It's always 1939 in Ponchatoula

Because the South, because Louisiana, because rural Tangipahoa Parish, because the fraught racial history of the South, and of Louisiana, and of rural Tangipahoa Parish, I am pretty much speechless that this is the poster for the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival.

But here it is, going to a place Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima have never gone before. That place is Pickaninnyville.

According to a story in the Advocate, the south Louisiana daily newspaper, the creator of the poster drew upon the work of a late Ponchatoula artist known for his stylistic portrayals of rural blacks in the Deep South.

The festival board’s publicist Shelley Matherne told WBRZ that the painting for the poster was selected in an open contest in which two entries were submitted.

“Art is subjective; there was no intent other than to pay tribute to the festival and the strawberry industry,” she said in a statement. “This is Kalle’s interpretation of a similar world-renowned local Ponchatoula artist, now deceased, who he drew his inspiration from.”

WELL, THAT'S fair enough, and it would be pure knee-jerk speculation to say there was any malevolent intent on the part of the artist, Kalle Siekkinen, but I think it does show an abject cluelessness on the part of Siekkinen and festival organizers about the minefield that is race in the South.

From what I can see of the late artist Bill Hemmerling's original work, the style of the poster is pitch-perfect in representing Hemmerling's style, but managed to hit all the wrong chords with the execution. It's rather like when Yosemite Sam tries to blow up Bugs Bunny with a booby-trapped piano.

Bugs hits the wrong note and lives. A frustrated Yosemite Sam, angrily showing Bugs how to correctly play the melody, hits the right note . . . and blows himself to bits.



WHO KNEW Yosemite Sam was from Ponchatoula?

I don't think it's the poster's use of African-American children is necessarily problematic,  per se. It's just the little things in the artwork that turned it into something close to the perfect stereotype, and it's troubling that no one involved could see that. And that may well speak to deep-seated problems of culture and race that would merit a post unto itself . . . if not a very, very thick book.

If only the poster had depicted the kids in a different pose. If only the kids' skin wasn't absolutely, positively coal black -- which wasn't necessary to mimic a significant portion of Hemmerling's work. If only the little girl had a different hairstyle -- even just a little different, which might have been truer to Hemmerling's originals. If only the kids had been wearing hats, which would have been even truer to much of Hemmerling's paintings.

If only, if only, if only.

Even so, some folks still might have been offended. But it wouldn't have been so condescendingly, head-shakingly, "Holy crap!" stereotypical.

As it stands, the poster for the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival only could have been worse if it were for the Ponchatoula Watermelon Festival.

It says nothing good for Louisiana, or for the state of racial understanding in the South, that one is rather relieved that Ponchatoula doesn't have a watermelon festival.

3 Chords & the Truth: Best if played by . . .

. . . big speakers.

Really big speakers.

For that matter, if you're an audiophile, this week's 3 Chords & the Truth might be a hell of a way to test out that new setup you've been bragging to people about. Play it loud. Play it proud.

And if someone calls the cops, my work here is done.

Actually, that's not true. My work here is done if your neighbors come rushing over to ask you about that wonderful music you're listening to . . . loud.

I GUARANTEE there's one part of the show that will give your goosebumps goosebumps. You'll be amazed at what you're hearing, and at the incredible -- and incredibly unlikely -- mix of music. Note well, however: It's only unlikely before you think about it a minute, or if you don't listen to the Big Show much.

For regulars, it makes perfect sense. That's freeform radio for you -- even if its on the Internet.

OK, I'm done teasing you for now with this foray into high-fidelity click bait. Click on the links to the show . . . or on one of the embedded players for the show . . . and you'll hear the Big Show, and all will be well with the world.

And your curiosity.

It really is amazing, though.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

One standard or two? We report; you decide.

It had to happen.

Protesters took to the street outside the Dallas home of the N-word spewing SAE frat boys at Oklahoma, chanting slogans and, according to one neighbor, accusing the entire neighborhood of being a hotbed of racism.

Accompanying the protest were a couple dozen reporters and several cops. From CBS News:

Dozens of protesters took to the street in front of the home of a former University of Oklahoma student and fraternity member who was shown in a video leading a racist chant aboard a bus.

