Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

This really is a full service blog.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

After roe, women are no longer free.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

This blog will pay for itself.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

You are here: Home / Music / This Makes Me Happy (Afternoon Open Thread)

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84Comments

  1. 1.

    imonlylurking

    An open thread, good.

    I’d really like to smack Manny’s former owner. He’s got advanced gum disease and is going in tomorrow to get some extensive (expensive!!) dental work done. He’s going to have multiple teeth pulled-they are just gray blobs at this point. The vet was appalled.

    My roommate has a line on a foster home for him-the woman has other dogs (which he is used to living with and clearly misses) and 7 acres so he will be able to get some exercise. We would love to keep him-he is just the sweetest boy-but the cats are not amused and are retaliating.

    He already expects walks from both of us-I wasn’t going to take him out this morning because my roommate got up early and took him out already, but he gave me such a sad look when I was about to walk out the door, I had to grab the leash. I thought he was going to bounce through the door!

  3. 3.

    mclaren

    That video will be taken down within 15 minutes due to alleged copyright infringement. In Shithole America, nothing can be permitted to occur without some giant monopoly corporation vampiring cash out of it.

  5. 5.

    cleek

    this is exactly why Eddie used to do this stuff with his back to the audience. damned 14 year old girls be stealing his technique!

  8. 8.

    scav

    Best I can manage is a pained laugh from this juxtaposition.
    Atheists Are Good if They Do Good, Pope Francis Says
    (gee, um, thanks, I was really worried)

    Records show Chicago Jesuits hid sex crimes

    Internal church records released Tuesday show that Chicago Jesuits consciously concealed the crimes of convicted sex offender Donald McGuire for more than 40 years as the prominent Roman Catholic priest continued to sexually abuse dozens of children around the globe.

    One letter written in 1970 by the Rev. John H. Reinke, then president of Loyola Academy in Wilmette, described McGuire’s presence at the school as “positively destructive and corrosive.” Instead of insisting he be removed from ministry or sent to treatment, Reinke suggested a transfer to Loyola University.

    “This whole situation has been so muddy and troublesome I just wanted to get it out of my mind from time to time,” wrote Reinke, who died in 2003. “Anyway, here it is, for the files and the record. … There is little hope of affecting any change. … He cannot be corrected.”

  9. 9.

    jl

    Not my type of guitar hero(ine) stuff, but wow, the technique is impressive.

    “Get off my grass you damned kids”? Shouldn’t that be “Get off my lawn you damned kids”?

    Or is that some superannuated hippie yelling at some college punk who just sat on his bag of weed?

    I am not aware of all internet traditions.

  10. 10.

    Karen in GA (who really needs a better name)

    I started a blog (a friend of mine likes my writing and suggested it, and I thought, hey, why not).

    So why am I mentioning this? Yes, 5% blogwhoring, although there’s only the one post right now, which is just a roundabout way of saying “hello,” so there’s not much to whore — more like bloghinting right now.

    But 95% because FYWP. Is it because I set it up from my iPad, or is the free WP setup way more complicated than it needs to be?

    (I chose it over Blogger because I wanted simpler commenting. So whoever you two or three commenters are that show up someday, you’re welcome.)

  11. 11.

    Mnemosyne

    @scav:

    That’s pretty freaky — my brother went to Loyola Academy (which is a high school), as did several other people I know.

    If the church had handled the offenders “internally” by, say, sending them off to monasteries where they would have zero contact with anyone under 18, a whole lot of heartache and abuse could have been avoided.

  14. 14.

    piratedan

    @schrodinger’s cat: TRMS mentioned it last night indicating that McConnell has stated that He won’t filibuster the bill. Now does that mean that Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or Imhofe will let it fly, who knows. Plus McConnell could be playing the long game, he knows that this is part of the damage control that R’s have to do to win minority voters but whether or not the TP caucus in the House will let this pass is another case of I’ll believe it when I see it.

  17. 17.

    Cassidy

    @cleek: Which technique do you speak of? The be drunk and spend the next 30 years making a living off 30 y/o guitar riffs? Prima Donna? Pissing off two amazing frontmen?

  21. 21.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    The thing about her demeanor reminds me of this story someone told in the jazz world a while back about someone taking his nephew to see Wes Montgomery play, and the kid, unfamiliar with jazz and used to musicians jumping all over the place, didn’t know what to make of this guy just sitting there on stage, playing, with seemingly no “performance” at all. When he asked his uncle why the difference he replied “They’re all running around looking for it. Wes has already found it.”

