Quotation of the Day

This would be featured as the quotation of the day in the NYT's daily email digest.

"If you spent six or seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting a graduate degree and you end up doing this, that is not a happy thought. But it is steady work."

JAMES JACOBS, president of Macomb Community College in Michigan, on the part-time jobs his college is offering many teachers.

Best line of a remarkable week

The Daily Show

Jon Stewart: Washington was so crowded today, there's so many people... You, as a bishop, are sort of doubly handicapped in that situation, only being able to move diagonally. How is that negotiating the crowds?

Bishop Gene Robinson: Jon, you have to understand...there's a queen on the board as well.

When Brown Can Stick Around

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when yellow will be mellow... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

Final words of Inaguration Benediction, Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery

Hang Loose

The Aliens and the Evil Office Man

Big Boy's "cover" for a comic book he worked on today

Matmos

Experimental electronic music. One of these dudes (Drew Daniel) is a recent PhD in English and an assistant professor at John Hopkins. He writes on melancholy. Their sound is tripped-out and fleshy.

Wikipedia: Matmos gained notoriety for their use of samples including "freshly cut hair" and "the amplified neural activity of crayfish" on their first album.

Caution: background video is NSFW.

Flying Lotus

aka Steven Ellison. This track based on Roberta Flack.

The The Impotence of Proofreading

Magnetic Morning

Doing the wonderful Kinks "The Way Love Used to Be." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5OL_dJ-vQA

The Melvins - Into the Void

Black Sabbath cover. Love the slow pace. This is live at the Kennel Club in SF, where I saw Dinosaur Jr., and others . . . can't remember.

Gary Og & The Exiles

"Sunday Bloody Sunday"

Henry My Son

We've been listening to a lot of old Pete Seeger around the house. Big Boy loves it. His favorite song is "Henry My Son," a ballad about a boy who eats something bad: "Mother be quick I got to be sick and lay me down to die." There are only a couple obscure versions of the song on YouTube. Here it is music hall style in the mid seventies.

Update: Well, that takedown was quick. Weird. Here's another, very straightforward version.

Ningen Isu

Nailing a cover of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man."

People Who Deserve It

Mostly standard-issue misanthropy site, but chuckle-worthy.

#64 - Self-Important Bluetooth Guy

Hey there buddy, I see you got one of those fancy cyborg ear attachments for your cell phone, you must be pretty important?

No?

Oh, of course you’re not, you’re not even on the phone right now, instead your just walking around with a blinking light in your ear like a metro-sexual robot.

Honestly, unless you’re police dispatch, or air traffic control, there is no way you’re getting enough calls to justify sporting that glorified techno-earring 24/7. So do us all a favor take that “thing” out of your ear and rejoin regular society.

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

Play (and sing) the theme from Shaft. The whole concept of a (very serious) ukulele orchestra seems uniquely British.

Primus - Hello Skinny

Covering The Residents, a Bay Area experimental group. I saw Primus in the early nineties. Great show, but they were getting radio play by that point and the mosh pit was oddly filled with frat boys.

Fantomas - Simply Beautiful

A Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) band. Pretty straightforward Al Green cover spiced with some thrash.

Favorite line: "There's a whole lot of things you and I could do."

More fussy Little Boy

"I wanna talk sad."

Russell Kane

Young comic on, among other things, being English and from the working class.

Looking for nuance

I don't think Israel is doing itself any favors by bombing and invading Gaza as it is doing right now. One only has to look at the vastly disparate casualty figures, especially of Palestinian civilians, to come to the conclusion that something is truly out of whack. Hasn't the failure of hyper-militarized responses to radicalism (Muslim or otherwise) been strikingly evident lately?

Laura Nyro

Songwriter Laura Nyro's arrangements are generally too sweet for me, but they are known to have influenced a generation of post-sixties pop singers. She also died of ovarian cancer at 49 years old, which strikes a chord.

David Ackles - Out on the Road

Before alt country, there was melancholy country.

Sublime - Doin' Time

Billy Stewart's version of "Summertime" got pulled, so here's Sublime's mashup.

The Bluefoot Project

It's a new year. Peace!