It was Thursday, December 18, 1986.

It had been almost a month since I met the rest of my band. Things had clicked famously. The three brothers had been playing in bands together for years, so they were pretty tight. So when we got together and actually started playing – in the basement of a duplex on 24th at Hennepin in the Wedge – things really took off.

After the radio interview, I’d worn a groove in the carpet at William’s Uptown Bar, where Larry Sahagian – who’d made the mistake of being my guest on the Mitch Berg Show that late night a few weeks ago – was the booker.  Finally, perhaps as much to be rid of me as anything, he booked us to play.  We’d debut on Sunday, December 28.

Right before my show.

No matter.  I could do it all.  Besides – we had bigger things to worry about.

Like picking a name.

And getting some posters out.

And learning an hour’s worth of music, while we were at it.

We started practicing in late November; three nights a week, Tuesday through Thursday (the bass player worked Mondays, and who really wanted to practice on the weekends?).  The first few weeks of practice with any band you enjoy playing with are like the first few weeks of a really fun relatiionship; you just can’t stop, you want to spend all your free time at it.  So we did; I’d head over to practice after I got done with the Vogel Show in the evening (I’d haul my guitar to work), we’d start at seven, and play until ten or so (and usually later, since the neighbors on the top floor of the squalid duplex usually were too high to care).

Coming up with music was easy; I had demo tapes for about four dozen songs I’d written; I managed to sell the guys on a solid couple dozen of them.  The other guitar player, Nick, the oldest of the brothers, had four or five of his own.  It only took 10 or 12 songs to play a set (you only got about an hour if you were an opener anyway), so we were fixed.

But getting people to show up?  On a Sunday?  Another entire story.

As to the name…

I’d never been in a band where selecting a name was anyting other than a complete donnybrook.  Egos were involved; creative people were getting doused in each others’ creative juices.

The four of us spent an hour or so after several practices tossing out names.

“The Joseph Stalin Band!”

“The Head of Alfredo Garcia!”

“Couch Beautiful Shriek…”

“The Turning Cookies!”

And on and on and on.

We were getting to the point where we had to do something to start publicizing the gig.  It was Thursday night.  I walked into the basement – which always smelled very faintly of natural gas, probably from some not-entirely-sealed pipe somewhere – and set my guitar case on an unused clothes dryer…

…and saw a notepad covered with scribbled notes in the various brothers’ hands.  At least one of the brothers had been putting band names in the notebook; I noticed a few names that had come and gone over the past few days.  One note read, tersely…

“Tenant’s Union”

I broke up laughing.  “Perfect!”

“Huh?” asked Will, the drummer.

I expounded briefly on how I loved the name “Tenant’s Union”.  They all cocked their eyes…

…and agreed, although with a few rolled eyes.

Thenceforth, we were “Tenant’s Union”.

It took me the better part of a year to learn why they seemed so quizzical;  the note had nothing to do with naming the band.  The guys were literally going to call the Tenant’s Union on their slumlord landlord.

But no matter.  We had a gig to get ready for.

Kate Parry is listed at the Strib’s “Reader’s Representative”. In her tenure at the Strib so far, that’s seemed to the unwashed masses to mean “Official Rationalizer” for everything the Strib does, right, wrong or absurd.

On Sunday morning, after a week where the Strib wiggled (so it claimed) away from charges of plagiarism, we found out what the problem was; “Reader’s Representative” means “propagandist”!

For instance, Sunday’s gauzy, soft-focus puffy on the Strib’s “Front Page Editor”.

Since July, [Colleen Stoxen] the 44-year-old North Dakota native has been the Star Tribune’s page one editor, a post short on the usual trappings of newsroom power: She has no staff and seldom has the final word on anything.

Yet, although dozens of hands will leave imprints on page one through the day, no one is more influential in determining what you will see there than Stoxen. Her considerable clout is wielded through acts of diplomacy and incisive observations injected throughout a marathon daily meeting regimen with key decisionmakers.

It’s hard out here for an editor. Sho nuff.

Of course, those “key decisionmakers” seem to be beyond Kate Parry’s keen analytical ken. For while we are now intimately aware of the life of the person who decides (or tries to decide) where the Pagemaker geeks will put things on Page One, we remain ignorant about the decisions about what goes in the stories, and who determines little things like editorial policy.

Who decided to go soft on Keith Ellison throughout the election, and why?

Who decided – as Rochelle Olson told us on the NARN before the election – that the fact that Alan Fine’s domestic abuse arrest never led to a charge didn’t warrant inclusion in the story Ms. Stoxen put on the front page? Even though the story was 32 column inches long, and included plenty of secondary facts that could have been pared down to make room for that simple fact?

