Perspective is a Good Thing

Buddy of mine at work on me being worried my going to Paris will be the proverbial American bull turned loose in a Parisian china shop: "They'll be fine. They handled the Nazis, they can handle you."

Del Boy Moment du Jour

Xmastime is Going to Paris!!!!!

Longtime Xmastime fans know of my lifetime quest for the perfect croissant, and I'm pretty sure I'll find it in Paris. I'm leaving for there tomorrow and damn right I'm bringing my little buddy.

Only Fools and Horses du Jour

Pirates Rule!

A few weeks ago I Tweeted this out:

I have no interest in seeing any of these Steve Jobs movies. But I did watch the hell out of Pirates of Silicon Valley over the years.

— XMASTIME (@XMASTIMEblog) October 9, 2015

At Salon today some guy agrees:

The greatness of “Pirates of Silicon Valley” lies in the fact that it manages to brilliantly balance all of these elements into a single hour-and-a-half long narrative, paying tribute to the achievements of its subjects without excessively glorifying or vilifying them. While audiences will need to decide whether “Steve Jobs” performs a comparable feat (Wozniak has praised the new film — not as effusively as he did “Pirates,” perhaps, but at least he didn’t dismiss it as “crap” like he did the Ashton Kutcher vehicle “Jobs”), it’s fair to say that “Pirates of Silicon Valley” established the standard that all worthy movies about the computer revolution will need to follow. Its themes are the themes not only of these particular stories, but of our era in history as a whole. To understand our time, we need to understand the feats and foibles that helped create it, and so far no work of art has done this better than “Pirates of Silicon Valley.”

Some Video Facebook Did, Sure Why Not

Just Another Night on Watty's Lap

State du Moi

Button-fly jeans pretty much double my time at a urinal. Grrrr.

Got Money to Burn?

You can buy the house Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen wrote Born to Run in!!

He was sitting on the edge of his bed in this home when the words "born to run" came to him, Springsteen said in the documentary "Wings for Wheels."

"I worked very, very long on the lyrics to 'Born to Run,' because I was very aware that I was messing with classic rock'n'roll images that easily turned into cliches," he said.

Leaving

I'll never forget a coupla weeks before this video came out, when he was playing the same show as Marah and I was regaling him and Dave with the story of how I'd gotten kicked out of the Mercury Lounge the night before. He was very amused and told me shit man, that's hard to fucking do. Two hours later I brought down the house with my egg-shaker riff during Marah's version of Can't Hardly Wait, but that's for another day. - XMASTIME

Based on the video below, it looks like my story is now only the second-best egg-shaker story in Marah history. But that's okay, as Leaving is a superslice and I'm a little bummed I missed out on the band's triumphant return to the city of brotherly love this weekend. Could I beat the hell out of Serge's kid right now if I wanted to? Sure, but I'll be the bigger man  ;)

State du Moi

Seriously starting to think me and Alicia Keys just aren't going to happen.  :(

Thoughts. I Have Them.

While it's hard for me to picture a worse president than W, I'm not really popping a hamstring to actually BLAME him for 9/11. However, this idea that he "kept us safe" is a bit like Red Sox fans bragging about how great Bill Buckner played the field in Game 7. I mean, camon.

Ironic Pillow du Jour

Happy Birthday To the King

Thoughts. I Have Them.

Listening to Republicans explain how the country should be run has officially become the same as listening to fat people's weight loss advice. 

One Year Later

This still cracks me up:

This story from Op on whom was surely the Matthew Barber of his class made my day.

i told Luke about the time my music teacher pulled out his clarinet on the first day and said I can make it laugh [makes it laugh] and I can make it cry [makes it cry] and how the kid behind me said Can you make it shut up? the point being, i said to Luke, that kid wasnt long for the school but that crazy motherfucker lives forever in my heart.

Del Boy Mangles French :)

This Is Impressive.

Fuck You, GOP

...of course government on any level bigger than the Junior Women's Club is not made up of real people that you may know and live amongst but are instead a faceless, nameless phantasm of evil, socialist energy that will merely be forced into some backroom to shake it's fists at the sky "damn you, freedom, you've beaten me THIS time!!!" and rub it's hands with glee at the prospect of coming back again and trying to destroy America as if in some Spy vs. Spy cartoon or Jerry muttering "Newman!!" through clenched teeth. - XMASTIME

A brilliant article makes the same point today re: please quit sending idiots to Washington:

"Let's disrupt Washington," Bush told Fox News's Sean Hannity. “Let's create a little bit of a recession in Washington, D.C., so that we can have economic prosperity outside of Washington." Washington, D.C., is filled with hundreds of thousands of actual American citizens, including me. But Jeb Bush can get away with his lighthearted call for economic suffering for a major U.S. city because the "Washington" of Americans' fevered imaginations is somehow to blame for all their problems. They hate Washington.

