Quotable Quotes

"You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself." ~ Ethel Barrymore

"I'll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has got to say." ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." ~ Oscar Wilde

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you – then you win." ~ Mahatma Ghandi

New York City, 11:14 AM

The Sonics:

Retooled and Refueled

(l to r: Original Sonics Rob Lind, Larry Parypa and Jerry Roslie)

Throughout the first night of Cavestomp 2007, total strangers would approach us simply to express some variation of this sentiment: "I can't believe we're here to see The Sonics!"

There was a strong current of "pinch-me-I'm-dreaming" drifting through the ether. For the past 35 years, the band has resisted all overtures to reform... But tonight was the night.

And, holy shit, The Sonics delivered.

The band rehearsed anywhere from six to eight months (depending on what you read) for just these two shows, and the effort truly showed. We at Radio Zero hate hyperbole, but for those who worship at the altar of garage rock gods, this concert was nothing short of witnessing a second coming.

Original members Jerry Roslie, Larry Parypa and Rob Lind were ably augmented by two other Northwest garage rockers -- bassist Don Wilhelm (from The Daily Flash) and drummer Ricky Lynn Johnson (from The Wailers.) Wilhelm told us that original bassist Andy Parypa (Larry's brother), was actually sitting in at a Daily Flash gig back home that very evening, so Wilhelm could play with The Sonics. Oooh, the eerie synchronicity! And original drummer Bob Bennett flew in from Hawaii just so he could be in the audience, though he did not play.

Bennett was not the only one with serious jet lag -- people actually flew in from as far away as England and Japan to witness this event. For those unable to attend, there will be a DVD and live album (the band is recording overdubs tomorrow, in fact.)

And for those unable to wait that long, we shot some footage of the moment that 35-year sound barrier was broken. (As Cavestompers like to say: "It's primitive." But just you try holding a camera still when nearly four decades of pent-up ecstacy finally gets unleashed all around you.)

There are no plans for The Sonics to perform beyond these two Cavestomp shows, but Larry Parypa says future shows would be considered if, among other things, there is enough positive feedback from these performances.

Well, we can't imagine The Sonics aren't feelin' the love right about now.

Crisis Management =

Perception Management

FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, vice admiral Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing. Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices, and questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters.

The Washington Posts' Al Kamen reports

Shaking The Tree
"The real story of Jena and the Jena 6 is quite different from what the national media presented. It's time to set the record straight."

From the Christian Science Monitor, this report by Jena Times Assistant Editor Craig Franklin:

"By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they've all heard the story of the 'Jena 6.' White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests – the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics.

"There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice."

In light of recent research on the difficulty of countering false information in the news media, it should be interesting to see how this develops.

Harold and Maude Trailer
Featuring Cat Stevens'
"If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out"

The Psychology of Believing News Reports

Conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi.

While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

The Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reports

Black Balled

"The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism."

So says Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson, seeking to clarify remarks that eventually earned him a suspension from his research institution, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, NY.

In a recent (London) Times interview, Dr. Watson was quoted as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."

The remarks drew sharp criticism, and following the suspension, he stated: "This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

Read the BBC News' report here

Measles, Schmeasles.

I've Got A God To Please.

An Associated Press examination of states' vaccination records and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that many states are seeing increases in the rate of religious exemptions claimed for kindergartners.

The number of exemptions is extremely small in percentage terms and represents just a few thousand of the 3.7 million children entering kindergarten in 2005, the most recent figure available.

But public health officials say it takes only a few people to cause an outbreak that can put large numbers of lives at risk.

The Associated Press' Steve LeBlanc reports (via The Guardian)

One Vote Under God:
The Role of Faith in the 2008 Election Campaigns

Abortion. Education. Religious extremism and its ties to terrorism. All of these are central to life in today's America, and all -- or nearly all -- of the candidates have been forthright in their opinions on these issues and, in many cases, how they relate to their faith.

One Vote Under God is an incredibly useful interactive database that tracks the 2008 presidential candidates on topics ranging from their strategies for targeting 'values voters' to their stances on issues typically informed by faith. An invaluable tool to evaluate candidates' positions on a wide variety of key subjects, One Vote Under God is just a small part of the fascinating website based on the "Faces of Faith In America" Journalism Initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations.

Text edited from the One Vote Under God website

Doctor No

To paraphrase something George Carlin once said: Somewhere on the planet is the world's worst doctor... And someone has an appointment with him tomorrow.