Because while the anonymous efforts of the mass of mid-level functionaries that grind the paper out every day are fascinating mildly interesting, “reporting” on them really does nothing to “represent” the reader.

Answering hard questions about serious issues with more than a smug snark would be a start…

…but Parry’s had a couple of years of backing and filling and avoiding that job.

The fall of Wonkette – from moderately-readable all-over-the-place blog to vacuous giggly snarkblog distinct from “Oliver Willis” only by being…well, actually, “editor” Alex Pareene might be Oliver Willis…

…down to the corrosive racism at the very core of his stunted little excuse for a psyche.

“Michelle Malkin to Go to Iraq, Hopefully Stay” says Pareene’s (?) piece on Malkin’s “Odd Couple” trip to Iraq with disgraced former CNN chief Eason Jordan. He accompanies the “story” with a cowardly forgery within a cowardly racist forgery; the old, photoshopped “Girls Gone Wild” slag copied into a photo of a World War II Japenese internment camp.  (Mount an intellectual defense of a deeply-flawed 65-year-old policy?  Get your ethnic background sniggered at by “liberals”.  See how this works?)

Did you know Michelle Malkin was from the Philippines? The idea seems to obsess the leftybloggers.

Michelle is going because there’s an Associated Press source in Baghdad who she thinks doesn’t exist, and, like Curt Weldon, she knows only her and some other no-name blogger can find the truth.

Oh, that’s gotta leave a mark!

But did the big-name bloggers at “Wonkette” pay much attention last time a bunch of “no-name bloggers” got the truth about the media making stuff up?

Why, no. They didn’t!

I look forward to meeting Alex Pareene at the ’08 GOP convention.

He’ll probably remind everyone that Michelle Malkin is really Philipino.  Woot.

Pat Reusse on Bud Selig’s reign over major league baseball, due to end in a little over two years:

Fay Vincent was voted out of office as the baseball commissioner on Sept. 7, 1992. The main grievance against Vincent was that his intervention in the 1990 lockout of spring training had prevented the owners from getting a grip on the game’s economics.

Bud Selig was named the acting commissioner. He was the longtime owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. He planned to return to running that club as soon as a new commissioner was found…That will be 17 years on the job for Baseball Bud. And he will leave as did Vincent: with the owners having no grip on the game’s economics.

Selig was going to be the owners’ answer to the players – a commissioner that could stand up for owners’ interests.

The players struck in August 1994, and the owners lost a World Series trying to put a restraint into the salary system.

They messed it up, of course. They went through weeks of fruitless negotiations in the fall of ’94, then made the mistake of trying to declare a legal impasse a few days after the union had altered its position.

“The fact the impasse was declared after the union had moved created a legal situation for the owners that was unsupportable,” Griffith said. “They were forced to withdraw the claim of an impasse.

“They followed by taking the position that salary arbitration was a ‘permissive’ subject of negotiation, rather than a ‘mandatory’ subject of negotiation. It’s complicated, but the owners were wrong on that one, too.”

Bottom line: The owners gave up in April 1995 and basically settled on the players’ terms.

Which has had fallout all over the place, including regional politics; scrambling to pay the ever-escalating player salaries, teams feel no compunction about going to cities and states demanding new stadiums and, for all intents and purposes, big pieces of city rebuilt around the team’s needs.

So adios, Bud Selig (eventually), and good riddance.

I think we drew right around fifty people to Stub ‘n Herb’s last night for “The New Thing”, the big get-together of local concealed-carry activists. I spent about three hours there, talking with a dizzying variety of people.

Part of the rationale for the party was to troll for ideas of things to do to help hold the line for gun rights in the upcoming, intensely hostile legislatures. The other part, of course, was to meet fellow Right to Keep and Bear Arms supporters for a fun evening out. Both succeeded.

One of the ideas, potentially, involves two of your favorite things; a party, and your favorite group of plucky underdog talk show hosts.

Stay tuned for more details.

The last things in the world I expect to see:

1. Britney Spears doing a command performance at Kennedy Center
2. The Wege from Norwegianity taking an understated approach to a discussion
3. A good Rocky sequel. Oops. Well, blow me down. Rocky Balboa has gotten at least one good review:

Theres a disarming quality to Stallones thoughtful script that has a way of stopping smirking skeptics right in their tracks, as if to say: “Yeah, yeah, I know what youre thinking. But at least give me a shot here.”