Well guess what? We hate you more.

Election after election, districts all over America send their village idiots to Congress to rule over us, to write our laws and to spend trillions of our dollars. Some of the people they elect aren't qualified to spoon food into their own mouths, let alone serve in Congress.

At this moment, Republicans can't figure out who should be the next speaker of the House, one of the most powerful jobs in the government, because they can't find someone who will break the government enough. The 40 members of the House Freedom Caucus – the only members of Congress who love freedom, I guess – want someone who will shut down the government unless President Obama orders a nuclear strike on Planned Parenthood clinics across America. (I think I have that right.) And they're holding the process hostage until they find someone to satisfy their hunger for chaos.

After breaking the government, they'll go home to their constituents to join their complaints about how government just doesn't work. It's that dang Washington, D.C.! If only we could fix it!

State du Moi

Not 100% sure but I think I just watched a deaf couple have a rather vicious fight in sign language. 

BREAKING NEWS: Area show to be attended by exactly 0 people.

Judge Oppresses Group for Showcasing Their Enthusiasm for State’s Rights; Jesus & His Scrappy, Lovable Sidekick baby Jesus Howl “Where’s Our Country?!??!”

If You Live Long Enough Things Will Eventually Go Your Way

Laziness is good, grit is bad. 

Sweet, sweet redemption!

On a Side Note

My mind is still blown that I met Jeff Lamp this weekend.

Kids in Philly Re-release, Cont.

It's been a while, but I'd almost forgotten how great the B-side to Point Breeze was. In fact, I probably prefer Why Independent Record Stores Fail to the A-side.

New Campaign: "Someone Break It to Dave" #marah

If You've Ever Wondered...

...which song song is most improved when all occurrences of "I," "me," "my," etc. are replaced with "Greg"  HERE'S YOUR ANSWER.

Work. It's Killing Me.

Office day trip out to Maketto to practice the Sumi Ink Club technique of group painting. Nailed it.

KIDS IN PHILLY, CONT.

I like to have a sense of place with bands, which is why I love what this guy wrote that was shared on Serge Bielanko's Facebook page about the wonderfully Philly-centric Kids in Philly, which Marah re-released on vinyl to celebrate its 15th year anniversary:

One of the many grave miscalculations the modern record industry has wrought is the belief that music will appeal to the widest audience possible when it speaks in some kind of pop Esperanto that betrays nothing of its origins. Whatever their charms, it matters not very much where Lady Gaga or Nickelback come from. They could be from anywhere. Or nowhere. For them, that’s the point. But it wasn’t always like that.

Irrespective of birthplace, the music of Elvis and Booker T & The MGs comes from Memphis. The Beatles’ music is of Liverpool. The Gallagher Brothers’ sound sprang from Manchester. Bruce is Asbury Park. Neil Young, Winnipeg; Curtis Mayfield, Chicago; Buck Owens, Bakersfield. Everything on Motown is from Detroit. Jay Z = Brooklyn. The Velvet Underground is the sound of the Lower East Side. The Ramones are the Bowery.

Marah is Philadelphia. The record you hold in your hands is their long-form birth certificate and it’s also your visitor’s visa. I realized this the first time I visited Marah on their home court. It was a blazing hot summer weekend and as I walked the streets of South Philly, everything seemed curiously recognizable. Keep your virtual reality Oculus headset, through a hundred spins of Kids In Philly, I had Dave and Serge Bielanko leading me around by the elbow, steering me through the streets and haunts of their town. It was all familiar. It was all new.

BUY YOUR DAMN COPY HERE TODAY!!!!

Xmastime Tries Caviar for the First Time!

In Which Xmastime Meets His First Hero, Jeff Lamp.

Jeff Lamp was my first hero as a kid, a smooth-shooting All-American forward who hit clutch shots like most people breathe air. I'd watch Virginia play on Raycom Sports and then sprint outside and pretend I was Jeff Lamp, falling out of bounds from the corner and hitting yet another big shot to send the Cavaliers to the Final Four. I probably dreamed of him and me and Lee Raker rooming together and going out for pizza after big games, which of course is to say that I absolutely dreamed of him and me and Lee Raker rooming together and going out for pizza after big games and generally shooting the shit about what great friends we all were.

