Komedy Korner

Another installment from the never-ending Audio vs Lighting 

mutual derision society:

God was watching a crew set up for a show. 

He saw a guy carrying a pipe rigged with lights crossing the stage.
He turned to St.Peter and said, "Let us see what happens if I taketh away half his brain".
He pointed His holy finger at the lighting tech and zapped half his brain to dust.
The light guy didn't flinch, and kept walking with the light bar.
God then said, "OK, Now I shalt blow out another quarter of his brain".
ZAP! The tech just kept on walking toward the lighting truss across the stage.
"Wow", said God..."Let us now see what happens if I smite away all of his brain".
He pointed the almighty finger and blew the rest of the guy's brain out his ears.
The lighting tech stopped walking, put down the light bar, stepped to the downstage microphone and said...
"Testing, one, two".

I Get No Kick From Retirement

The latest in highbrow literature from Tom Tomorrow

Drive-By Truckers - "This Fucking Job"

This stuff is the Kine! From the Drive By Truckers on the Letterman show back in March. Their latest LP, "The Big To-Do" is well worth a listen- or even a buy! These guys are the vanguard of the current Southern rock scene.

If you somehow had the misfortune not to have heard the Truckers backing Booker T on last year's masterpiece "Potato Hole" (which also includes Neil Young's guitar work on several tracks), then get yer ears on some without delay!


Back in April, Toid and his Roast spawn Jeremy traveled to Philly to catch the Truckers at the Electric Factory (with the added bonuses of Pat's cheesesteaks, Italian market Philly pork n' greens hoagies and a pre-season Phillies game at Generic Corporate Name Field). I gotta tell ya, DBT can rock with the best of 'em. They blew the house down with a non-stop, two and a half hour set. Classic stuff.

Opening for the Truckers was another compelling band of Southern rockers, the Memphis dynamo Lucero. I love these guys! You won't hear it on the track below, but they brought a great Memphis horn section on this tour, and it brought their already tight and powerful groove up another notch. I highly recommend you listen to this talented buncha young rednecks. They have been around for a while, but are really coming into their own, and deserve a wider audience.
Their latest, 1372 Overton Park is high quality stuff!

Here's a cheesy vid of a great tune :

Music Industry Slashes Own Throat. . . .Sun Rises In East.

The pathetic, lemming-like march to oblivion of the major record labels continues apace.
Their flesh-wasting lobbying appendage, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), displays more of the obtuse idiocy that brought them to the waiting room of Dr. Kevorkian's death mill by following their current business plan of spending all of their money and creative effort making lawyers wealthy chasing a phantom menace they call "copyright infringement", instead of the old, obsolete plan of scouting, signing, developing and promoting talented musicians.

Read how the RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000! Genius! For the 3 year period from 2006 to 2008, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000.

And these morons have the gall to claim that all this self destructive stupidity is in the name of protecting artist's rights. HaHaHa! The great and beneficent moguls of this criminal enterprise have always made their profit by stealing from their artists. Lyle Lovett  sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales.The band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often.

Fortunately for the future of musicians and their fans, there are many models being developed by the musicians themselves to create, distribute and promote music, thereby bypassing the parasitic zombies in suits whose only aim appears to be to collapse an entire art form into a black hole- following our once-vaunted auto and financial industries over the cliff.

Oh... and betcha coulda guessed that this bloated piece of useless suet was paid over $2 million last year to orchestrate this abomination of a business plan. Burn in Hell scumbags!

For some interesting insiders' looks at this decayed and stinking corpse of an industry, take a gander at this current state of affairs, and this classic take-down from the 90's.

Rock On Dudes!!

Update: Roast aficionado Jody McAllister provides this link to Janis Ian's point-by-point refutation of the RIAA's distortions and continuing prevarication about the "illegal download problem", first referenced by Nils Nichols in a comment to this post. She also is an advocate of providing free downloads to attract new listeners, many of  whom come to her concerts or purchase her music and other merchandise. This article is a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the music business. If you are any kind of fan or consumer of music, it is a must read.

Cage The Elephant - In One Ear

Cage The Elephant carries the prestigious imprimatur of Sir Wilvis deLashleigh.

Idiot America- Where Facts are Irrelevant

The Boston Globe has a frightening article which examines the distressing tendency of misinformed people to resist correcting their misperceptions when given facts that show their beliefs to be false.

 Some lowlights from the article:

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. . .it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. 

In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), and that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction.

Please go to the Globe link above and read this article. It's a  warning siren for our dying Democracy.


Update: Roaster Maynardo (1930's era Brazilian soccer star) refers to this phenomenon as
"the 'Palinisation' of America: the celebration of little, if any, knowledge." Read his entire transcendent comment below.

Did you miss "This Week with Jake Tapper" today?

Fortunately for you, The Bobblespeak Translations has the official transcript. 
Some highlights:


McCain: well it turns out we wasted 8 years attacking the wrong country in Iraq but now is the time to get bogged down in another useless land war in Asia

Tapper: should Obama double the number of
troops in Afghanistan?

McCain: of course but what I worry about more
than anything else is the July 2011 withdraw date and also the lack of pudding.

And from the Panel of Chattering Pundits segment:

Krugman: the world is panicking over
Invisible Bond Zombies!

Tapper: Roger Moore and George Lazenby?