  23. 23.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I am not too hopeful, plus who knows what is in those amendments.

    And now to test your knowledge of the United States, Mister Gutierrez. Please recite the U.S. Constitution, including amendments, from memory.

  26. 26.

    Trollhattan

    Damn, that girl’s got chops. Lessee, when I was fourteen I could…um…er…something. Sure I could.

    Must show to my 11YO.

  27. 27.

    Trollhattan

    @Bill E Pilgrim:
    Saw Joe Pass once, knowing nothing about him beforehand. Similar deal, when you see calm genius it shifts one’s perception of everybody else in a flash.

  28. 28.

    Sean Dolan

    @mclaren:

    Unless you count the Van Halen brothers as a “giant monopoly corporation,” you couldn’t be more wrong.

    (They are likely incorporated, or at least and LLC)

    The original recording copyright is owned by the supposed giant monopoly corporation.

    Assuming it counts as an orignal composition, E. Van Halen owns the rights to the composition.

    It this were taken down, it would be due to the composer’s copyright claim, not the label.

    I’m all for slagging on giant record labels, I’ve done plenty of it in public and private, but you are aiming your ire in the wrong spot on this one.

    Have a nice day.

  31. 31.

    catclub

    Ben Bernanke would do nothing different if there were NO employment requirements to his dual mandate. Plus there is gambling going on in this casino and I am shocked.

    ”

    Ben Bernanke’s appearances before congress are usually a parade of clueless questions, but Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota just asked him a great one. Noting that some members of congress think the Fed should drop its dual mandate on inflation and unemployment and just focus on price stability, she asked Bernanke to explain what he would do differently if the mandate changed.

    Bernanke hemmed and hawed a bit, but the crux of his answer was: Nothing.

    He seemed to interpret the question as perhaps an attack on his inflation record, but his answer was a damning attack on his growth record. (His answer starts around the 39-minute mark here.) Bernanke noted that “inflation, if anything, is a little bit too low” and said that even though many foreign central banks have a single mandate “I think our inflation record is as good as really any major central bank, and so there’s not really been a sacrifice in that respect.”*

    That’s a huge tell right there. Bernanke can’t name a single way in which his policy would change if congress rescinded his legal mandate to attempt to maximize employment.”

  32. 32.

    BGK

    First world carping:
    I’ll be glad when all the paleo-diet jerkoffs in my office fall off the damned wagon. Which I figure will be over the next two weeks. Since we had a health-and-fitness week at the start of May, there’s probably 20 of these clowns. They eat what seems like every 15 minutes, and all they ever seem to eat are hard-boiled eggs or eggs with vegetables, “cooked” in the microwave oven. Both of which are fine in their place, but the break room is down the hall from me and the place now reeks all the time of sulfrous egg yolk stench.

  34. 34.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @BGK:

    Both of which are fine in their place, but the break room is down the hall from me and the place now reeks all the time of sulfrous egg yolk stench.

    Make the best of it. Tank up on beans and fart freely.

  35. 35.

    Dave

    ARRGH, Now I wish I’d bought that Lanikai Tenor uke yesterday. It was Musician’s Friends stupid deal of the day for $99 but no, I was being responsible thinking I should pay for wife’s and my upcoming Sanibel trip. Oh well, I’ve got guitars and basses for now.

  36. 36.

    Southern Beale

    What’s everyone’s vacation plans? I need some ideas for a teaching thing I’m doing. I need to come up with around 16-18 vacation destinations, enough that offer a variety of experiences, some similar but not identical. I have seven so far:

    Lake, Beach, Mountain Lodge, Camping, Canoeing, New York City, London.

    Trying to think what else people do when they go on vacation. I guess I can have “visit inlaws in Bumfuq, Kentucky.” Sigh.

  39. 39.

    Eric U.

    Van Halen’s problem was that it’s a little too obvious to most guitar players what he is up to. People came along and surpassed him and he was no longer unique. If he really played with his back to the audience, it probably was to hide the fact that he was too drunk to play and was doing the guitarist equivalent of lip-syncing. Les Paul would pretend to play some of his sped-up tracks in concert. I forget who it was that learned how to play those parts note-for-note, Les Paul mentioned it in an interview.

  40. 40.