As you most hardcore, dedicated to the point at which your family is beginning to worry about you fans of Xmastime know, I've spent the past few years wondering where in the hell on the Internet Jeff Lamp is. Yes, he graduated from college in 1981, way before the Internet (so was WWII but there's plenty of photos/info on that!) but for a guy who led UVa in scoring 4 times, was all-ACC 2 years and an All-American while playing alongside Ralph Sampson, I've always been surprised at how little stuff on him I could find online. It's not like he was a damn scrub, he was one of the ACC's all-time great players. Yet he's always remained a bit of an enigma, an enigma draining yet another 17-footer in his Adidas.

Incredibly, a coupla weeks ago longtime Xmastime buddy The Gnat let me know that the 1981 Final Four team was being honored as part of a scholarship program in Richmond. This was my all-time favorite college basketball team. It's hard to imagine now, but back in those days UVa was the biggest team in the country, veritable rock stars like teams like Duke et al would become later on. Well, in my eyes anyway. It was the prefect storm of their being a great team, me being a 9 year old boy living in the sticks with nothing else to do and the time being what many people still consider to be the ACC's Golden Age.

I was of course absolutely thrilled when I saw Jeff Lamp's name on the "expected to appear" list for the event. Now, as great of a college player as he was, and he had a cup of coffee in the NBA, it's not like anyone really knows where he is, or what he's doing. His is not exactly a universal name. It's not like he's popping up on ESPN every week - you have to be a pretty hardcore fan of that era to know who he is. As years (decades, ugh) have passed a sort of mythology has built up in my mind, my childhood idol worship of him intertwined with his lack of presence on the Internet. I mean hell, of course Ralph was a bigger, more famous player but if you REALLY wanted to meet him you probably could, at any of the events he participates in throughout the basketball season. Or just go to Harrisonburg and sit around for a while. Lamp, meanwhile, seemed like a character dreamed from a past life, fantastical unicorn out there never to be seen or heard from again.

I was thrilled, but also skeptical...what if I went to the event and he didn't show up? Don't get me wrong - it'd still be a thrill meeting the other guys: Sampson. Gates. Othell. Ricky. Jeff Jones. Terry Gates. But the dream meeting, my white whale so to speak, would be Jeff Lamp.

So the Gnat and I walk into the Virginia Historical Society lobby in Richmond, and there’s a spread of appetizers along with a small and surprisingly open bar, and before we could really adjust ourselves to the setting we practically bumped into "The Blitz Brothers," "The Smurfs", Othell Wilson and Ricky Stokes. We were like wow, Othell & Ricky! And they couldn’t have been more welcoming; it was as if they spent all their days greeting complete strangers to gawk at people who hadn’t touched a basketball court in decades. Boom – right away, it was arms around shoulders and pictures being taken and The Gnat & I talking about going to school in a neighboring country from the high school his brother Bobby had starred at before going on to be a part of the first (and only until 2 years ago) Virginia team to win the ACC Tournament. And of course as we’re talking to them you couldn’t help but notice a particular 7’4” guy lurking within a few feet of us, greeting and taking pictures with anyone who came up to him. We waited our time to see Ralph with Othell & Ricky, and Othell mentioned “yeah, plenty of the guys are here, there’s Jeff, and…” and I looked in the direction where he was waving a hand at and even with his back turned, I knew I was looking at the great Jeff Lamp.

HE HAD SHOWN UP!!!!  HE WAS THERE!!! I WAS GOING TO MEET HIM!!!!

Playing it super cool, natch, we got our turn to talk to Ralph, and he was cool too. I told him about my brother going to his basketball camp and how pleased he’d been with the experience re: how hands-on Ralph was throughout it, which Ralph seemed to appreciate. More so, he got a kick out of me telling him that my brother had attended the camp under false pretenses by claiming to be me, what with my not being allowed to go thanks to my shitty grades.

So then it was finally time. Jeff Lamp was kind of standing there by himself in a small sea of moving bodies, and I moved in (with the Gnat guiding my ass which was in a bit off a stupor – were it not for him I’m pretty sure I woulda just stood around commenting on the cheese plates all night.) Jeff Lamp happily shook my hand, and I told him how much he was my favorite player as a kid, he was my hero blah blah blah. He laughed and said something like “gee, don’t tell me you were like in third grade or something!” which I laughed off as in oh don’t be ridiculous of course I wasn’t that young when OMG IN 1980-81 I WAS EXACTLY IN 3RD GRADE!!!!! Then I moved on to my whole thing about not being able to find him online and suddenly he says oh yeah, someone found and passed that along to him and he’d seen it.

