise:

Earlier this week on the website Hooked on Houses, former House Hunters participant Bobi Jensen called the show a sham. Jensen writes that the HGTV producers found her family’s plan to turn their current home into a rental property “boring and overdone,” and therefore crafted a narrative about their desperation for more square footage. What’s more, producers only agreed to feature Jensen’s family after they had bought their new house, forcing them to “tour” friends’ houses that weren’t even for sale to accommodate the trope of “Which one will they choose?”

Obviously HGTV wants ratings and wants to create suspense. We have noticed several common ploys that they use in the formula for the show. Most notably, you watch a couple look at 3 houses and constantly point to one aspect (example: an “open floor plan”, which at this point seems to be the stock answer for every couple in the world) as their paramount concern. then at the end of the show they pick a house because it had a great yard, or some other attribute that went curiously unmentioned for the first 28 minutes of the show. Anyways, why does it matter?:

By now, the onus is on the viewer to consume all “reality television” with a chuckle and a grain of salt. The genre’s underlying appeal is often rooted in its escapist, aspirational qualities (or, at other end of the spectrum, its indulgence of our basest schadenfreude). But House Hunters was always much more about showing us an attainable reality than a fantasy. The show (and its many iterations), in which people just like us (juggling budgets, worried about school districts, pulled between city and suburb), go shopping for the best home their money can buy, not only glorifies the dream of home ownership, but makes it seem achievable. (If that IT guy and his elementary school teacher wife can successfully get out of their dingy apartment and into a new home with the requisite granite countertops, “marriage-saving” double vanities, and bedroom-sized walk-in closets, so can I!) This plays right into our inexplicably unwavering attachment to home ownership: Despite the collapse of the housing market, polling continues to demonstrate that we regard owning a home as the cornerstone of the American Dream—a perception that undoubtedly played a role in the home-buying craze prior to the bubble’s burst.

I don’t know that I would put so much emphasis on HGTV, but I will say that the American obsession with home “ownership” as being the quintessential element of the American Dream, is evidence of a huge marketing campaign that the government has sold us on for decades, with a fair amount of support from the construction, real-estate and banking industries. And it certainly played a large role in the economic mess we find ourselves in today. –Uncle Eb/John

played a gig with these guys Tues night and they were great. They were playing just as a duo but they did a really amazing job of making it sound like a full band. They are a husband/wife team and had great chemistry on stage in a way that was adorable without being sappy. They were also really nice.

Their songs have really lovely melodies and their voices harmonize really well together. This one was probably my favorite.

Plus how could I not like a group that writes about French Girls:

They could be pretty “folky”

And they had pretty great groove too.

It was a great reminder of why I really need to make more of an effort to get out and check out live music more often. So much good undiscovered stuff out there. Cheers– Uncle Eb/John

You may have heard about this story. Republicans in Michigan want to make a law that effects what goes on in women’s vaginas, but doesn’t like when Lisa Brown uses the word in her opposition. So they ban her from speaking. Speaks volumes about the way Republicans view women. I suppose she should have used the word “pussy” instead. –Uncle Eb/John

In other words, Regnerus’ “Lesbian Mother” and “Gay Father” categories (unlike the “Intact Biological Family” Category) included children of adoptive parents, step-parents, single parents, and, notably, a large number from divorced parents. Regnerus then observes in the resulting data that the children of his “Lesbian Mothers” and “Gay Fathers” look less like children of married biological parents than they do like children of adoptive parents, step-parents, single parents, and divorced parents. Well, duh.

As Jim Burroway explains in his excellent analysis of the study, “If one wanted to intentionally create Lesbian Mothers and Gay Fathers groups which were least likely to look like an intact biological family, I can’t imagine a better way to do so than to take the steps Regnerus has taken here.”

This seems to be a pretty obvious ploy to skew the results of the study against gay parenting. I do wonder, however, in 20 years, if all the twenty-something college girls who once groped each other and made out in the cantinas of Cabo on their Spring Break, will be classified as lesbian moms. –Uncle Eb/John

The first was a discussion about the Stuxnet cyber-attack. They had a guy on who runs an anti-virus software company. Towards the end of the discussion he complained that the government is not doing enough to protect businesses from foreign attacks (most notably from China) stealing American trade secrets.

The second was on Freakonomics, I think, and was the story about gambling addiction. The main subject of the story was a woman who racked up $125,000 in losses to a casino and was tempted by the casino to come back and try to “win some back” despite it being obvious that she had an addiction. The interesting part was that they interviewed a neurologist and behavioral psychologist who both had done studies on gambling addiction. What they found was that “near-wins” (say, a slot machine giving you two cherries but not the third, or a blackjack hand that almost wins, but ultimately loses) are registered differently in healthy brains than they are in the brains of pathological gamblers. In the healthy brain, the near-wins are seen by the brain in the same category as losses, whereas in the gambling addict brain, they are registered and feel like wins. This would do a great deal to explain why it is so much harder for an addict to walk away from a casino table, even after a string of losses. At the end of the piece the neurologist and psychologist were both asked if Caesar’s Palace was responsible for the woman’s plight or she should have to pay off the debt (which got even bigger after she returned to the casino and lost more.) Both said that what the casino did was sleazy and immoral, but that the woman was ultimately to blame for her inability to overcome her desires.

In the first case, I don’t know the guy’s politics, but as a business-owner I can easily see him holding Libertarian views that the government should have no role in business when it comes to regulations, fair labor laws, oversight etc., but is totally fine with demanding that the government use it’s power to help protect his patent, copyright etc. This is a view that has been held by many entrepreneurs that I have known or worked for.

