When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · April
· · · · 23 (3 entries)
Sock Hop Arousal · In recent weeks, I’ve had some successes at discovering good new music on the radio, which isn’t what it once was but is still not beyond hope. Here’s one: the other night, listening to CBC Radio3 sometime past midnight on CBC-FM, I really liked a cut off Bonobo-a-Go-Go by Sock Hop Arousal (they have a way with words if nothing else), and then the guy came on the radio and said “You can buy that at Bullfrog Music” and right then and there, sitting in my chair, I did, it was C$8.49 and with shipping was still only $12 or so. The most obvious influence, like the Web site says, is Bristol trip hop, only with guitars. The music, to my ear, has a heart, a centre; a rare enough thing these days, or in any days. Money well spent.
Spam Storm · Is it just me, or is everyone getting a hundred or so emails per hour that are spambounces, i.e. spam with my email address on the “From:” line. I’m not sure I’ve seen a spamstorm quite as intense as this, ever. I actually looked inside one and sure enough, there’s a real Web page selling the usual pharmaceuticals. Can nobody just go and take these guys down and keep them down?
Tet · Hey, you can call me a pedant and a pinko, and while I know that few today really care much about what happened in Vietnam in 1968, I am constitutionally unable to let huge fat stinking historical lies in major publications go unaddressed. In George Will’s Washington Post column this Sunday, he says “When, after the misreported Tet offensive of 1968 (a U.S. military victory described as a crushing defeat), Cronkite declared Vietnam a ‘stalemate’...” I’m sorry, I was at one time a keen student of the history of Vietnam going back centuries and up through the fall of Saigon, and George Will is full of it. In 1968, at a time when the Americans and South Vietnamese were busy assuring everybody that everything was just fine, the other side suddenly and without warning launched synchronized uprisings and attacks across the country including right in Saigon. Yes, the Americans won that battle, quickly and decisively; but the offensive made it clear that they’d been lying about the real state of affairs. I was watching those TV broadcasts myself, and they made clear it clear that the Americans were winning the skirmishes, but they also exposed the visceral horror of both troops and civilians that the enemy they thought they were beating could infiltrate at will and attack any time. It was at that precise point that a lot of smart people decided, and some of the media started accurately reporting, that the U.S. wasn’t winning.