JEFF. LAMP. HAS. SEEN. XMASTIME. YA’LL!!!!!!!!!!!!   

Long story short, I did not hold back on the gushing. What the fuck, I know I’ll never see him again, and I wanted him to know how much he'd meant to me as a kid. He didn’t seem like the type who was really used to strangers coming up to him and telling him how awesome he is, but he was nothing but incredibly friendly and polite.

Meeting Jeff Lamp is something I’ll never, ever forget.

The rest of the night was great – there was a panel where the players told stories and answered questions, and then The Gnat and I met Terry Gates and Jeff Jones as well. The event was only half-filled so there was total access to the players, all of whom happily received anyone who wanted to talk to them.

Then somehow we all found ourselves next door at the bar, where I quickly decided not to stalk my hero. I played it cool, casually hanging out talking to Jeff Jones and Terry Gates while Jeff Lamp spent most of the time talking to the woman who’d coordinated the event. He was the first to leave, after about 20 minutes. He had to catch a flight back to LA in the morning. I didn’t try some last-ditch “let’s be BFF!!!” thing; I simply watched him walk out of the bar into the parking lot and then into the night, and I was fully satisfied with the friendly encounter we’d had earlier that would be burned in my mind forever.

Once my hero was gone I exhaled and just had a blast over the next couple of hours with Othell, Ricky, Ralph  & Terry Gates, who let me look at his 1980 NIT ring. I didn’t even ask to hold it, I simply asked if that’s what the ring was and before I even realized it he was giving it to me to hold and look at. Very cool.

Although I’ve blathered away for a few thousand words here, none of them could actually convey what it meant for me to meet Jeff Lamp. I don’t even feel silly at all for being a man in his 40s acting like a schoolgirl meeting Taylor Swift. After all, if you ever had a hero as a kid, a part of them never truly goes away. If you’re lucky.

Xmastime & Jeff Lamp hanging out, no big whoop.

 Xmastime & The Gnat chilling with Ralph fucking Sampson.

Othell & Ricky! And Xmastime! "The Guys!"

Xmastime & The Gnat with point guard Jeff Jones

(l-r) Othell Wilson, some guy, Jeff Lamp, Ralph Sampson, Terry Gates, Ricky Stokes, some guy

Stumped by my thoughtful question, "what the hell IS dry ice?"

Ricky Stokes just as I'm cutting one. Whoops.

Terry Gates' 1980 NIT ring. I'll prolly send it back, found out it's only worth $19.95 on ebay.

Othell Wilson, just before I hit him up for some cash.

Xmastime, Ralph & The Gnat on a Saturday night. No biggie.

A big thank you to The Gnat for making this possible for me. Here he is with Jeff Lamp.

My look when I sense you're eyeballing the last slice.

I Will Say This

If Ben Carson isn't our next president he could do very well for him$elf by being the voice of Boo Boo in the next Yogi Bear movie. 

Happy Birfday...

...MARLEY!!

Here's Marley ROCKING OUT WITH DT AND THE SHAKES on their classic hit, Seconds.

Or, as my camera work suggests, Marley solo  :)

Happy 75th Birthday John Lennon

After the Implosion

One of the many joys of Marah's reissue of their classic Kids in Philly is the bonus tracks, one of which was always one of my all-time favorite songs by the band and was never released. This recording's also from the first time I ever heard it, at the KIP release show at the TLA.

"Republicans suddenly about to start insisting that yes of course they always loved Frasier."

For Fuck's Sake

Dear UPS:

It's 8pm. I'm sitting about 8 feet away on the other side of my door. You can see my lights are on, and you can hear my tv. But no no, please just dump my package and scurry away without bothering to knock so I know it's there. Next time please leave a shining red light with a bell alerting the city of DC that there's some free shit outside my apartment if they want it.

Thank you.

Bruuuuuuuuuuuuce

A few years ago HERE I rolled my eyes at the fan-created doc Springsteen & I, although it had one scene that got me:

Springsteen & I is a documentary that needs to explain why it exists, but I thought of this when I saw the great scene when the kid tells Bruce's he's been dumped, and Bruce gives him a hug. And he fucking means it.

