The Wake

Here’s an entertaining video montage of news anchors (and Dan Marino) losing their cool. I jacked it from Steve Perry at Minnesota Monitor, and he jacked it from Gawker. I guess jacking shit is part of the online game.

[Note a young, sleazy Bill O’Reilly at the 1:00 minute mark]

My night out on the town with my Japanese and Polish friends was a smash. We hit the Karaoke bar with full force. Everything from The Rolling Stones to Madonna was performed with mild and expressionless enthusiasm, with the rest of the patrons laughing drunkenly all the while. Karaoke is a very communal experience. It’s a great look into Japanese culture, as its serves as their primary source of recreation, according to my doctor friend.

After the bar closed, we went down to a Shisha Bar (or Hookah bar in the states) and ordered up some Strawberry flavored product. Along with that, we ordered 4 cherry and banana juices. Delicious enough on their own, they became even tastier upon Radek suggesting I empty the rest of our large carton of screwdriver into the each glass, …

Read more →

Im in an internet cafe in Berlin, with a 25 year old doctor from Japan, who was studying abroad in Poland, and is traveling Europe now. He was in the same room as me, and we saw some sights today. His English is.. .limited.

When I got in last night, I didnt have a place to stay but this Columbian girl who´d just missed her train to Poland was crying on a bench I was sitting at. When she stopped, we chatted about my time in Venezuela, after exchanging pleasantries. We had a really intersting chat about Columbian/Venezuelan relations, as I am pro Chavez, and she´s out spoken about her disdain for his stance on Columbia´s violations in Ecuador. Venezuela has no military deployments in Columbia, rather it has only defended, verbally, the sovereignty
of Ecuador. …

Read more →

The Good Ol’ Rev. Jeremiah Wright

It’s easy for any white person to call Jeremiah Wright’s recent actions egotistical. For whites, Wright is an easy Black target, as media coverage has proved this past week. Wednesday’s New York Times editorial claimed Wright’s recent statements were full of “racism” and “paranoia.” Both it and a Star Tribune editorial praised Sen. Obama’s moves to distance himself from his former pastor as much as he could. Steve Perry at Minnesota Monitor called Wright’s media tour a “selfish move.” In fact, I’ve only seen one positive commentary of Wright, which was published in Insight News, the Black community newspaper of the Twin Cities. Something’s not right with …

Read more →

I was going to about 5 shows a week on average here in London between my internship at Helter Skelter Agency LTD and my job writing for Music-news.com.

Here are some of the best gigs I hit:
The first show I saw in London was The Lionheart Brothers at The Social in Soho, I saw then later on in the spring at the Hoxton Square Bar in the Shoreditch area. Everyone needs to give this tune a listen. Norwegian Psych pop at its finest, “50 Souls and a Disco Bowl”

The second show I saw in London was Texan quartet, Explosions in the Sky. The show was at the Astoria, which has just been controversially shut down to make way for public transportation, read news story here.

The other band I saw at …

Read more →

In the hectic pace of my sleep deprived, London life style, I had very little time to relay all the great new bands I’ve discovered. So I write to you know from a café in Madrid with some suggestions and news.

Initially, I was quite disappointed with the proclaimed hot new bands of the moment in London. Bands like: New Young Pony Club, Does This Offend You Yeah?, Scouting For Girls, The Hoosiers, Guillemots, Pigeon Detectives, The Enemy, Ipso Facto. They’re all either boring electro groups trying to ride that long past new wave revival, sad Libertines rip offs, weak piano soft rock, or just plain shit.

The next level is bands that are a good listen and pleasant enough, but are incredibly over blown given the quality of their tunes. Within this I would include …

Read more →

Sure, I could write about tonight’s big Pennsylvania primary win for Hillary, but goddamn it, we all knew it was going to happen. Nothing has changed; Obama is still ahead in the delegate count and has most of the Democratic super delegates at his fingertips. Besides, there are tons of primaries still ahead and more pressing news to be told.

After a week of speculation, the rumors are true: according to the Star Tribune, the Minnesota Vikings have acquired defensive end and human wrecking ball Jared Allen. As this YouTube clip of the now-former Kansas City defender knocking the shit out of Jaguars QB David Gerrard illustrates, this sonofabitch Allen means business.

But the drunk-drivin’, mullet-sportin’, No. 69-wearin’ mammoth comes …

Read more →

Talking Points Memo just posted a new Hillary Clinton campaign ad, featuring flashes of Osama Bin Laden that are so brief it seems as if they are meant to be picked up by the viewer subconsciously. Is she attempting to dramatize the remaining bitter shreds of U.S. democracy? You be the judge.