Carlin's observation came to mind when we read the following, from the London Times:

"Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs. Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity. A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex. One male student was prepared to fail his final exams rather than carry out a basic examination of a female patient."

The (London) Times' Daniel Foggo and Abul Taher report

New Hope for Intelligent Design!

Texas Opens The Back Door for ID, Bitch Slaps Dover, PA

Texas' new "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination" law requires every public school in the state to adopt a policy guaranteeing students' right to religious expression. It mandates that schools create "limited public forums" for religious and other types of speech.

One of the drafters of the law, a Houston attorney named Kelly J. Coghlan, urges students to lead their peers in prayer before the beginning of the school day as well as before football games, graduation ceremonies and other school events. A student could, for example, read the morning announcements over a loudspeaker and then lapse into a prayer or mini-sermon.

"This law is fundamentally at odds with the principle of religious freedom," said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based group that opposes the machinations of the Religious Right. "It will force public school students to participate in public events that promote religious views -- through prayer or even proselytizing -- that they and their families may not share or may even find deeply offensive. So rather than protecting religious freedom, this law represents a grave threat to it."

AlterNet's Rob Boston reports

More "Jesus And Mo" Here

Anthony Balch's "Bizarre"

Try to imagine The Twilight Zone – or better yet, Night Gallery – filtered through copious amounts of acid and Spanish fly. You might get something like the Anthony Balch film "Bizarre."

In surveying the online reviews, it seems that even some of the most jaded cult film connoisseurs walk away from "Bizarre" at an utter loss for words to describe what they’ve just experienced. Watch this 12-minute clip, and you may understand why.

We first came across "Bizarre" during our search for the short films that Balch made with William S. Burroughs. For a while, the only place you could find their collaborations "Towers Open Fire" and "The Cut Ups" was as bonus material on the "Bizarre" DVD.

Though these 'bonuses' are completely incongruous next to a movie like "Bizarre," they do help provide some perspective: Take the art-house sense of the Balch/Burroughs shorts, and combine it with a grindhouse sensibility... What you get is indeed bizarre.

The clip contains sexual situations that will probably not be safe to watch at your cubby farm.

Read The New York Times 'review here

Frustrated by press leaks about its most sensitive electronic surveillance work, the secretive National Security Agency convened an unprecedented series of off-the-record "seminars" in recent years to teach reporters about the damage caused by such leaks and to discourage reporting that could interfere with the agency's mission to spy on America's enemies.

The New York Sun's Josh Gerstien reports

Harvard Coop In the Doghouse

The 125-year-old campus bookstore The Harvard Coop is facing some stiff competition from online book retailers. So much so that students trying to do some comparison shopping could find themselves bounced out of the store.

The situation escalated recently when Coop management had police eject a group of students who were writing down ISBN numbers and prices from the bookstore shelves. The "offenders" work for the student-run CrimsonReading.org, a website that provides information on where textbooks can be found for the lowest price.

All along, the Coop has maintained that the ISBNs are its intellectual property. But the director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, along with another Berkman Fellow and a Harvard law student, beg to differ: "The Coop neither authored the ISBN numbers on its books nor compiled them in an original selection or arrangement," the trio writes. "Locking competitors out from price comparison is not part of copyright's aim. While some courts have protected the creativity of price estimates, they haven't allowed companies to exclude others from learning market prices or catalog part numbers."

Kill Hill... Or No Bill
Celebrity Culture and the Campaign

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton. Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands.

The spiked GQ story shows how the Clinton campaign has been able to use its access to the most important commodity in media — celebrity, and in fact two bona fide celebrities — to shape not just what gets written about the candidate, but also what doesn’t.

There’s nothing unusual about providing extra access to reporters seen as sympathetic, and cutting off those seen as hostile to a campaign. But a retreat of the sort GQ is alleged to have made is unusual, particularly as part of what sources described as a barely veiled transaction of editorial leverage for access.

Politco's Ben Smith reports

The (London) Times' Carol Sarler tells religious pundits to stop all the jibber jabber.

Read The Times' Carol Sarler here

Meanwhile, Paul Kurtz responds to similar requests for humanists and sundry godless types to keep it down: "Let’s be fair: Until now, it has been virtually impossible to get a fair hearing for critical comment upon uncontested religious claims."

Read Kurtz' editorial at the Council for Secular Humanism

KATHMANDU - Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft.

from Reuters via MSNBC

God Wins Again!