 Of course that made me think of the famous 1980 story of him visiting a random fan's house:

Springsteen lore has it that Bruce was once spotted in a movie theater watching Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (which comments on artist/fan relations). The fan who saw him challenged Bruce to prove he didn't regard his own fans with the contempt as the Allen stand-in in the movie by coming to meet his mom and have dinner. Bruce did so and supposedly still visits the fan's mother every time he's in St Louis.

What this doesn't mention is Bruce was in awe that the kid opened HIS life up to him, just like the many, many kids who did every day:

"You meet somebody and it's like an open well. In ten minutes I'll know more about him than his mother and father do, maybe his best friend. All the things it usually takes for people to know each other just go away, because there's this feeling that it's so fleeting. They tell you the thing that's most important to them right away. It's just a real raw, emotional thing; it's like the cleanest thing you ever felt. You have a communication, a feeling, and I don't know, you just gotta love the guy. If you don't there's something the matter with you.

And it ain't some starry-eyed thing, and it ain't some Hollywood thing, and it ain't some celebrity thing. This guy, he loves you, and what's more, he knows you in a certain way. That's the thing that makes me strong. I get strong when I meet somebody like that."

And then for all my turning up my nose at the Springsteen & I doc, he drops this, hich is fucking amazing.

This Guy...

My thoughts on Steve Rannazzisi, the guy from The League, which I've never watched, who recently had to admit he'd lied about being downtown on 9/11 are you know what, move on. He seems to genuinely be horrified at what he did, which was let a lie slip out for no discernible reason and then get sucked into having to to live out the lie for the next 14 years. I'm sure we've all done lesser, less famous versions of a lie like this. I'm sure the guilt that's eaten him up is greater than any animus from people who really did suffer because of that day could serve to him. And if you're upset that he's cutting into your share of the grief, then to me that says more about you than him. There's a lot of people out there like the guy from SNL who get to feel magnanimous and pat themselves on the back for forgiving Rannazzisi. He fucked up, and in the end it's not like it changes anything about 9/11 for the better or worse. There have been bigger monsters throughout history than this guy.

Cervi!

Nice story from Pirates catcher Francisco Cervelli, who was the Yankees backup for a coupla years but always seemed to get hurt (twice, I believe, on his birthday.) Every Yankees fan loved him; can't imagine any of us not happy for his success with the Pirates.

Children at Play

In 2008 I wrote, probably rather sexily, this:

But one thing that still sticks in my craw is being reminded of Bush as a dress-up cowboy wannabe pretender. What did we expect, after all – this a guy that dresses up to play cheerleader, dresses up to play pretend oil man and dresses up to play cowboy on his “ranch.” His tea party dress-up Lorenzo Charles moment being, of course, putting on his flight suit costume for “Mission Accomplished.” I’m surprised nobody’s walked in on him in the Oval Office in full KISS makeup wailing air guitar to “Detroit Rock City.”

Te right's fascination with being movie tough guys with guns may be sort of the same thing, a dress-up fantasy:

While Trump and Carson may have personalities that are polar opposites in terms of temperament, they do have a couple of important things in common (besides crackpot politics).  They are both outrageously arrogant and they both see themselves as Hollywood-style heroes. This notion they are personally so tough that if anyone threatened them with a gun, they’d either out-draw them or inspire everyone to run straight into a hail of bullets, is ludicrous. Neither of these men are trained military veterans or have any professional experience with firearms — except in their own Walter Mitty fantasies. These comments are embarrassing for both of them... They see themselves as heroes like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson protecting themselves and society at large from violent predators. In fact, Dirty Harry and Bronson’s vigilante were criminals.

On an aside, this is right on too:

Ben Carson, the Republican presidential candidate, said on Tuesday that victims of mass shootings should not be timid during attacks, imagining that if he were facing a raging gunman, “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me.”

The remarks on Fox News came a week after a gunman entered a community college classroom in Oregon and opened fire on students after asking them about their religion. Mr. Carson said that he would defend his faith at any cost and that if he had been in that classroom he would not have cooperated.

“I would say: ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all,’” Mr. Carson, a conservative who has been rising in recent polls, said.

That’s very impressive. I’m sure Carson had a lot to teach the victims about how they should have behaved more bravely in the face of an armed madman bent on killing them.   One of them, a veteran who tried to keep the shooter out of the room, did live, so perhaps Carson can tell him all about what he did wrong when he’s out of the hospital.  As for defending his faith at any cost and committing suicide rather than cooperate, well let’s just say that makes him someone who has more in common with Islamic fundamentalists than he might be comfortable with.

