Awe, Hell.

Today, on Facebook, I saw a super sweet status update.

"Why do people who don't believe in God celebrate Christmas? Just saying..."

Merry Christmas Everyone!!

Hubert Sumlin

Get you some! RIP Hubert Sumlin.

R.E.M. rocker

I was never a huge fan of R.E.M. (and am still not really) but this song always got my attention. So fucking awesome in so many ways.

Dolphin jetpack!

via Kottke

Spotify and Facebook. Please just stop.

"Let's go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It's also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There's no "sharing" at all. Frictionless sharing isn't better sharing; it's the absence of sharing. There's something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it's just a feed in some social application that's constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It's just another form of spam, particularly if I'm also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends." 

—Mike Loudkes, as seen here.

Falcon

Amazing. via Mike Holland

Sitting down is freaking me out

This topic is the scariest one out there for me right now. I hate thinking about this shit! *While much of the facts may be hard to measure, it's not an arguable point that we are all sitting down much longer than we did just 10 years ago. Ugh.
Via: Medical Billing And Coding

RA on Letterman webcast

If you are a Ryan Adams fan, you will LOVE this. If you are not then you probably won't, but this is the best performance of his I have seen in a long time (read: he plays really, really awesome older songs).

The Groove is King

Image is nothing.

Skiing, awesome?

Thanks to Templeton for sharing this clip.

Politics, in general, is for the rich...

"The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."       —More here.

I feel like people are bored with politics and no one wants to really talk about it.

INTERNETZ

Lytro

Initial reaction: I think this thing is stupid.

duh

Antlers

So, I have found out about ALOT of good music lately. It's always a good feeling.

A Trident!?

Nevermind that bullshit below, just watch this one!

Cass McCombs

This song is tight, the video is okay. I just started listening to this guy, after hearing about him in passing for awhile now. Pretty mellow stuff, but good.

What to think about the Occupy movement

I have not had a lot of time to fully comprehend the Occupy Movements, but it is obviously important and stands to drive the 2012 election. The other night I finally got around to reading a piece on it, and found it all fairly as I thought. Rather than rehash it, I will lead with a quote from the piece by Andrew Sullivan because he is pretty good at breaking things down:

"The theme that connects them all is disenfranchisement, the sense that the world is shifting deeply and inexorably beyond our ability to control it through our democratic institutions. You can call this many things, but a “democratic deficit” gets to the nub of it. Democracy means rule by the people—however rough-edged, however blunted by representative government, however imperfect. But everywhere, the people feel as if someone else is now ruling them—and see no way to regain control."

The message is pretty clear, basically, we're all fucked unless something changes at the root of our government. It's interesting to see how it has taken center stage, as an extension of the overall gloomy conversation on the economy, the recession, etc. How many more times do we have to hear "there are no jobs and the national unemployment rate is 9%?" Apparently these stories are not impactful enough, we just feel grateful for what we DO have. Well, the facts aren't changing anything, it's just more bad news on top of more bad news. Nothing shocks anyone anymore so the people had to take it to the streets. (Think about the 10 year old kids in America who have been "born and raised" in a time of war—a time of two wars; the impact on many of these kids can be so minimal as to not even feel it at all.)

I guess all I am saying is that the Occupy stuff is a good thing and hopefully it will shake us out of our national despondency. It's also feels like, perhaps for the first time ever, America is copying the Middle East by rising up, declaring change in the streets in the form of mass protest. It might be a long shot, but it certainly feels like it's worth a try.

Serious political discourse

For such a thing, look no further than Herman Cain everyone! This is 100% real and on HIS actual YouTube channel. This is the kind of fun and fluff running for the highest office in the land! Hooray for not taking the big issues so seriously and making a mockery of everything a democracy is! Hooray, hooray!

Haruki Murakami

I've never read him. I've always wanted to. Maybe I will someday. It's stuff like this that interests me in people/authors/artists:

“Full time,” for Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.”

“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.”

From NY Times article.

Bored To Death (HBO)

This show is sooo good. I just found out about it and have been watching Season 3 on HBO. It's a comedy. I don't have HBO, I don't even have cable; I don't make a lot of time for TV. Take all this into consideration if when making your decision based on my little bloggy here, of whether or not this show is for you. It reminds me of something awesome—good comedy! Zach Galifinakorassdfs and Jason Schwartzsermannn in the same show, oh and TED DANSON? Awesomeness written all over it.

Ep. 19: Clip - Ray on Breastfeeding

"Pabst Blue Ribbon: A lot to look forward to"

Political Statement

Uh, duh.

The day is coming. 

Context free bust

Wallridin' season is in!

Temp took some sick photos today (and did some sick skating - ollieing INTO this here launch ramp). Thanks for the photos buddy.

Lucky Now, on some Dutch radio show...

It's pretty amazing that Ryan Adams still has such epic, simple tunes inside him and can release this stuff every few years...new shit October 11; Listen to it on NPR here. Where are his peers? What are they doing? Do they even exist? Sad state of music today.

Edit: More awesomeness from the session above here.

The War On Drugs

It's no secret that when I get into something, I tend to go a little overboard. This band is no different. They are so tight, there is something so refreshingly awesome about their sound. They have a Springsteen vibe as well as a less trendy-Arcade Fire-ness to them. They are from Philadelphia and so good. Loving this whole album. Turn it up loud.

Where am I?

bitch

AS SEEN ON THE INTERNET