Terry Gross’ NPR interview with Jay-Z except his responses have been edited out in the SoundCloud above, so you can respond in his place. You have 10 seconds for each answer.
First time ever seeing Golden Gate Bridge! (Taken with Instagram at Sutro Baths Ruins)
The @NewYorkObserver did a writeup of Dylan today, which landed on the cover. (By @weareyourfek, yeah Foster!)
Props to artist Drew Friedman for the awesome Dylan-as-Teddy-Roosevelt illustration, which made my week.
Four years ago today, a member of our team found a potato chip—a Baked Lay, precisely—in his lunch that looked suspiciously like the state of Iowa.
Today, Barack Obama is president. And the chip, having traveled with our teammate to every job and town he’s lived in, currently resides in a Tupperware container in his desk. Today seemed like the appropriate day to tell the entire internet about this.
With chip photos or without, either is OK—do you have a story to share about where you were when Obama won Iowa four years ago?
Did you hear the one about the toast that had jesus on it?
Via Matt Taibbi:
The Iowa caucus, let’s face it, marks the beginning of a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests.
If that sounds like a glib take on a free election system that allows the public to choose whichever candidate they like best without any censorship or overt state interference, so be it. But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.
That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.
The auctioned election process is designed to reduce the field to two candidates who will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars apiece from the same pool of donors. Just take a look at the lists of top donors for Obama and McCain from the last election in 2008.
Obama’s top 20 list includes: Goldman Sachs ($1,013,091), JPMorgan Chase & Co ($808,799), Citigroup Inc ($736,771) WilmerHale LLP ($550,668), Skadden, Arps et al ($543,539), UBS AG ($532,674), and Morgan Stanley ($512,232).
McCain’s list includes: JPMorgan Chase & Co ($343,505) Citigroup Inc ($338,202) Morgan Stanley ($271,902) Goldman Sachs ($240,295) UBS AG ($187,493) Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher ($160,346), Greenberg Traurig LLP ($147,437) and Lehman Brothers ($126,557).
“In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse). And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration).” —Glenn Greenwald
Shit is fucked up and bullshit, fo’ sho.
Who do you get to snuggle with? (Taken with instagram)
For my 30th this May, I’m considering leaving NYC for a few weeks and hitting all the cities I’ve always wanted to see. Beirut is one of them. I have a good friend there, and I’ve been meaning to go visit her. (Also on the list I’m considering: here, here, and here. Oh and here.)*
(video via @habibh)
*Budapest, Prague, Moscow, Istanbul. Anything I’m missing?
Found a new place to work when I’m in Buffalo, as I am for the week. Sweetness 7 cafe, on Grant Street — the owner bought the 20,000 square foot run down Victorian on a whim. Sadly, they’re only open from 8AM to 3PM. But if you’re ever in Buffalo, come here. It’s wonderful. (Photo via flickr)
Facebook Timeline. I activated it, and didn’t like it, and the privacy controls didn’t do what I wanted them to do. Other than managing a few corporate accounts (which I’ll create a new account to do), I have no use for this. See you here, and on Twitter, I guess.
There are times in which I catch myself thinking about my dad, suddenly sad that I can’t call him or send him an email with a stupid picture that I know would make him laugh. There are times when I want to clench my fists and punch the walls, kick the furniture, shout at the top of my lungs because I MISS MY FATHER and I WANT HIM BACK. But I can’t do that, because I feel like it’s counterproductive to getting over the fact that something bad happened to me once. There’s no use in dwelling on it and letting it destroy everything I can accomplish in the future, despite being a thing that happened in the past that has shaped the way I am today.
Dead Dad’s Club. No one chooses to be in it, but it’s comforting when someone writes about it so eloquently. My dad and I used to email (articles, links, news stories) back and forth a few times a day while we were both at our jobs. When I had a few down minutes, I’d dial his work switchboard (“extension 2229, please.” “One moment.”)
Those emails are now put away in a Gmail folder marked “Laird,” which I like to read now and then. I have a million pictures of us together, even some recordings of him playing his acoustic guitar on the porch. But the emails I love the most. Sometimes I wonder who has his cell phone number now, or who works in his old office where he’d send me emails during the day. I still have my old cell phone that has my last text messages from him in there. I miss him.
Merry Christmas! Would you like to play a 2-hour-long show of offbeat and vintage Christmas music, with Bob Dylan as your DJ? You’re in luck! Here is Dylan’s 2006 Christmas show from “Theme Time Radio Hour,” his late-’00s program on XM satellite radio. The playlist — posted here — runs from Leadbelly to ’50s mambo to Johnny Paycheck singing “Jingle Bells.” (But none of Dylan’s own recordings). Along the way Dylan tells jokes and historical tidbits, answers e-mail from listeners and gives out his recipe for figgy pudding. (Download the show here.)
