Deep Smit

I touched this woman's hand

on the subway tonight
and we both looked
straight ahead

And away we go...

I leave for Philly tomorrow morning to look at apartments and try to nestle a bit before I settle into my job for the rest of the year. As a believer in signs and omens and the ability of early results to predict overall success, I am very happy that Philly 2006 gets kicked off the right way on Friday night with a Beef and Beer Pong party some friends are hosting to benefit the American Cancer Society. Good times, good cause, good people...hopefully the campaign shakes down the same way.

In unrealted news, I've been reading a lot of science magazines lately. Nothing clinical but the latest issues of Scientific American and SEED are at my disposal for the subway ride home tonight. I've been saving a post about how my mind is completely blown by these things called mirror neurons. El Stence first hipped me to the article in the New York Times about them and stories of developments in the field seem to be popping up in every science mag I see. Until I get around to publishing the post you'll just have to trust me that these things are amazing parts of our brains that have evolved to help us learn language, develop empathy and infer the intentions behind peoples' actions. Oh, our amazing brains!

I also think that my recent fascination with these science mags has to do with the joy I get from reading about people that are intellectually curious and believe in science for science's sake. Obviously, those tendencies stand in stark contrast to those being espoused by our political leaders but it seems like American society as a whole has lost the spark for discovery and exploration. Not surprising I guess given the heaviness of recent times but dammit America! Snap out of it! There's a great big universe out there!

And giant oceans and microscopic creatures and bending strips of time near the speed of light! Not to mention all the cool stuff going on inside our own heads! There's so much we don't know yet - about our planet, about our solar system and about ourselves. What do you say, team? Brand new era of scientific discovery on Three! 1-2-3!

Enter the psychedelic swirl to the New Enlightenment

Are we there yet? No? OK, fine. So, it's gonna take a little bit more magic than fractals to get our exploration engine running. But if you're looking for some news that doesn't involve administration snow-jobs, alleged rapist student-athletes or nuclear-fueled nationalism, get yourself some science reading and nerd out.

Here's something to tide you over until I get the mirror neurons tribute ready. It's not a new discovery but still very cool: Mind-Controlling Wasps! In the meantime, I'm off to discover and explore in Pennsylvania. If you have any other cool science tales, please pass them on.

Cloud fractals: what the sky looks like in the New Enlightenment

Speaking of clobberin time...

Worst. Parent-Teacher Conference. Ever.



You can tell the decision to wallup was made early. Lady says "excuse me", squares up and lets one fly.

It's good to be back

Hello friends, apologies for the lack of fresh goodies the last week. Life's been taking up a lot of my time lately - working, travelling, celebrating birthdays and weddings, etcetera, etcetera...

The week started with some time reviewing reams and reams of polling data, voter databases and analyses of previous elections to start putting the state plan for PA together. Trying to make sense of all the data to figure out where the votes are going to come from is an intimidating deal but I've never been involved with this aspect of campaign planning before so I'm pretty psyched. I'm supposed to be heading up the Keystone State this week to start laying some groundwork and then before I know it it's gonna be June, then August, then I'll blink and it'll be November. Crazy. You know what time it is...


On Friday, I left D.C. to start making my way up to Albany. One of my good friends from college was getting married on Saturday but Friday was this old boy's birthday so a layover in NYC Friday night was in order. Hit the usual places with the usual gang and a good time was had by all.

Famous people born on April 21st:

Charlotte Bronte, John Muir, Queen Elizabeth II, Tony Danza, Iggy Pop, Andie McDowell, Robert Smith of The Cure, Charles Grodin and Catherine the Great. Can I get a hell yeah?

Tony flashing that winning Taurean smile

I manage to get one hour of sleep before up and at em in a car up the NYS Thruway to Capital City. Maria got married in the giant Catholic cathedral right next to Empire Plaza. The service was beautiful but as an M.O.T. I have many questions. For starters, who's really in charge of this thing? The guy with the white hat or the guy with the red hat? The guy in the red hat tells everybody when to sit and stand but the guy in the white hat keeps raising his arms up and singing loudly. In the name of brevancy I'll digress but it's a good thing the bride was a good friend of mine because organized religion on an empty stomach and an hour of sleep make Ben something something...