Dozens of demonstrators Wednesday evening marched up and down the North Dallas residential street in front of the home of Parker Rice. Watching them were about two dozen news media representatives and six police officers.

The protesters chanted, "Racism is taught," and, "Racism is a choice."

CBS Dallas reported that the group, Next Generation Action Network, says Rice and Highland Park-graduate Levi Pettit, another SAE member seen in the OU video and now also expelled from the university, made a bold statement that was caught on tape and now it time for protesters to make theirs.

Their numbers didn't pack the street, but their message was heard loud and clear. "This is what democracy looks like," they chanted. "Teach your kids another way, no modern day KKK!"

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Is this Dallas protest proper, or is it harassment -- the creating of the same sort of "hostile environment" that University of Oklahoma officials alleged in kicking two (so far) Sigma Alpha Epsilon members out of school.

Would your answer to the question change if this were a bunch of anti-abortion protesters marching in the street outside the home of an abortionist? If so, why?

"Because one is bad and the other is good" is not an acceptable answer -- not before the law and not in today's morally relativistic philosophical soup, in which your "truth" may not be others' "truth."

Are we getting blind drunk on outrage?

The fraternity-from-hell-gift-that-keeps-on-giving now is giving me flashbacks.

This is the now-former Sigma Alpha Epsilon housemother at the University of Oklahoma, caught on video saying That Word over and over again as she laughs, with loud rap music playing in the background. The Internet Outrage Machine tells me this is Beauton Gilbow, who hypocritically lamented the sad state of affairs on the Norman campus and said she knew nothink, NOTHINK about any racist goings-on at the SAE house.

The Internet Outrage Machine, as it is wont to do -- and let me emphasize there's plenty to be outraged about in this whole outrageous mess -- takes just one sliver of a story, the one most likely to cause good people to lose their s***, and runs with it. That's because the Internet Outrage Machine's collective mental age is no greater than the chronological age of the World Wide Web itself, and young people usually aren't good at perceiving nuance.

So, we're told this is Beauton Gilbow, bigot and evil frat-boy enabler.

I know better.  This is Beauton Gilbow, a vision from my youth. Beauton Gilbow, someone who reminds me of my parents and any number of aunts, uncles, cousins and acquaintances as I grew up in the Deep South as Jim Crow faded away and whatever we have now started to take shape.

Gilbow, from the sound of her, probably grew up in Oklahoma or the South. And I know a little bit about the culture that formed her and imprinted on her heart and mind a whole host of attitudes, assumptions, unthinking Pavlovian reactions and expectations.

If her upbringing was anything like mine -- and at age 79, I assume her experience was mine on steroids -- she had been well-marinaded in a thoroughly toxic culture before she even reached the age of reason. I'm sure it's possible to completely undo that kind of psychological imprinting, but I'm not sure it's possible without violating many of the Geneva conventions.



AS I SAID, this whole thing is giving me flashbacks. I don't like them. I don't like reflecting on how many of my childhood memories, how many of the silly schoolyard songs we sang, how much of The Way Things Were was thoroughly, unthinkingly and hatefully racist.

Here's a blast from my Red Oaks Elementary past, what we thought was a hilarious takeoff on the Daniel Boone theme song from TV:

Daniel Boone was a man, he was a big man,
But when the bear was bigger, he ran like a n***** up a tree

Folks who grew up in the North -- or should I say grew up in the North and didn't hear the N-word 200 times a day amid a culture where racism and segregation, both de jure and de facto, was as pervasive as the air you breathed? -- generally get to remember their silly childhood songs and rhymes with a certain wistful fondness. If you're a Southerner seeking to rise above your upbringing, trying to do like Jesus said and love your neighbor as yourself, that luxury is forever denied you. You get to remember with a sense of regret and shame. 

Double that if you forget yourself and find a silver of wistful fondness trying to climb over the wall you've built around it over the decades.

Truly, if you're under 40 and not from where I'm from, you have no idea how pervasive -- how normal -- that word, the N-word, was. It's true enough that many white folks in the South were raised by parents who forbade them from using that word because it wasn't nice . . . because polite people didn't talk like that. I was not among that fortunate number.

And even for those who were, "n*****" was everywhere. In the air, in the culture, in the hearts of too many.