In the second you have the obvious case of a business (casino, tobacco company, alcohol, etc.) that knowingly prey upon the addictions ofmany people in the market. It reminds me of the case that Mark Kleiman has made about alcohol and how a small percentage of problem drinkers, make up something like 80% of alcohol sales. Despite the heavy toll on public health, crime, drunk driving etc., the common view among many Americans is that the seller’s right to take advantage of the weaknesses of the populace to maximize revenue, trumps any concern over the health and prosperity of the addict. The argument is usually “well they are adults and they make their decisions.” But in the case of addiction, it seems pretty obvious that the addict’s brains make it such that the game is already fairly rigged against rational decision-making over temptation.

Anyways, I suppose I’m not saying anything new here. Just pointing out that our (America’s) blind fetish for Capitalism is one of those things that I never thought much about, but once I did, I see evidence for it all over the place. Not sure if there’s much that can be done about it, politically. –Uncle Eb/John

I have never been much of a fan of Nickelback, but the level of vehement hatred that most people have for them has always baffled me. Sure they suck. But alot of the traits that make them suck can be found in acts that are very popular. Chuck Klosterman wrote about the 5 most hated bands in a pretty funny piece a couple years ago:

Over the past 20 years, there have been five bands totally acceptable to hate reflexively (and by “totally acceptable,” I mean that the casual hater wouldn’t even have to provide a justification — he or she could just openly hate them and no one would question why). The first of these five acts was Bush (who, bizarrely and predictably, was opening for Nickelback that very night). The second was Hootie and the Blowfish, perhaps the only group ever marginalized by an episode of Friends. The third was Limp Bizkit, who kind of got off on it. Obviously, the last two were Creed and Nickelback. The collective animosity toward these five artists far outweighs their multiplatinum success; if you anthologized the three best songs from each of these respective groups, you’d have an outstanding 15-track album that people would bury in their backyards.

Anyways, I don’t want to defend Nickelback beyond saying that in my opinion they don’t suck that much more than other shitty bands. And frankly , there are some bands that are hugely successful (and ones who get tons of airplay on KCRW) that I think are equally shitty. That said, that image at the top is pretty fuckin’ funny. –Uncle Eb/John

h/t PZ Myers

While watching FOX News Sunday this morning, and seeing Brit Hume finally call William Kristol out as the pinko Americaphobic Saddam-smoocher he is for daring to suggest that the complete absence of WMD in Iraq means that the doctrine of Bushian Infallibility may need to be called in to question, I was struck with new-found respect for the man’s journalistic courage and integrity. And I thought to myself, have I been unfair to Mr. Hume in my writing? Specifically, have I moved beyond the factual truth in my descriptions of Brit’s large, oddly-shaped, sickly-complexioned head (which I recently compared in conversation to a demented planetoid papered with chicken skin, a comparison I now regret.) As many in the liberal media are now offering up public apologies for distorting the truth in service of their dastardly political aims, I thought that I should follow suit and review my coverage of Brit Hume’s big bean, and make sure that I have been, at all times, Fair and Balanced.

1) January, 2003: In a post which I subsequently removed, I refer to Mr. Hume’s head as “a bloated, malformed astronomical anomaly, which draws viewers into its powerful gravitational field of pure evil.” This is absolutely false. There is no credible scientific data that Brit Hume’s head generates a gravitational field that is significant in astronomical terms, as this has been verified to great precision by looking for tell-tale differences in the Earth’s motion around the Sun when Mr. Hume is in the New York and Washington studios. I was perfectly aware of this at the time I wrote it, and, although I did take the post down, I was never disciplined for making this outrageous charge. It is probably this initial laxness which led to all subsequent abuses.

Read the whole thing. It’s Friday. Have a laugh. Cheers– Uncle Eb/John

h/t John Cole

Local LA band Super Duper just wants to play some funky rock and roll tunes and have a good time, man. This song sounds like the kind of house party everyone wants to go to, but no one can ever find. Plus I’m a sucker for trumpet. The lead singer’s voice ain’t too shabby either!

Dreams Of A “Big Sky” Country!!!

Here’s a great op-ed by the Democratic Governor of Montana on the need for a Constitutional Amendment that would overturn Citizens United.  It contains some fun history too:

Montana’s approach to campaign law began when a miner named William A. Clark came upon a massive copper vein near Butte. It was the largest deposit on earth, and overnight he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. He bought up half the state of Montana, and if he needed favors from politicians, he bought those as well.

In 1899 he decided he wanted to become a United States senator. The State Legislature appointed United States senators in those days, so Clark simply gave each corruptible state legislator $10,000 in cash, the equivalent of $250,000 today.

Clark “won” the “election,” but when the Senate learned about the bribes, it kicked him out. “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale,” Clark complained as he headed back to Montana.

It’s interesting that the State’s Rights!!1! Republicans aren’t screaming bloody murder about how Citizen’s United has taken away the ability of states like Montana to pass laws to clean up their elections.  It’s almost like the more accurate Republican motto should be “State’s Rights (that we happen to agree with!!!)”  —Uncle Eb/John

Cool Time-Lapse Video!!!

Nuff said. Uncle/Eb/John

h/t Ocean

Hmmm, What Are They Selling Again???

Sex sells.  Not just in Mad Men.  We were recently looking into a possible purchase of an air conditioner and we found a place in Van Nuys that is surprisingly overt in their undertones.  The website even has an invitation to “Beat Me!”  Only in the Valley. —Uncle Eb/John  

I Smell Old People!!!

In an effort to explore the commonly held view that “old people” smell, researchers found that yes, they do, but not as bad as middle-aged men:

On average, the elderly actually smell better than all of the rest of us. Middle-aged men come in dead last in the smell test, with the worst ratings on both “pleasantness” and “intensity” of smell.

So glad I’m not yet 45. —Uncle Eb/John