After the wedding comes the reception and when the Cuse is in the house with an open bar you know the good times are bout to flow like liquid gin..pictures and more posts coming soon.

Eat the Rich

We're gonna need a lot of hot sauce...

1. Retiring Exxon chairman gets PAID

2. Dick Cheney still PAID

3. New Yorkers for Santorum PAYS up

4. Apologies for the quality of the graphic below but the NYC subway rag AM Metro doesn't cater their online version for the blogosphere yet. If you can't read it, it's worth a download, which you can do here.



Thanks to Capitol Jester for practically writing today's post.

Notes from a couple days ago, now old news

Lesson #1: A late-night swim in the outdoor pool at the Quality Inn in Somerset, PA is an excellent pick-me-up after spending 20 out of 48 hours behind a steering wheel. Heading back to DC for some meetings that'll hopefully finalize where I'm spending the rest of 2006.

Lesson #2: Ben Gordon is a baller. The ex-UConn Huskie and Mos Def look-a-like tied an NBA-record by drilling all 9 of his 3-point attempts against the Wizards tonight. Playoff seeds on the line and Benny comes up big in front of the hometown crown. Respect. The rest of the Chicago Bulls basketball organization, especially Tyson "Kwame Brown brings out my A-Game" Chandler and Andres "Thug Life" Nocioni, can eat a bag of you-know-whuts.

Lesson #3: 1840 Haight is the place to be in San Fran tomorrow night. Caps and Jones flash the bat-signal over the Bay Area, calling all crusaders to Milk Bar Saturday night. B.Y.O. capes, heroes...

Little-known fact: Beast and Cyclops were the dudes posing in the original Tommy Boy record logo.

Now Reading/Watching

With the spectre of employment casting its dark shadow upon my coming days, I'm doing my best to veg out via books and movies while I still can. Some hits and some misses - all of which are profiled below.

Now Reading:

• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - NERD ALERT - the adjectives "wicked" and "awesome" alone would not suffice as descriptions of this wicked awesome sci-fi novel. I read all 324 pages for the first time between 4pm and 2am yesterday and it FU@%ED me up! I couldn't get to sleep afterwards and laid in bed wondering if it's true that we can't truly hurt somebody unless we understand them completely; and that the only way we can truly understand someone is if we make the effort to love them as they love themselves. Love as the only conduit to truly harm someone has been a theme of pop music for decades, but the thought of learning to truly love someone as they love themselves so that you may destroy them is CUCKOO. What's really gonna bake your noodle is thinking about what if Jesus understood that. Oh dip...
  

• Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo - Meh. I haven't read any of DeLillo's other novels. Perhaps I started with the wrong one. I found the characters unengaging, the dialogue hard to follow and the narration very unfriendly. Perhaps that was the artistic intent of the author though - to create a reading atmosphere resembling the cold, calculating persona of a post-modern king of finance. Whatever, I don't like it when authors do that. Hulk Smash.
  

• Law School Confidential by Robert H. Miller - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will admit publicly that I'm still thinking about it. I've been doing some research up here in St. Paul, hanging with a law school pal and taking it all in. Granted, law students in their second semester of their third year don't set the best examples of the rigors of studying law but I get the picture. The advice from the book is clear: either commit to law school early and don't look back or don't do it at all. At this point, I think I'm willing to pledge to commit and not look back until I see my LSAT score. Baby steps...

• Conversations with Tom Petty by Paul Zollo - OK, so if you're a really, really big Tom Petty fan and you dream of one day sitting down with the man himself in order to chronicle his thoughts on every song he's ever recorded and will accept "Yeah, I really love that song, too" as an insightful response - I'm sorry to break it to you, but Paul Zollo has already written your book for you. To be fair, there are many great stories peppered throughout the book, including Petty's gushing recollections of the Heartbreakers touring as Bob Dylan's back-up band and what it was like being a Wilbury (Answer: super-cool and freakin' awesome, respectively).