    BGK

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate:

    Tank up on beans

    Oh I like beans and legumes. While tasty, they’re energy-dense, full of awful calories and water-retaining carbohydrates. I’m trying to get to a goal weight by the middle of June, so that, for the first time in my adult life, I’ll weigh what I want to. It’s really just vanity at this point, but I really don’t have that much farther to go. Which, of course, means every tenth of a pound is like crawling across broken glass.

  41. 41.

    Soonergrunt

    I had to look up “insouciance”.

    carefree attitude: cheerful lack of anxiety or concern

    I am a better man for it. Thanks, Betty!

    @catclub: cleared.
    @Southern Beale: leaving tornado alley and visiting earthquake country in mid July.

  43. 43.

    catclub

    Branson and Dollywood.

    In Mississippi gaming establishments, people with teeth are treated like royalty.

    National Parks? Archeological tourism/free labor.
    Bicycle touring.

  46. 46.

    beltane

    @BGK: I wasn’t aware that paleolithic hunter-gatherers subsisted on a diet of microwaved eggs and vegetables. You could always tell your co-workers that if they want to go about this the right way, they should be scagging for roadkill and sucking the marrow out of antelope bones.

    The “paleo” fad seems even more stupid than the average stupid food fad.

  48. 48.

    Eric U.

    I built my son a miniature guitar when he was little. Everyone calls it a uke. I made the mistake of putting a floating tailstock on it, not a good idea on a fairly flat-topped instrument. He still plays it occasionally. Wasn’t really a good instrument to learn on though. I should build another with a better bridge.

  49. 49.

    Southern Beale

    @BGK: LOL.

    See, I have 7 cats and I adore tuna myself but sometimes the olfactory similarities between my tuna and their canned food gets to me. We switched to dry for all but the big toughie who demands his wet.

  50. 50.

    Betty Cracker

    @Southern Beale: For my money, nothing stinks up a break room worse than burnt popcorn. There are things that smell worse, but burnt popcorn LINGERS. You might as well take a dump in the trashcan. Which some psycho at a former office complex hellhole I worked in used to do. We called the mystery dumper “The Shit Assassin.” God, I’m glad I work at home now.

  53. 53.

    Origuy

    @Southern Beale: I’ll be at Lake Tahoe in July for a few days. My vacations are a little unusual, since they usually include orienteering competitions. I’ll be working the event and going to a meeting as well as running around in the woods.
    Tahoe has a lake, mountains, camping, casinos, river rafting, and historical tourism.

    Edit: Oops. I said the C word.

  54. 54.

    Capri

    @Southern Beale:

    How about a whale watching vacation?

    I just looked into going to the Platte River in Nebraska for birding.

    Quite a few folks travel around going to every MLB ball park in the country

    There’s also a whole lot of gambling destinations, Las Vegas being the most well known.

  55. 55.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Trollhattan: Yeah.

    I have to say I actually find that Wes Montgomery story also sort of overly-arch and kind of arrogant, in addition to liking it. I mean lots of musicians are expressive in various ways, including a lot of classical players. Also it’s definitely just a style in jazz as much as anything else, that’s the way everyone else does it, so you do too. However there certainly are people who overdo the physical exertions as a substitute for anything going on musically.

  56. 56.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @catclub: I’m hoping that that was a typo, otherwise I have this terrible fear that they’ve done a remake.

  57. 57.

    BGK

    @beltane:

    I wasn’t aware that paleolithic hunter-gatherers subsisted on a diet of microwaved eggs and vegetables.

    Hell, either they, or I, could be misusing the “paleo” term. I know they seem to eat only from a rigidly-delimited series of foods, in teeny-tiny meals, at ridiculously short intervals. They gather in packs, yammering about what’s on the plan. And none of them seem to be actually improving their personal fitness.

    Seems to me it always comes back to limiting calories by a different name. Which, while tedious, is exactly what worked for me. Gosh, who woulda thought?

    At least no one here is a footie-finger-shoe foamer.

  61. 61.

    Mnemosyne

    @BGK:

    One of my coworkers is doing paleo and is a little insufferable about it sometimes. The defense I’ll give for her is that she really does have some strange grain allergies — she is genuinely allergic (as in, hives and anaphylactic shock) to oatmeal — so it makes sense for her to severely restrict grains. Plus she doesn’t subject us to microwaved eggs, at least not yet.

  62. 62.

    R-Jud

    @Mnemosyne: @BGK: Speaking as a CrossFitter, the Paleo diet thing drives me mental. The general principles are decent– eat mostly plants, well-raised meat, and eliminate refined sugars and grains.