But what really puts the aches in my back is how Hillary recently denounced the “activist base” of the Democratic Party at a closed-door (meaning uber-wealthy guests only) fundraiser right after Super Tuesday. She said, and I will quote:

“We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, …

Read more →

“Well I just think that it is so shocking that after all this time we thought we’d seen it all with Marilyn Monroe, and… here we go,” says Lara Spencer on CBS’s The Early Show.

The Marilyn Monroe sex tape has finally surfaced, thank God. The media was almost running out of living celebrity faux news fodder.

It is still a mystery why Spencer thinks this “news” is “so shocking.” In her lifetime Monroe made a name for herself as one of the most sensual and seductive stars on the planet, in addition to having rumored affairs with a number of celebrities and politicians. Further, wasn’t she on the cover of Playboy? Yeah, she was.

I’m personally glad that the person who bought the foreplay tape (no sex, just oral) has more integrity than the people reporting …

Read more →

Schlitz is Back!

Milwaukee beers get a bad rap, but heck don’t most of the Ameircan mega-brews. Schlitz was once at the heart of Milwaukee’s brewing powerhouse. But don’t be worried, there’s plenty of brews still being brewed in my hometown and a lot of them aren’t half bad.

The “Beer that Made Milwaukee Famous” is back and I just happened to have seen a few sightings and tasted the original recipe not to long ago. No, they’re not returning to the 1849 recipe, which would be awesome, but they have returned to the “classic” 1960’s recipe. Now I know we’re going to have detractors from both sides. Some may call the beer utter crap, but I have to say it …

Read more →

U.S. Senate candidate Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer

While most Minnesotans have stuck comedian Al Franken in their minds as the next Minnesota DFL Senate candidate, St. Thomas peace studies professor Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is still vying for the party’s upcoming June nomination. Despite barely being mentioned in the local media, Nelson-Pallmeyer surpassed Mike Ceresi in the race and is slowly but surely winning over the most liberal sectors of the DFL. After looking into his campaign, I found out that Nelson-Pallmeyer is a more progressive, less elite alternative to Franken. Although Franken often mentions the late Sen. Paul Wellstone as his role model, Nelson-Pallmeyer’s grassroots campaign, stances on the issues, and intellectual demeanor (he’s an educator) resemble Wellstone much more …

Read more →

The biggest key to winning an election is projecting a public image. It surpasses where candidates stand on the issues, how they work with others, what their personalities are like, and just about every other necessary factor needed to run a successful campaign. Remember when then-Minnesota Attorney General and 2006 DFL gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch called a reporter a “Republican whore” one week before the election? Hatch’s loss to Gov. Pawlenty shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise to in retrospect. The sad thing is, Hatch made best election performance by a DFL gubernatorial candidate in decades, according to St. Olaf College political scientist Dan Hofrenning. Remember that this was 2006, when the Democrats swept the national elections.

To be fair, it’s quite an assumption …

Read more →

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and how his name and reputation in the Black Community was being undermined and exploited by a media circus centered on a few YouTube clips of him criticizing the U.S. government. Now that the circus is over and labeled as old news, it might be an opportune time to present Rev. Wright in his own words, words that were certainly suppressed in the coverage of his past sermons. What follows is a letter to the editor intended for, but never published in, the New York Times and a video of Wright making the case for his church on Hannity and Colmes a few weeks before he was all over the news.

In …

Read more →

For the few weeks before the looped YouTube videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright shifted half of the Democratic Presidential coverage to racial matters (the other half of the coverage being focused on the sinking economy), the topic of the talk was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The trade agreement, which was put into law by President Clinton in 1993, restricts obstacles that corporations used to face when they moved their goods between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. It essentially made free trade easier, prompting many U.S. corporations like General Electric to relocate across the border and hire Mexicans at lower pay (starting pay for a Mexican engineer at GE is equal to one-third of a U.S. salary).

Upon NAFTA’s inception, major trade unions were immediately against it, arguing …

Read more →

It’s best to begin this post by noting that 81 percent of the United States believe this country is headed toward a bleak future. Only a third of people believe that the next generation will be better off than the current generation. Fewer than half of parents — 46 percent — expect their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they themselves do. The other day, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose job requires a basic sixth grade knowledge of stubbornness, finally acknowledged the possibility of a recession.

And it looks like some politicians in Washington are continuing to poorly execute what are otherwise decent ideas. Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to President Bush …

Read more →