• Guns, Germs and Steel, A Brief(er) History of Time (Books-On-CD versions) - I have a long ride from Minnesota to Philly ahead of me and I discovered I have little to no recall of the stuff I learned when I read these a few years ago. AKA I'm not the guy you want to help you remember the combination to your bike lock. I am gonna be wicked smart by the time I get back to the East Coast though.

Now Watching:

• The Aristocrats/Comedian - For those living in bubbles impenetrable by all things humorous, The Aristocrats is a documentary dedicated to the telling of a single joke. The initial set-up and punchline vary slightly according to the teller but the narrative that connects the two ends is completely up to the person telling the joke - and it's completely filthy everytime. Comedian is a lesser-known documentary that follows Jerry Seinfeld's on and off-stage efforts to build an all-new stand-up routine. The best part of both movies for me was getting to watch professional comics talk about their craft; about what makes "funny". I could watch Carlin, Seinfeld, Cosby, Drew Carey, Colin Quinn, these "comics' comics" talk about what works and what doesn't for hours. And I did. The other interesting thing I noticed though was that there was absolutely no overlap in comics between the two movies. There must have been easily a hundred comics featured between the two movies and not one appeared in both. It's as if there are two comedy "camps" - the "Seinfeld" camp and the "Penn from Penn and Teller" camp. That's obviously not the case but it's fun to imagine.
  

• The Fog of War - Rent it. It's like someone gave Robert McNamara truth serum. You'd hate to see the same thing happen to Rumsfeld - too soon.
  

• Paycheck - it's not often that a film title can also sum up the apparent motivation of all creative entitiess associated with it. Good for the first hour and then it everyone on both sides of the camera said, "Eh, who gives a shit" and went pants-optional from there on out.
  

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Opposite of Paycheck. Really disappointed until the Tri-Wizard Tournament started. Kinda disappointed that Fleur was not hotter or that Krum didn't have a unibrow you could rest pencils on. Also, the actor playing Ron needs to pop in a tape of the VH1 Corey Feldman Behind the Regrettful Career Decisions and see what happens to kids that are too cool for school and lack talent. Apologies for not posting a NERD ALERT at the start of this review.
  

• Chapelle's Block Party - More funny than Aristocrats and Comedian combined PLUS the greatest hip-hop concert ever recorded. ?uestlove did a helluva job putting the music together. The marching band playing Jesus Walks and Lauryn Hill tearing up Killing Me Softly made my eyes well up. No joke. I'm a sucker for magic moments. Like that part in The Natural after Hobbs shatters Wonderboy and says "Pick me out a winner, Bobby"? Killer.
  

Testing

Trying out a new technology here. Hooray for the internet!

America's Craving Some Crave

John Crave drops some new maple syrupy gold for those pancakes in yer ears, kiddos. Come hott hotties, mighty children and everyone to kneel by Crave's fountain of liquid gold. Soak up your aural fill...

Gold Buick
the early nominee for anthem of summer 2006

Watermelon Nights

Star Wipe

Battle for Kelv

Rap Your Rock
perfect for that spring backyard bbq jam

For the full John Crave experience, pack your intergalactic suitcase and click here...

Saturday night ramblings

In a hypothetical, stream-of-consciousness, self-interview, where I ask for an autobiographical Ipod playlist; the response:

It would probably start out with some comedy bits. I remember listening to comedy albums before I started listening to music. Cosby, Carlin, Jonathan Winters, Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, Mel Brooks, Bob Newhart, some real random stuff, like this one my grandma had called Laugh of the Party and she would do this routine where two women with proper accents get talking about going to Ceylon and get smashed on port. That stuff had a huge impact on me. Huey Lewis would be in there, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, early HipHop : Rob Base, Heavy D, B-Boys, De La Soul, Tribe, Public Enemy.

