Thursday, April 12, 2007

Alice in Wonderland, Grace Slick, (Pete's Couch), and Harrogate



Harrogate's Fans Know Why. Enjoy.

God Bless You Mr. Rosewater


Sad news today: Kurt Vonnegut died. He was 84.

Kurt Vonnegut was the first author I enjoyed while I was young. I remember first reading his some of his short stories in grade school, in either 7th or 8th grade. "The Euphio Question" was the first story I read.

What are your favorite stories/ books/ moements from Kurt Vonnegut?

What I remember most from his work is his discussion of humanism. Two examples: From Slaughterhouse Five (the intro).
"Be Kind. God Doesn't Care whether you are kind or Not."


And from God Bless You Mr. Rosewater:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Imus Aint Funny, But Snoop Dogg Sure Is




Snoop Dogg's statement on the Imus situation is really funny and makes you think, sort of like a passage out of Henry Miller.

Don Imus (hat tip Talk Left for the "dogg-house" picture), Readers will recall, is the rich, old, white male icon of talk radio/television who referred to the Rutgers Women's Basketball team, whose dream season came crashing to an end at the hands of perennial powerhouse Tennessee (Pat Summit thou hast done it again! Way to go! Good ole Rockytop, Rockytop Tennessee!) as "nappy headed hos." Now that the shit has hit the fan (one of the truly great dead metaphors ever) MSNBC has dropped its simulcast of him and CBS meanwhile is perhaps on the verge of yanking Imus off of Westwood 1.

The Rutgers Ladies, meanwhile, appear on Oprah Winfrey today. Harrogate thinks it will be worth checking out, as Vivien Stringer, their head coach, speaks off the cuff as well as any figure in sports--in this way she's the women's b-ball equivalent of Florida Head Coach and Philosophe, Billy Donovan (congratulations Gators, by the way. If you're not a Gator you're Gator Bait, that's what Harrogate hears anyway).

But anyways, Harrogate digresses. In the aftermath many other white conservative pudits have taken care to give the obligatory condemnation of Imus, but then launch headlong into "wondering" aloud why rappers can say these words but Imus cannot. Snoop provides one of several possible answers in the link above. Here is a delightful snippett:

"It's a completely different scenario," said Snoop, barking over the phone from a hotel room in L.A. "[Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about ho's that's in the 'hood that ain't doing sh--, that's trying to get a n---a for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC [which announced Wednesday it would drop its simulcast of Imus' radio show] going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them mutha----as say we in the same league as him."


That's just funny, Harrogate don't care who ye are.