What the Hell is going on with McCain in this picture?

Just took a look at the mildly-hyped new site saclights.com.

There was nothing to see there and I moved on.

For starters, it appears to be attempting to pander to the much-solicited 18-to-25 demographic. I’m way past that age, but even in my 20s there’s no way that I would have found anything even remotely valid on this site. For example, I would still walk to the corner and pick up a copy of the Sacramento News&Review and look at the music listing grid if I wanted to see what was happening where this weekend.

Anyone who actually does meet the targeted age demographic should feel insulted when they see this garish, hastily assembled cyber-slop and realize that THIS is considered content that would attract them to get involved in visiting and contributing to saclights.com. I have a little more faith in the younger generation than to assume that this is where the future of American culture is headed. But then again, when I see that the number one most visited item on Newsweek.com is entitled “What’s Wrong With Britney?” that faith is severely tested.

And I can’t forget, of course, that there is a groundswell of youth support for Senator Obama’s presidential run at the moment, “because, like, Obama wants change and generates hope, and like, all the other candidates look old and probably have old people’s smell and stuff. Like, my parents voted for Hillary’s husband- how uncool would that be to vote for HER? Except maybe that John Edwards guy but he’s, like a bummer and uses big words and stuff, and even though black people like, scare us when we see them on the street it’s still cool to be voting for somebody like Barack.”

But I digress. Things could be worse. If Ron Paul was in his late 30s or early 40s it would be a whole new ballgame, and THAT would be kinda fucked.

Anyway. Supposedly, the Sacramento Bee is putting a tremendous amount of support and funding into this online dog saclights.com in order to cut into the weekly News&Review’s audience, but I can’t see how or why that’s going to happen at this point. Of course, the Internet is infested with enough self- made self-promoters, and also plenty of shallow attention whores with insecurity issues, to populate saclight.com’s photo and blog sections. But the question still lingers: What the fuck is the Bee/McClatchy trying to prove with this?

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

(Yeah, I know, the image is pretty small, so if you want a better view of it, Click on the image, Pilgrim)

We had a big storm today. Rain fell. Wind blew. Stuff got fucked up real good. Now that my power is back on, I'm going to post this picture so that I can blend into all of the other 30,000 people posting storm pictcures right now. The End.

An excellent opinion piece was in the Sunday Sacramento Bee today, reprinted from the Nation by their Washington correspondent, John Nichols. It's a well pointed assertion that the Bush administration, as well as our State Department, made virtually no attempt to diplomatically pressure Musharraf and the government of Pakistan to protect Benazir Bhutto's safety which could have helped to prevent her assassination. In the final lines of the article (which, oddly, were paragraphed differently in the Bee reprint) Mr. Nichols states:

This is a time for mourning. But it is, as well, a time for somber reflection on the utterly failed and fully dysfunctional foreign policies of the Bush-Cheney administration.

The world is a more dangerous place today.

The failure of George Bush and those around him to premise their relationship with Pervez Musharraf on the absolute demand that Benazir Bhutto be kept safe and alive made it so.

Now, the question is whether members of Congress -- Republicans and Democrats -- will step forward to say that the relationship that George Bush has established and maintained with Pervez Musharraf is no longer morally or practically tenable.

I have an answer for that question.

And the answer is- no! Those pussies won't do a thing since they're just as voluntarily brainwashed as Dubya into believing that this fatigue-wearing poseur Musharraf is going to help flush out Osama Bin Laden and help make the world safe for democracy again. Well, maybe Ron Paul would support cutting aid to Pakistan but he'd only do so because it would save tax dollars.

Read the full Nation piece: Click Here, Pilgrim

For more work by Jimmy Margulies, whose cartoon I stole to illustrate this blog entry, Click Here, Pilgrim

Hey Losers,

Islam forbids attacks on women.

Dear Midtown Neighbors,

Hey, you probably go to Safeway for your grocery shopping, don't you?

After all, there's not one but TWO of 'em within spittin' distance of us here.

You know how the ground beef prices are all jacked up nowadays? You know how Safeway ALSO packs their ground beef in packs of 1 and a half plus pounds minimum? There's a lot of single folks like myself living around here and I don't know about you, but if I was eating that size burgers all the time in one sitting I'd morph into Fat Elvis pretty damn quick!

Anyway, if I can't find a less than one pound package, as nice as the workers behind the counter around here are, I usually shop when they're busy or not open to wrap a custom order for me, so I usually just pass and opt for cube steak or something.

BUT I know that many of you fine people like to purchase that shit in bulk, especially when it's on sale, and store it in your freezer for weeks on end.

SO, if you did that with Safeway ground beef purchased between September 19 and November 5 of this year...

Throw that shit away.

Because salmonella is a bitch.

See? Sometimes you can read this blog and find something useful.

Here's the story of the beef recall: Click Here,Pilgrim

Hey, do me a favor, will ya?

Go to this website:

http://www.last.fm/

and type in

Michael Psycho

(And if they don't play me right away, you should be able to hear a bunch of classic shit from other bands and all that.)

Thanks, Pilgrim.

Whew. At least Barry Bonds doesn’t have to feel so lonely anymore.

What really surprises me about this here Mitchell Report: no mention of Mark McGwire except as an introduction and explicitly pointing out that the "andro" was considered legal at the time? Huh? Okay, having Jose Canseco on the list wasn’t exactly a shock. I am a little thrown off that Roger Clemens made the list, however. He always struck me as the All-American baseball template. But then again, there’s always been something All-American about using unscrupulous tactics to get ahead and win at life.