Then Bob Dylan. I probably discovered Bob Dylan like teenagers discovered Dylan thirty years ago. Vinyl record alone in my bedroom. There's probably not any other way to discover Dylan, once you hear him for the first time it's all the same, BAM, either you're in awe or you're looking for something completely diffferent. It was Like a Rolling Stone, over and over again, it was literate, it had timing , his words weren't arbitrary, it was like the comedy albums. Tomorrow is a Long Time, All Along the Watchtower, Idiot Wind, Isis, Tambourine Man, Masterpiece. Then the Band - my Dad was a huge musical influence on me. Everything up to now was from my Dad - the comedy albums, the Motown, Dylan, everything. Mom's stuff was always sort of playing in the background: Billy Joel, Elton John, Daryl Hall and John Oates, I know all that shit. Then, one day, I remember being in the car when Chest Fever I think came on the radio and my dad turned it up and afterwards gushed "man, it just doesn't get any better than that" and I thought "what, who? What have you been holding out on me?" Long Black Veil, Atlantic City, Country Boy, Basement Tapes. That's my bread and butter. That's where I'm home

I remember seeing Dave Matthews Band in the fall of 95 and I got super into them for about two years and then I just jumped headfirst into the Grateful Dead. Someone gave me a bootleg of theirs in high school and I remember it being too mellow for me at the time, then i saw them the summer after I graduated high school at RFK stadium, in 95 and I got progressively more into them until my sophomore year in college when exploring music became a group effort and we all needed a steady diet of music to smoke weed to: Dead, Phish, The Band, The Allmans with some Tupac, Talking Heads and Steely Dan thrown in for good measure here and there, reggae, etc. That musical scene proved hard to get out of and I picked up on some non-jammy shit here and there but at the time that scene was still pretty good: MMW, Strangefolk, Percy Hill, DBB, Viperhouse, etc. HipHop reappeared for a brief second with Mos and Kweli's joints but I mostly stayed immersed in jam world until I heard Wilco.

I was living in Ithaca, in a cabin about 8 miles outside town, when I picked up Being There on a complete fucking lark. I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I heard jeff tweedy's voice - in my car at the intersection of Buffalo and Rt. 13 heading East, on my way back from Best Buy where I bought the album. It's been as torrid a love afffair with a band as I've ever had ever since. They opened me up to a whole new scene of music which I've been happily sifting through ever since. That's where it would wrap up.

P.S. This was my cabin home outside Ithaca:

The wheels on the bus...

Chugga chugga choo choo!


Nevermind the proper sounds a bus makes! It just got a lot more dangerous to be an ex-Steeler, son! Or someone who's had a frothy mixture named after them. You're both going down, cousins, it's clobberin' time!

Timeless Goodies

Well gang, this one is sure to cause a stir but there've been some big things underfoot here at the home office, you might want to sit down. Many of you know my girlfriend Allison. Many of you do not. And for those that don't this is going to come as an especially big shock but Ms. Fisher, with the permission of Mr. Fisher, has finally agreed to marry this old boy.

I asked for her hand on the shores of Lake Michigan, last weekend, in front of a large crowd of bystanders, including her parents and several hundred pigeons, just like in that Zales jewelry commercial. It's all very exciting and we couldn't be happier and we wish to direct all of you to our registry at Dick's Sporting Goods. Spend generously and promptly. Some of you will be recieving invitations in the near future.

1. An old take on an old Administration tactic but a good read nonetheless. A newer take on West Wing happenings from dear Mr. Fineman.

2. Celebrating the man, the school: George Mason. Who was he? How close is GMU to my high school? Go Patriots.

Nuff respek to G-Mase

3. Twin Cities treating the old boy well. The sun is shining, the birds are back in town, threat of catastrophic frostbite subsiding. Back on the road soon though. Gone til November, i'll be gone til November.