And darned if that gently self-effacing approach doesnt melt away those preconceived notions.

With his beloved Adrian having passed away, Rocky trudges along the streets of his South Philly neighborhood like a man whos been beaten down by the ravages of time and bittersweet memories of all-too-distant glories.

Hes only too happy to regale patrons at his eatery, Adrians, with those stories, but his habit of living in the past is beginning to grate on his old buddy Paulie Burt Young, whos been there for all six rounds, whos no longer willing to accompany Rocky on those ritual tours through his old haunts.

OK.  I’ll go.

I’ve been humming “Circle of Steel” by Gordon Lightfoot incessantly for the past two days .

Not that that’s a bad thing, but I have no idea why.

New Jersey legislators legalize Civil Unions.

Personally, I don’t oppose civil unions; it’s a contract between two people that has conditions that need to be met, and (in theory) penalties for breaking.  The courts, I think, are right; there’s no secular, legal reason to bar people from having them in accordance with other laws.  (The “Now a guy can have a contract with a Badger and a Moose” doesn’t hold up; relationships between gays and lesbians are legal; humans, badgers, moose and other fauna  are not.  If you see a need to prevent them, by all means organize.  I’m not especially worried).

Of course, the reasoning of some on both sides irritates me:

“Love counts,” Democratic Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo, a chief sponsor of the bill, said as the debate opened. “The gender of whom one loves should not matter to the state.”

Yeah, true as far as it goes, but could we drop the “Love Counts” BS?  Marriage isn’t about love, and either are civil unions.  Oh, one had best love one’s partner, to be sure – but marriage (and surrogate ideas) are about much more than just “loving someone”.

So Mr. Caraballo’s bit about the “gender of whom one loves should not matter to the state” is true only in the sense that love is irrelevant.  Marriage  and  civil unions, to the state, are about obligation, duty, penalties and  conditions.

Nothing more.

Love’s got nothing to do with it.

But Republican Assemblyman Ronald S. Dancer said: “It’s my personal belief, faith and religious practice that marriage has been defined in the Bible. And this is one time that I cannot compromise my personal beliefs and faiths.”

Except that the Bible has little to say about contracts.

The social conservative argument is that “civil unions open the way for gay marriage!”.  Perhaps that’s true – and I oppose gay marriage – but that is our problem.

Gay marriage, like abortion, should be the job of the states to decide.  If you want to hold the line agains gay marriage (or, for that matter, civil unions), then get organized – because your opponents certainly are.  And in politics, victory generally goes to those who show up.

For my part?  Since civil unions are purely secular, and subject to secular laws, and there’s no secular reason to deny gays the right to contract with each other (assuming homosexuality is legal), then I can accept civil unions – and then draw my line in the sand, and top it with barbed wire.  Marriage is not a civil, secular observance.  It is a religious exercise.  And I challenge anyone to find any religion that justifies gay marriage on religious grounds (real religions, not McFaiths like the Unitarians).  And it may be that you can find such a faith; it’s a lock that I will neither marry nor worship there.

Gay rights advocates welcomed the legislation as a step forward but said they would continue to push for the right to marry.

Er, yeah.  Expect pushback.

Joel Rosenberg has sent a blanket invite to Second Amendment activists and anyone else who might be interested; come on down to Stub and Herb’s tomorrow at 6PM:

Pro-gun activists from all across the state will be meeting and sharing food, fun, and maybe a little bit of beer to talk how to move the ball forward over the next few years.

This past election was a setback for gun rights supporters – but it doesn’t have to be a fatal one. And it’s at get-togethers like this that we lay the real groundwork for keeping it that way.

I hope to see you there.

Ahmet Ertegun dead at 83.

For all the justifiable reputation Motown garnered for bringing R&B to a mass audience, it was Ertegun’s Atlantic Records that brought R&B to the wider world:

[Ertegun’s Atlantic Records] popularized the gritty R&B of Ray Charles, the classic soul of Aretha Franklin and the British rock of the Rolling Stones…
remained connected to the music scene until his last days – it was at an Oct. 29 concert by the Rolling Stones at the Beacon Theatre in New York where Ertegun fell, suffered a head injury and was hospitalized. He later slipped into a coma.

“He was in a coma and expired today with his family at his bedside,” said Dr. Howard A. Riina, Ertegun’s neurosurgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center…Ertegun will be buried in a private ceremony in his native Turkey, said Bob Kaus, a spokesman for Ertegun and Atlantic Records. A memorial service will be conducted in New York after the New Year’s.