"How can Americans say that they respect science and even know what scientists believe and yet still disagree with the scientific community on some fundamental questions? The answer is that much of the general public simply chooses not to believe the scientific theories and discoveries that seem to contradict long-held religious or other important beliefs."

Read David Masci at Pew Research Publications Online

Or... Does He?

"The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school. And this is not a question of sex or salacious novels; the parents want their children to be taught the truth."

The Nation's Ian Hacking

It's The Reunion We Were Told Would Never, Ever, EVER Happen.

Since they broke up decades ago, they’ve turned down many offers and serious gobs of money to perform again.

Regularly lauded as one of the most influential rock and roll bands in history, its members seemed content to just sit back and watch their legend grow... Which it has, to genuinely mythological proportions.

But just last week, fans the world over lathered in sheer ecstasy when news of the impossible was confirmed... There would finally be a one-off reunion.

Uh, what's that you say...? Led Zeppelin?

Well, as nice as it is to hear that those boys are back in the sandbox, we’re talking about something far more monumental…

The Sonics were one of, if not the great architects of the raw rock and roll that went on to be known variously as Garage, Punk and Grunge. In their heyday of 1964-66, The Sonics were cranking out some of the fiercest gutbuckets of sound ever waxed, with a power that holds up remarkably well to this day.

Just think about what was on the radio then…. Lovable mop-tops, harmonizing surfer boys, cuddly girl groups… Hell, think about what's on the radio today... and know why the world needs The Sonics reunion... Now more than ever!

More info at the Cavestomp! MySpace page

Haidt on Morality and Religion
"Surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people." Read "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion" By Jonathan Haidt

Harris on Haidt
"...Religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know." Sam Harris and others respond in "The Reality Club" at Edge.org

Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee

Islamist Orders Hit on Cartoonist and Editor
The head of an al Qaeda-led group in Iraq has offered a $100,000 reward for the killing of a Swedish cartoonist for his drawing of Islam's Prophet Mohammad and threatened to attack major Swedish companies. Reuters' Diala Saadeh reports

Woman Sues Judge Over Language Restrictions
The accuser in a sexual assault case is suing a judge because he barred the word "rape," "victim" and "assailant" and other words from the trial. Read the AP report at Law.com

Ridiculously Rich Guy Buys Respect
Since 2002, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, has used his considerable financial clout as one of the richest men in the world to garner apologies and damages through the UK courts. Recently, his attention has been turned to respected academic publisher Cambridge University Press, over the book "Alms for Jihad."

The book's authors firmly deny bin Mahfouz’s claims that their book links him, financially and through family, to Osama bin Laden. However, CUP recent issued an outright apology, declared that it would pulp all unsold copies of the book in the UK, and requested that library copies be returned to meet the same fate. Such is the fear of bin Mahfouz that even US-based Amazon is not selling "Alms for Jihad," instead, somewhat disingenuously, offering a 557-word review for the knock-down price of $9.95. Read more in the Index On Censorship

Event Planning... The White House Way!
Tip #42: If You Can't Keep Your Protesters On Ice, at Least Strive for a Chilling Effect

A married couple neither said nor did anything to disrupt a Bush rally in Charleston, W. Va. But when they refused to remove their anti-Bush T-shirts, they were, at the direction of White House event staff, handcuffed, booked, photographed, and fingerprinted, charged with trespassing, and held for several hours in jail.
Dahlia Lithwick looks at the "Presidential Advance Manual" in Slate

Readin' and Writin' and Repression

Stephen Law asks: "To what extent should schools encourage deference to authority on moral and religious matters?"

Commentary in The Sydney Morning Herald

Transsexual Harassment

To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom.

In 2003, Dr. J. Michael Bailey published “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” a book intended to explain the biology of sexual orientation and gender to a general audience.

He argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake — in essence, women trapped in men’s bodies.

Days after the book appeared, Lynn Conway, a prominent computer scientist at the University of Michigan, sent out an e-mail message comparing Dr. Bailey’s views to Nazi propaganda. She and other transgender women found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination.

Dr. Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar, is a longtime advocate for people born with ambiguous sexuality and has been strongly critical of sex researchers in the past. She said she had presumed that Dr. Bailey was guilty of scientific ethics violations.

But in her just-completed account, due to be published next year in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, the field’s premier journal, she concluded that the accusations against the psychologist were essentially groundless.

Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.