But then again, is the type of behavior that these guys are being accused of even worth getting all worked up over in the first place? I mean, look at Jimi Hendrix, for example. Jimi used performance-enhancing substances to improve his abilities, and he’s in a Hall of Fame. I’ve never heard Ian MacKaye or Jonathan Richman whining about how Hendrix shouldn’t have been allowed to have a recording contract because HE was juiced! Nobody’s trying to take away all those number one singles from the Stones just because they were stoned or loaded off their ass when they wrote most of those songs! And the Eagles were flying with a walking fuckin’ pharmacy named Joe Walsh when they composed and recorded much of Their Greatest Hits Vol. 1. Nobody’s putting an asterisk next to THAT album’s record of 28 million sales! And don’t try to tell me that there’s a difference: so-called professional music is WAY more competitive and brutally cutthroat than all of the North American major league sports combined!

In reality, this report isn’t going to do shit when it comes to cleaning up baseball. I doubt if the Mitchell findings will be shaking things up into any kind of noticeable results or changes. What the Hell, let’s just make the use of performance enhancing substances a requirement as opposed to a taboo for all professional athletes. Then things would get really interesting. Then again, the 100 homer seasons and 12 inning perfect games would start to get pretty boring after a while.

Dear Comcast,

It's official. You. Suck. Shit.

I could not fuckin' BELIEVE the treatment I received from your call center reps this morning. All I wanted to know was if there was a service problem with the High Speed Internet in my area.

After a semi-comical exchange of:

"Well, if the light's on you're connected."

"Yeah, but my homepage isn't loading, it's not connecting to your NETWORK."

"Well, if the light's on you're connected."

"Yeah, but I ping for Comcast.net and it says it can't find the network."

"Well, if the light's on you're connected."

I then asked to speak to a supervisor, at which point the bitch HUNG UP ON ME.

On the second call, I mentioned the hang up to the second rep, who replied with, "Oh, ha ha ha I hate when that happens..." and then put me on hold for fifteen minutes to "get" a supervisor. She even came back with the usual crap of "Now I didn't hang up on you, so don't hang up on me, 'kay? (chuckle)"

Giving up, I tried one more call where I got the excuse of how there's only one manager talking to a bunch of (presumably pissed off) people. Fuck that. That's not my problem. I pay over ONE HUNDRED BUCKS A MONTH for combined Cable TV and Internet and that's on the lower pricing tier. PLUS Comcast is raising the rates (again!) in January. If they're too money grubbing to hire enough people to take gripes about their shitty service, tough shit.

Of course, I never did have enough time to hold for a supervisor due to having to leave for work eventually and sure enough, my service was magically restored later in the day. But now I've learned a hard lesson about what happens when one company gains a practical monopoly on the cable service in one's local area. Absolute disrespect for the customer with no real recourse.

I am now seriously considering, no fuck that, I'm actually planning a switch to another service, probably from AT & T (just to burn Comcast's ass.) It's a Hell of a lot cheaper for not much lesser speed, and besides, Comcast lies out the ass about how fast they are. More often than not, I have a creaky slow connection depending on how many folks are on broadband in the vicinity of my modem. And I'd rather try to decipher a rep in Bangalore than get bullshit attitude from some dumbass in this country who thinks that they'll get through college and get a "real" job before they ever get fired.

In researching my latest blog rant (and searching for the Comcast VP to drop a courtesy call on- apparently that gentleman's name is Rick Germano and he's the Senior VP of Customer Operations,) I found a fascinating lil' blog appropriately entitled "Comcast Must Die." In the latest post, there is a reference to a recent American Customer Satisfaction Index report that Comcast has a rating of 56. Their customer satisfaction dropped 7% while their profits increased 12%! So if you'd like to read about this finding (and other disgruntled customers in the same boat I am, named the S.S. Corporate Swill Barge) Click Here, Pilgrim

So who really IS Bob Dylan, anyway?

Honestly, I don’t give a shit.

Within my own life experience, Dylan was the music, not the man. (Or, as the makers of the film “I’m Not There” are entailing, a woman in at least one shade of persona.) My memories of Dylan, thanks to an incredibly hip-for-his-age brother eight years my senior and a shared bedroom while we were growing up, are purely spawned from songs with words that may well have built an early critical thinking process in a five year old’s brain. I didn’t pick up on the life or image of Dylan (the type of stuff touched upon in work like the excellent documentary “Don’t Look Back”) until much later, and even then it was all about the songs and the images and statements created with them. Mr. Zimmerman was a teacher who made me want to pick up a guitar and say, “I want to do something like that.”

I recall seeing Ray Davies on TV a while back, and he said something about not wanting to ever meet his heroes because he knows he’d probably be disappointed. Maybe that is close to the excuse zone that is keeping me away from this movie, but perhaps the bigger reason is that I don’t mind learning the truth about the life experiences of notable people in history, but digging into abstract analytical concepts of what really makes the person tick is just a wee bit too much on the obsessive side for my personal taste. Therefore, this movie looks like a skip for me. I’ll just do something along the lines of listening to “Blood On The Tracks” for the umpteenth time if I want a peek at what’s going on in Bob’s head. After all, that’s something coming directly from the source.