Don’t hold James Blunt against him.

…but even though I haven’t heard this song in fifteen years, it still always kills me.

20 years ago when I suggested this concept, people got a good laugh.

Who’s laughing now, huh?

Flash memory, with no moving parts to break or wear down, is the data storage technology of choice for devices such as iPods and digital cameras. But phase-change RAM is set to overtake flash entirely—it uses a chemical found in rewritable discs, which is alternately heated and cooled to store data. The result is memory that’s 30 times faster than flash, with more than 10 times the life span.

Granted, my idea was more akin to “dude, what if our universe if just an atom within a larger universe…” rather than a treatise on electrical engineering.

But still.

After weeks of progress…

…I’m back to “Life Begins At The Hop” by XTC.

What have I done to deserve this?

Ryan Rhodes reports. You decide.

While Senator Johnson had the stroke, it’s some on the far left that seem to have suffered the damage.

This time, via Brian Maloney – conspiracy theories about Senator Johnson.

Rove’s henchmen and their evil arterial-occluder ray strike again, apparently, in their little peabrains.

Mike Kelly at Irish Pennants on the ISG report:

The truth, which the ISG’s aging luminaries lack more the guts than the brains to grasp, is that Iran and Syria are now our principal enemies, both in Iraq and in the broader war on terror. Without their interference, sectarian violence in Iraq would swiftly and sharply decline.

If there’s been one big overarching mistake in the War on Terror, it may have been that Iran and Syria needed to be taken out of the war (not necessarily militarily) at the same time, or before, Iraq.

The fact that the US government is doing effectively nothing to destabilize Ahmadinejad – in the same sense that Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and, of all people, the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland – did to destabilize the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact with their support of Polish labor unions and Czech and other Eastern European dissidents – is, to use my gift of understatement, a crying shame.

Katherine Kersten on the propaganda value of the imam publicity blitz:

But the report on the Iranian website, which has appeared on a variety of Muslim websites worldwide, had a larger primary focus. After the imams incident, it quoted Bray as saying Muslims want “new, broad-sweeping legislation that will extract even larger financial and civil penalties for any airline that participates in racial and religious profiling.”

The report is optimistic that Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, will lend his support to new legislation. Ellison, it says, has expressed his opposition to “such racial and religious profiling.” Ellison, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

He’s wising up, at least.

And by the way, I’ll support such legislation!

(When the Iranians stop “profiling” Jews, Ba’hais, gays…

(From Cox and Forkum)

Kersten continues:

One piece of legislation in the works is the End Racial Profiling Act. It is an important priority of Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, whose district includes one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. Conyers introduced the bill in 2004 and 2005, but it went nowhere. Now the alignment of forces may be changing. Conyers will probably be chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when the new Democratic-controlled Congress convenes next month.

Nancy Pelosi, who called herself a “proud” cosponsor of the Profiling Act in 2004, is the incoming House speaker. And in January, Ellison, who represents the district where the imams incident occurred, will take his seat in Congress.

Watch for a determined effort to make the term “profiling” equal “discrimination” in the public mind.

Bob “I Want To Be Lincoln Chaffee When I Grow Up” Taft’s veto of a state pre-emption ordinance for gun laws was crushed in the Ohio Senate on Tuesday.

The law – which will bar cities from hijacking control of the Constitution by enacting “tougher” gun laws than the State allows – is similar to the one we have in Minnesota:

Lawmakers voted Tuesday to override outgoing Gov. Bob Taft’s veto of a bill that will wipe out local gun laws, the first time in 20 years that the Legislature has rejected a gubernatorial veto.

The move was all the more unusual because both chambers are dominated by Republicans – the governor’s own party.

The Senate voted 21-12 on Tuesday to override, and the House voted last week. The bill will take effect in about three months.

The usual suspects are making the usual noises:

“We are struggling with the issue of public safety in our city, and a major tool has been taken away from us,” said [Cincinnati] Mayor Mark Mallory.

The “tool”, of course, being the ability to oppress the law-abiding while not fazing the criminals one iota.

Congrats, Ohio!

(Via Rosenberg)

South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson has suffered an apparent stroke.

If Johnson were to pass away, or be forced to retire, the US Constitution delegates the task of appointing a replacement to South Dakota lawmakers, who in turn, often turn that task over to the Governor. The Governor of that state, Mike Rounds, is a Republican, and both houses of the state legislature are dominated by Republicans.

Prayers, naturally, for Senator Johnson.  We’d rather get the Senate at the polls.