The New York Times' Benedict Carey Reports

Pentagon Nearly Sends "Left Behind" To Soldiers In Iraq

Last week, after an investigation spurred by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the Pentagon abruptly announced that it would not be delivering "freedom packages" to our soldiers in Iraq, as it had originally intended.

What were the packages to contain? Not body armor or home-baked cookies. Rather, they held Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic and the apocalyptic computer game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" (derived from the series of post-Rapture novels), in which "soldiers for Christ" hunt down enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers.

The packages were put together by a fundamentalist Christian ministry called Operation Straight Up.

From the Los Angeles Times article by Michael L. Weinstein and Reza Aslan

Justice Is Served... Eventually

Mississippi: James Ford Seale, a 72-year-old ex-policeman and former Ku Klux Klansman, has been jailed for life over the 1964 abduction and killing of two black teenagers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of black people were killed by whites who wanted to retain racial segregation. Few of the crimes were solved, partly because some of the perpetrators were protected by state and local officials. The FBI is re-opening several cases from the civil rights era before suspects die.

Read More Here

Don't Tread On Me. Or Kick Me Into A Net. Or Lob Me Off Your Head.

Americans call them "soccer balls." The rest of the world calls them "footballs." Except in Afghanistan, where they are called "blasphemous." That is, when the balls in question are adorned with the Saudi flag -- which features a verse of the Koran.
BBC's Alastair Leithead reports

In other news, Afghanistan is trying to decide what to do with the other giant Buddhas they didn't destroy.
BBC's Charles Haviland reports

There's More "Jesus and Mo" Here

Newfangled Coffeeshops Create Grande Tizzy In Ivory Tower

Professor Angles for Larry King's Job in What Just Might Be "The Worst Op-Ed Piece Ever Written"

"... Our professor seems to think he has encountered a brand-new cultural phenomenon: coffee places that are disturbingly different from the lunch counters of yesteryear. Well, I did a little Googling, and it turns out he's right! There are hosts of these coffee chain stores, including one with the improbable name Starbucks, infiltrating our cities."

Slate's Ron Rosenbaum creams Stanley Fish's coffee here

You can read the original Fish-in-a-barrel here

Evil 101

"Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us—under the right circumstances."

The infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment" was aborted in less than a week due to its character-imploding power. Along with Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority—the "shock experiments"— the investigation is considered one of the most important pieces of research demonstrating a core tenet of social psychology: external situations can lead us to behave in ways that we would not, could not, predict.

American Scientist Online features details in Robert Levine's review of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil," by Philip Zimbardo

Also, Discover Magazine Online has this excerpt

Free Speech For Me,

But Not For Thee

Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, attacked last week at the launch of her book in southern India, faces up to two years in jail if found guilty on a charge of inciting religious tensions. The Guardian's Richard Lee reports

Meanwhile, a Muslim fundamentalist group has revived a long-standing fatwa on Nasrin, stating that she “has spoken against Islam and Prophet Muhammad and we will go to any extent to eliminate her.” An unlimited amount of money is offered to anyone who will kill her. The Hindustan Times' Rakeeb Hossain reports

"Resentments Rather Than Good Relations"

Staff at a UK hospital have been told not to eat at their desks to avoid offending Muslim colleagues.

The Muslim Weekly reports

India's Prosperity Enables Sex Selection

Increased consumer choice is one of the hallmarks of the new India. Tragically, it is being applied, with almost industrial efficiency, to depress the female birth rate.

BBC's Nick Bryant reports

Jose Gonzalez "Killing For Love"

Model Behavior

Digging through the attic recently, we unearthed a memento of a fun little memory from just over five years ago. The occasion was the live premiere broadcast of Little Steven’s Underground Garage, a nationally syndicated radio show that continues to be one of the most wildly successful in recent history.

Little Steven took over New York City’s Hard Rock Café to throw a huge party for the launch, and Garage Rock legends were everywhere – We even shared burgers with Lenny Kaye and drinks with Richard and the Young Lions.

The event was just as much a celebration of New Jersey Guys Made Good, with virtually every celebrity from The State Next Door in attendance. That included co-stars from one of Little Steven’s other gigs, The Sopranos, who may not have been real Jerseyites but played them on TV.

Loud music, go-go dancers and swirling day-glo lights kept the surroundings psychedelicized. But it was genuinely surreal to weave around people on the dance floor doing the Frug and the Swim, then bump into TV Mafiosi.

