Is anyone doing fiction yet where it goes straight to audio? The idea is to do audio editions of my work. I’ve even got this recording gear I’ve been wondering what to do with.

Parade magazine asks, “What is Royalty in the 21st Century?” What kind of question is that? Royalty in the 21st century are who they were in the 12th century: useless fucks. The more pertinent question for royalty in the 21st century is why we still put up with them now that we don’t have to.

Especially if you’re American. I’ve always wondered about this, because it’s always been my understanding that one of the main points of the Declaration of Independence is that royalty can go fuck themselves. The whole reason Washington is the father of our country, I always thought, is not that he won the war but that he could have been a king but he chose to be the President.

This is one of the most cogent arguments in favor of marriage equality that I’ve seen.

Not that you even need a particularly brilliant argument—the opponents of same sex marriage don’t even have anything that could properly be called an argument, at least if you define an argument as “a reason given in proof or rebuttal” or “a coherent series of statements leading from a premise to a conclusion.” All I’ve ever seen offered in opposition to same sex unions was a bunch of sanctimonious unsupported assertions.

I liked this. I don’t see any link from that page back to any other page, but I originally found it through the Hardcore Zen blog. There’s actually kind of a small labyrinth of related pages there, and I’ve liked a lot of the things that I found. There’s even a grizzly bear fighting a tyrannosaurus! (Click on the picture there to see it full size.)

I remember reading something about this a number of years ago, maybe in the Atlantic.

I had to send a letter to the Sacramento Bee this morning. They’ve printed most of the letters I’ve sent them in the past, but it’s been a while, so we’ll see. Some fool Republican assemblyman has an editorial in there today where he thinks he’s got the solution to the economic crisis. Can you possibly guess what his solution might be? Do you think it’s:

Deregulation? Nope.

Jesus? Nope.

I’ll tell you. Hang on to your hats, because this is really going to blow you away. What shockingly innovative solution has this visionary proposed?

Tax cuts!

This story talks about Arab militias raiding villages in Darfur on horseback and camelback. I’ve heard other stories on NPR about the guys who fly the Predator drones. Remote piloted aircraft, and they’re being flown by these guys in California who mainly developed their skills by playing video games. So in one part of the world you’ve got guys who get up in the morning, go to an office, spend eight hours blowing shit up on the other side of the world, and then go home again. And in another part of the world you’ve got these guys on camels raiding farming villages.

These people are amazing. Or these people.

Look, there’s a bus. This bus is collectively owned by this group of people, who collectively decide who’s going to drive the bus and where it’s going to go. For a while the bus driver was a dude called George W. Bush, and now the bus is a fucking wreck. Like all the windows are gone, which is unfortunate at the moment because the driver has gotten them lost in the middle of a huge slum and people keep throwing garbage and feces at them.

So they pick this new guy called Barack Obama to be the bus driver, and the first thing he says is, “OK, first thing we have to do here is get the engine running.”

And so there’s this one group of people on the bus who all sit together and, I don’t know, George W. Bush had been trying to get the engine running by randomly removing parts of it and throwing them away, and these people all still think this was a great idea.

And so Barack Obama has this theory that the first thing you do if you want to repair something is you stop destroying it, and most of the people on the bus agree, but this one group of people keep insisting he’s full of shit.

They keep saying that if you keep doing what George W. Bush was doing, eventually the bus is going to start running. And so everyone else is like, “Fuck you, you got us into this mess.” And they start bitching that no one will listen to their ideas.

In Cleveland on February 14 the group played a benefit for a Vietnam vet named Larry McIntyre. “This guy called Larry McIntyre lost both his legs in Vietnam,” wrote Joe in his NME account, “and when he went for a swim one day in the pool near his flat all the other residents banned him on the grounds that it was too disgusting … so we agree to play a show for him, helping his legal costs, but we don’t get to meet him because, having forgot his name, I referred to him over the PA as ‘the guy with no legs.’”

From Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer by Chris Salewicz