Al Franken’s show – which has been broadcasting from Minneapolis for most of the past year – has been “demoted”, sort of. Air America Minnesota, says this report by Strib media-beat writer Deborah Caulfield Rybak, is moving Fast Eddie Schultz to the 11-2PM slot (up against Rush Limbaugh), and “tape”-delaying Franken to the 2-5 slot:

Franken had no comment on the change, but “we’re not horribly offended,” said his executive producer. “They’re free to do whatever they like.”

“They” – Janet Robert’s KTNF (AM950) – are indeed. And rumor has long had it that there was little love lost between Robert – the wealthy, former mud-slinging DFL congressional candidate who is nonetheless pro-life and pro-Second Amendment – and free-spending, ultra-“progressive” liberal, and incompetent Air America. Rumors in the business have long held that Air America wanted to find a different Twin Cities affiliate.

Locally, [Franken] had been performing better in the Arbitron ratings than Shultz, but not by much. KTNF posted a 0.9 percent share of listeners ages 25 to 54 during Franken’s show and a 0.4 share during Shultz’s. Both are eclipsed by Rush Limbaugh, who attracted a 4.1 share of listeners on KTLK (100.3 FM) during the same period.

Side note: Little birds tell me that Dennis Prager and Michael Medved, on AM1280, are handily clobbering both of them as well. Of course, noting that would require Deb Rybak to acknowledge the Patriot’s existence and the fact that is it beating the crap out of not only Air America Minnesota, but also most of KTLK’s non-Limbaugh lineup. And duh, Deb; of course Franken’s numbers have been better than Fast Eddie’s; Franken is on mid-days, which is a lot less competitive than afternoon drives. It’ll be interesting to see if Franken has any numbers at all by the time he finally gives up the radio ghost.   

The song that I can simply not  stop humming today…

…is “Fine Fine Day” by Tony Carey. 

Why this 1983 one-hit wonder (from a solo outing from the leader of another one-hit wonder, Planet P) would burble to the top of my head, I have no idea.  But there it is. 

It’s a fine, fine day for a reunion…

I’ve taken my swipes at Nick Coleman before.   He’s deserved quite a few.

He’s also written some good stuff. Yesterday’s was one of his best:

So the most infamous of the city’s 59 murders of 2006 closes with tears, a life sentenced to rot in prison, and a mystery. No one may ever understand how a 21-year-old with nothing on his record to warn he might kill, who was not a gangster — “not a menace to society,” as his mom, Yolanda, tearfully told the judge — how it came to a point he sprayed an entertainment block with gunfire.

“He’s not the worst person we’ve encountered in this system,” the judge said, noting that Holliday showed some remorse after his arrest.

Holliday had been in AmeriCorps, helped build a house for a homeless family, worked at the Y, was hoping to go to college and had a chance to turn out OK. Somehow, he ended up on a street with a gun. And he took two lives — Alan Reitter’s and his own.

It’s actually worth a read.

The bad news:

Troy Smith’s Heisman Trophy was shipped home because airport security would not allow the Ohio State quarterback to take it on the plane Tuesday.

The good news:  At least this means actors’ Oscars will be confined to Hollywood…

(more…)

The dextrosphere has been shaken to its’ puritan roots by yesterday’s installment of Chris Muir’s “Day By Day”, which was too revealing for some consumers (NSFW – if you work in a kindergarten, convent or  Minnesota Public Radio).

In the interest of public service, we’ve brought in experts on both sides of this controversy.  On the right,  Captain Ed:

As for yesterday’s entry, I think Chris went over the top. That won’t keep me from supporting Chris and his comic strip nor cause me to rethink my association with it.

Also from the right, Learned Foot:

KAR Thong or not, this is an encouraging trend. Yes – I say “trend” intentionally. I have taken to time to plot the occurrences of thong-clad women in Day by Day, and as you can see, the pattern is striking:

There you have it.

Developing…

The Strib loudly laments the fall of journalism.

“TV stations air PR puff pieces and call it news”, they whinge…:

Last month, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released its second report on television stations’ use of VNRs. One Minneapolis/St. Paul station was on the list. In June, KMSP-9 aired an entire, uncut VNR from General Motors. Station anchor Karen Scullin even introduced the narrating publicist, as if he were a reporter. No disclosure was provided to viewers.

While the need to clearly label such materials might seem obvious, an association of broadcast news professionals — the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) — recently joined the PR industry in fighting to keep the status quo: many VNRs and no disclosure required.

Hmmm.

Yes.  It would really be a problem if the media published uncritical puff pieces without giving the reader any context, wouldn’t it?