    But I think the arguments made for eliminating dairy are silly, and the very bad science used to “prove” that paleo man ate x or didn’t eat y make me grind my teeth. Finally, most people at my gym use paleo as an excuse to eat bacon or beef jerky all the time. When they tsk at me for coming in with a coffee that has milk in it, it’s hard not to pour it over their heads.

  63. 63.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    Demeanor aside, she really isn’t doing anything but what someone who’s really good at video games does: She’s following a coded sequence that she’s memorized, no improvisation allowed. She might be technically proficient- even exceedingly so- but she isn’t showing much creativity.

  64. 64.

    Mnemosyne

    @R-Jud:

    My co-worker is also lactose intolerant (yes, she’s a walking encyclopedia of allergies and intolerances) but at least the Paleo version she’s following is actually okay with dairy. (I think technically she’s doing the “Primal” diet.)

  66. 66.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Mike E:

    Tell me what separates her from any of the other “prodigies” you’ll find here. And tell me how it is that she plays the same songs night after night but always finds a slightly different variation as did people like Montgomery, Lester Young, Miles Davis…

    Take your technically proficient, non-creative whiz kids if you’d like, but I’ll take Billie Holiday- who did more than anyone creatively with less technical talent- any day.

  67. 67.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Mike E:

    The funny thing is that the punchline fits this set-up, which sounds horrible much of the time, but, at those points when everything jibes, is fucking gorgeous. One of the ballsiest pieces of music ever recorded, imo.

  68. 68.

    hedgehog the occasinal commenter

    @Southern Beale:
    San Antonio, Texas for the World Science Fiction Convention (in August, right before Labor Day weekend. At least the hotel and convention center will have air-conditioning, and both are right off the Riverwalk, so there’s that). Going to the Caribbean later in the fall for our anniversary.

  69. 69.

    opie_jeanne

    @Southern Beale:

    Heading to Charlotte, NC in late June to visit an online friend I’ve known for years but have never met. We’ll be there a few days and then Mr opie_jeanne and I will head to Baltimore for the 4th of July and the Discworld Convention. This is the last one we will attend, unless they have one in Seattle. They eat up a lot of time and money that I’d rather spend in Ireland or maybe Italy.

  71. 71.

    Bighorn Ordovian Dolomite

    Very solid. I was about 19 the first time I pulled off “Eruption” and the first time you pull it off in front of your guitar playing buddies, well, you feel pretty cool.

    It took me a week or two with my copy of Guitar for the Practicing Musician–hell it took me a week or two to psych myself up to even try to get it down.

    But, to be honest, from then to now, twenty-something years later, I doubt I ever NAILED it the way she does here. I can pretty much breathe fire, and make all of those squeaks and squeals on command, but I’ve always struggled to really flawlessly cover somebody else’s solo.

    I really love guitar….. :)

  73. 73.

    Snarla

    I’ve been a ukulele novice for a couple years now, and I just had a breakthrough–found a song I can play while singing. Very exciting.

  76. 76.

    dopey-o

    @Trollhattan: i particularly like how she looks away from her fingers several times. lotta confidence. i would have my nose buried in the 14th fret and drip sweat all over the strings. she’s not even breathing hard.

  78. 78.

    stinger

    @Southern Beale: go white-water rafting, visit Washington DC, visit a farm, help build a Habitat for Humanity house, visit Gettysburg, visit Amish country, visit the Alamo, tour wine country, visit Kitty Hawk?

  80. 80.

    JR in WV

    @Southern Beale:

    Rafting on New River National River…

    Caving in Carter County, KY

    Visiting Mammoth Cave National Park

    Volunteer to work on an Archiological dig in the SW USA

  81. 81.

    d. b. cooper

    Technical ability is, alas, only a slight fraction of what makes good art. It’s a nice thing to have, but hopefully she can do more with it than copies of masturbatory guitar solos.

  82. 82.

    Redshirt

    I wish I hadn’t missed this thread. Awesome shreddage!

    Also, what crime is Eddie guilty of? I read some harsh implications.

  83. 83.

    Gus

    @Eric U.: Ha! Reminds me of Art Tatum learning how to play via player piano, but the player piano was playing two parts.

    @d. b. cooper: Jesus Christ, the kid’s 14. Let her live a little before you expect art from her.

  84. 84.

    Steverino

    If you ask her what “insouciance” means, she’ll just shrug, roll her eyes, and say, “Whatever.”

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