B2L2
- Programming Note May 13, 2013B2L2 continues to publish on a monthly schedule, but now the month’s posts will be published in clusters of 2-4, roughly once a week, instead of all at once. […]Derek Bridges
- Monsters May 13, 2013[…]Gerald Cannon
- Narasimha May 13, 2013As a kid, I was fascinated with the tales of the ten avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu. Brahma creates, Siva destroys and Vishnu is the man in the middle who preserves, he keeps the universe going. According to Hindu mythology, there are ten times when things got so bad on Earth that Vishnu had to take on a mortal form and show up to, you know, preserve. Retur […]Maitri
- Five Monsters May 13, 20131. The Alien There are so many great monster movies. Monsters from the deep. Monsters from outer space. Monsters from the laboratory. The walking, crawling, shuffling, sprinting dead. My favorite monster movies? Off the top of my head? Nosferatu. Frankenstein. Godzilla. Alien and Aliens. Let’s see, that’s one vampire, one experiment gone horribly wrong, one […]John Hicks
- Bride of Svengoolie May 13, 2013In first grade, while doing a Svengoolie impression in the mirror in the bathroom, I was discovered by a teacher who moonlighted as an actor at the Robert Young Repertory Theater, a leftover from when Smithville was a resort town, a place where Chicagoans would go to avoid the summer city heat. The teacher was hiding in the middle stall, cloistered for a mom […]John Sheppard
- Where in the hell is Jimmy Gabacho? May 13, 2013Rumors have been flying across the internet regarding the whereabouts of Jimmy Gabacho. He hasn’t posted anything since March and was last seen in a seedy airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, getting ready to catch the Cape Air flight 269 heading to the West Indies. When this reporter spotted him, he declined to comment about his recent activities, which set […]Jimmy Gabacho
- Television April 17, 2013[…]Gerald Cannon
- Ode to TV theme songs April 17, 2013Is the television theme song a dying art? Although I watched a lot of television, few current running shows' themes get me to hurry me back from raiding the fridge other than the intros to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Most of my favorites are from the 1970s — TV's golden age for theme songs. Chalk it up to a combination of my age, gender, […]Tom Long
- The Macroeconomics of Girls April 17, 2013In HBO’s Girls Hannah Horvath, a precocious Oberlin grad moves to The Big Apple, where she interns at a publishing house for two years–entirely on her parents’ dime. A reliable foundation for a privileged American success story? One would hope. But Girls is not about the guarantee of The (or even “an”) American Dream to this protagonist’s upper-middle-clas […]Amorphous Funk
- Television is April 17, 2013television is the devil television is for you television is becoming a reality television is shown television is the root of all evil television is here to stay television is cooperating television is watching you television is my boyfriend television is catching television is “barely” alive television is the electrical transmission television is beautiful t […]Bob Hate
Kick-in
The Eddy Band needs help getting a new album out. Bob Hate sets the table at Kickstarter:
The disc will follow up 2010′s “Six Foot Length of Rope,” and features the fellas playing their hearts out for Bob, who, once again, has fired everyone a handful of times since he last saw them.
Backyard project
This weekend I borrowed a friend's circular saw (Thanks, Trey!) and finally executed my plan for a Z-shaped raised garden bed. I bought four 8 ft by 12 in cedar boards, which I cut into eight pieces:
- four 2 ft long
- two 4 ft long
- two 6 ft long
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That was then
I was cleaning out my email inbox and I came across this message from July 24, 2012 where the Office of the Mayor engages in much happy talk about the city's consent decree with the feds agreeing to overhaul the New Orleans Police Department:
Now, of course, Landrieu is trying to weasel out of this agreement. I just wanted to remind people that the mayor actually was quite pleased with the decree back when he signed it.
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He probably just thought he was multitasking
I took these pictures of then New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in 2007 at the citizen rally against crime at City Hall. Thousands of us were there. What do you think Ray was thinking? Turns out we have some idea where his head was that day:
Continue readingIn fact, as thousands of New Orleanians marched on City Hall in January 2007 to demand safer streets amid a wave of murders, Nagin was emailing Michael Singer, the owner of Singer Kitchens, to try to negotiate a business arrangement.
Recently overheard at a bar
A guy said:
Continue readingAnd I woke up at Harry Shearer's with a pork chop and mashed potatoes in my pocket.
It’s crazy–unless things get truly crazy
The coin. You know the one I'm talking about. It won't happen--unless it does, at the last lunatic minute. Marc Ambinder:
Continue readingThe administration might reverse its position at the last minute if it absolutely has to. Better a viable gimmick than a catastrophic default. But if it does wait until the last minute to resort to a coin trick, it will have done so because Republicans forced him to.
NRA against imaginary guns
I see that Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, has a scapegoat to distract the public from calls for gun control legislation:
"There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people," LaPierre said.
"Through vicious, violent video games with names like "Bulletstorm," "Grand Theft Auto," "Mortal Kombat," and "Splatterhouse."
He then highlighted an online game called "Kindergarten Killers" that he said has been accessible on the Internet for a decade.
A crude Google search reveals these numbers:
- Guns and ammunition manufacturing annual revenue: $11 billion.
- Annual video game sales: $12 billion.
Callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry? Project much?
John Sheppard/Chicago
Paragraph Line has just released B2L2 contributor John Sheppard’s new novel Alpha Mike Foxtrot (click here for an excerpt). From Paragraph Line:
This is the story of a guy named Joe, a soldier, but it starts after Iraq, after he got wounded and discharged, and has more to do with starting over, finding your duty in life after your duty in the armed forces has abruptly ended. He’s got a mom with cancer and a brother that’s schizophrenic, and instead of immersing himself in that drama, he thumbs his way to the midwest, finds a room in an eclectic boarding house filled with lost souls, and stumbles into the only career for which his service trained him: stocking crates of junk merchandise at the local big-box store.
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