Fucking idiot.

The Gaslight Anthem’s classic (?) The ’59 Sound is over-the-top overwrought almost to a comical point, but it gets me every time and a great chorus is a great chorus and OMG look who also likes it my bff Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen!!!

Finally, a reason to move to the South. #efftheMcmuffin

2541

To guys like me the numbers 2541 have always meant a lot; The Replacements' Tim was recorded there along with Husker Du's New Day Rising, the Minneapolis one that started it all, The Trashmen's Surfin' Bird, and so much more. And of course Grant Hart summed its ending up perfectly at the end:

Hart, in surveying the demise of his band, isn’t looking at particular people or recounting specific actions, but taking inventory of the packed moving boxes by the front door. “Now everything is over, now everything is done,” he sings. “Everything’s in boxes at twenty-five forty-one.”

Awesome du Jour

NASA's released 8,400 hi-res photos from the Apollo program.

In America, Cont. Again.

Yesterday HERE I opined, as much as someone like me can opine, this:

t some point we have to wonder if this is yet another racist dog whistle that we’re all inured to, “The fabric of our culture” being a percentage of white males who like being white males & staying in power. 

Today a writer over at Salon said kind of the same thing: 

For conservatives, hanging onto guns is a way to symbolically hang onto the cultural dominance they feel slipping from their hands.

I've also been arguing on the sidelines that the total removal of guns has no opportunity cost since they serve one purpose and one purpose only, killing. Which the Salon guys agrees with:

The point of this rhetoric is to distract from the fact that guns were invented for the sole purpose of killing. Instead, Huckabee is invoking the framework where  the gun is actually a symbol of all that conservatives hold dear instead of what they really are, which is weapons that have no use outside of being weapons.

People who wear a homburg ranked, from l-r.

Macca

Each remastering of Beatles albums reveals that, incredibly, Paul McCartney was an even better bass player than we'd thought. Wow.

In America, Cont.

I’d like to revisit the idea of “oh fuck it, it’s part of the fabric of our culture" when it comes to guns in America.  I think it’s just become something we automatically say without actually thinking about it. I don’t feel like it’s a part of who I am. And I bet there’s a lot of people out there who would say the same (I don’t wanna be sexist here, but how many woman are really pumped up about guns?) I’d wager that the number of people who actually feel that guns are a big part of their culture and what America means to them would not be big enough to label it as being such a large part of the fabric of America. But there’s somehow an implication that a guy in Idaho taking a selfie with his rifle is more American than I am. He is not. The guys waving their AK-47s around at Chipolte are not more “American” than me. At some point we have to wonder if this is yet another racist dog whistle that we’re all inured to, “The fabric of our culture” being a percentage of white males who like being white males & staying in power. I’m not sure the white guy in Idaho is as willing to fight for the Chicago black guy’s right for a gun.

In America, Cont. $$$

At this point the NRA looks like a billionaire miser desperate to do anything to not lose a nickel, all while even more billions pile into their bank account. With a gun count over 300 million and rising in America, your spidey senses should be tingling to tell you that it's not about people protecting themselves, and our rights, and America's culture, but about exactly one thing: selling guns.

In America

One day, probably not in our lifetime, enough mass killings will have added up to make America finally abolish guns. And the irony will be that it won't be because of pinko-commie liberal hippies like me, but because of so-called "responsible" gun-owners who demanded the rights of extremists be protected in the form of mass proliferation, automatic weapons, "everyone should be armed everywhere" beliefs so that the killings kept occurring.  But hey, they're the "good guys", of course.

Only Fools and Horses du Jour

This has to be the funniest longish scene without Del Boy; the way Boycie says "Ghostbusters" kills me every time.

In America.

Prayers in the aftermath of a mass shooting are wasted; even worse, they're silly. Particularly when there is in fact a fairly clear-cut way to prevent those very shootings.

In America.

Our devotion to guns is a unique thing. Plenty of people love cars, but I’ve never heard anyone say “hey, as a safe, responsible driver there’s no way I’m gonna let you take away a person’s right to drive 100mph completely wasted.”

"Man's Assault on Freedom, Jesus and Jesus' Scrappy, Lovable Sidekick Baby Jesus Continues."

"This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are...
Posted by The White House on Thursday, October 1, 2015

Only Fools and Horses du Jour

I could listen to Del say "there is a rhino loose in the city" over and over all day. Kills me.


Theres A Rhino Loose In The City by em011