In the V.I.P. Room, Jon Bon Jovi surrounded himself with a phalanx of what looked like genuine Mafiosi. Some people could occassionally be seen penetrating the barrier, however, creating the curious effect of a "V.I.P.-Room-Within-A-V.I.P.-Room." It was at one of the food tables in the remaining V.I.Plebe Zone where a woman named Pamela Vandenberg told us about some her recent projects, including a gig modelling as "Sindy" for Altoids cinnamon mints.

Have a look at this clip featuring Pamela as Sindy – which is way up there on our list of the best ads ever filmed.



This other clip is pretty good, too.



The Sindy campaign was an enormous success (dare we call it "iconic"?), and pushed Altoids way over the top in their effort to be a "hip" brand. But we have to admit that, at first, Pamela's claim to being Sindy seemed a bit dubious.

First of all, she looked more to us like a young Lauren Hutton than the devilish minx in the ads. But more to the point, famous models simply don’t make conversation with people like us. You know, people who use words like "phalanx," and still expect to hold someone's attention.

Yet there was Pamela, happily chatting it up. And any doubts about her true identity were dispelled when Pamela gave us her direct mail piece, a mini-portfolio of sorts, which included her work as Sindy.

A few minutes after we had all moved on to mingle, Pamela returned to give us an Altoids postcard, and autographed it: "You’re too hot! Sindy." It was that very postcard that we found in the attic recently, conjuring up memories of that great big loud insane party at the Underground Garage.

At a number of parties since then, we’ve taken a cue from Pamela and handed out autographed photos of ourselves, using character names like "Magnus," "Gaspard" and "Dr. Finger." They never seem to go over quite as well as "Sindy," though. And we can understand why... Have a look at Pamela Vandenberg’s website, and see for yourself.

Appearances by Bill Clinton and Karl Rove generated a good deal of buzz for this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, the week-long series of open air chats with some of the world's most inspired thinkers and inspiring speakers.

Other highlights include Thomas Friedman's take on the enormity of being Green, and Richard Branson discussing his plans for privatized space travel. You can download or view streaming video at the links below... While you're there, take some time to peruse the entire Aspen Ideas Festival 2007 Audio/Video Library.


Thomas Friedman: Green is the New Red, White, and Blue
A Conversation with Richard Branson
In Conversation with Karl Rove
Bill Clinton Discusses His Work Around the World

The Tears Of A Clown

Crispin Glover's "Clowny Clown Clown"

Toothache Of The Clown

Jerry Lewis in "The Day The Clown Cried"
Wikipedia Entry

Bonus Happy Clowns! Clown Ministry

My Nature Documentary
by Jack Handey

Show monkey in a tree. Narrator says, “The monkey, proud and smart, in his native habitat. But one thing he does not have . . .” Show a giraffe. “. . . is a long neck, like the giraffe. Which is why nature has allowed them to combine forces.” Show monkey on giraffe’s neck. (Note: Monkey may have to be tied on.)

Then the narrator says, “The monkey can now see very far, and has protection from predators. And the giraffe has a little friendly guy to ride around on him.”

The monkey is shot by a poacher and falls from giraffe. Put ketchup on monkey to make him look bloody, but put something bad-tasting in the ketchup or monkey will lick it all off. Shoot BB gun at giraffe to make him run off.

Narrator: “The monkey and the giraffe have been separated.”

Continue reading here at Newyorker.com

Can I get some head?

When Peter Kaukonen attended Stanford University in the early 60's, he majored in biochemistry, human sexual behavior, and musicology, none of which appeared on the curriculum.

Peter played the folk circuit with people who went on to become Janis Joplin, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. (In the picture, he's the guy whose teeth are visible.)

His musical odyssey since then has been marked by detours and excursions, possibly symptomatic of ADD or Tourette's. He has played, toured, and recorded with Johnny Winter, Jefferson Starship, Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, and his own Black Kangaroo.

By the way, virtually all of the above was lifted verbatim from Peter Kaukonen's site, which has more, so much more, about the man and his music from a live performance broadcast this past December on KRSH-FM. Joining Peter is bassist Michael Lindner (pictured here blissfully unaware), a long time compadre who also played in Black Kangaroo.

Peter Kaukonen will also be live in the tattooed flesh on Friday, July 6th at the Warwick Valley Winery in Warwick, New York. Contact them at (845) 258-4858 or wvwinery@warwick.net for more info, or visit their Events Calendar.