FOR FOLKS of a certain age and from a certain place, "rising above your upbringing" isn't something that happens. It's a life-and-death struggle forever. When you have a certain thing pounded into your consciousness from birth, deprogramming is a lifelong task. Some see the need to look hard into the mirror every day that God in heaven sends. Some drift along, thinking they're just fine -- or not thinking much about it at all.

And then one day at an Oklahoma frat house in 2013, somebody sticks a smartphone in your face and you try to be funny and hip for the young idiots you're supposed to be watching over.

(Insert mushroom cloud here.)

Suddenly -- maybe -- it dawns on you that you should have spent a lot more time looking hard in the mirror than trying to impress a bunch of college kids who, having been born sometime during the Clinton Administration, have no damned excuse that I can think of.

Today when I saw that video of Beauton Gilbow, septuagenarian, I saw my childhood and a bunch of people I knew and loved. And I wanted to cry.

I wish I saw more tears over this and less click-bait exploitation of this from the Internet Outrage Machine. Hateful, racist college kids don't come from nowhere.

It would be a lot more helpful, actually, if we took some of the energy required to be exploitatively outraged and put that toward figuring out why we're no further from Selma, 1965, that we seem to be a half century on.

The True Gentleman Experience

According to its national website, Sigma Alpha Epsilon is all about the "True Gentleman Experience."

One brother from the Oklahoma Mu chapter at Oklahoma State University tells us all about it.

Soooooo . . . considering what happened with the SAEs at the University of Oklahoma, the student newspaper at Oklahoma State took a look at that school's chapter. And found this in a member's room, visible from the street:

O'Colly photograph

Oops.

Please tell me that's not how you win SAE's John O. Moseley Zeal Award, which "recognizes the chapter that best exemplifies a model chapter in Sigma Alpha Epsilon. This chapter excels in its operations and brotherhood, fulfilling the vision of our Founding Fathers and its members and by living the life of a true gentleman."

I'm guessing that being in PR for a fraternity is just a Lost Cause.

Everybody hates somebody sometimes

There will never be a n***** in SAE
There will never be a n***** in SAE
You can hang 'em from a tree
But they'll never sign with me
There will never be a n***** in SAE

This apparently is what it means to be a Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother at the University of Oklahoma.

So much for "tolerance" in an era when everything is permitted except loving your neighbor as yourself.

The latest black eye for the Greek system in the United States -- a vile and racist little ditty by the SAE brothers of OU captured on a cell phone camera -- exploded into the national consciousness during a weekend when the nation's first black president went to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," when Alabama state troopers brutally dispersed a march of peaceful civil-rights protesters asking for something as unthinkable at the time as an integrated Greek system. In 1965, that would be granting blacks the unfettered right to vote.

The right to be fully American.


MANY LOOK at the first African-American president speaking in the former heart of states' rights, "separate but equal" and violent repression of minorities and think of how far we've come in a half century. But you only need to look as far as Ferguson, Mo., and the partisan, race-laden rhetoric aimed at that first black chief executive to make you think twice about how far we've come in overcoming America's original sin.

You only need to look as far as a bunch of hateful, overprivileged white boys in Norman, Okla., to think that, after all this time, all this strife and all this shed blood, it's still 1959 somewhere. Many somewheres, actually.

OU President David Boren, to his credit, wasted no time in kicking the frat off campus, a move which followed the SAE national office, to its credit, disbanding the school's chapter.

But that's just playing "whack a mole." There'll be something else somewhere . . . soon.

Fallen humanity always has had a problem with The Other -- those who for whatever reason are unlike ourselves and whom we see as some sort of threat because of their otherness. That's not going to change. In fact, it's probably going to get worse as we untether ourselves from every philosophical or religious tradition that seeks to restrain our worst selves and remind us that we're not omniscient, omnipotent and righteous in every way.

We seek to be as gods, only to behave as devils.

SCRIPTURE tells us that "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." It doesn't get more prideful or haughty in spirit than Oklahoma's brothers of SAE . . . who now are disgraced former brothers of SAE.

But that's just them. What about us? If anything characterizes America today, it is our misplaced pride over just about everything and our overreaching haughtiness in spirit.

Our faith in American exceptionalism is as fervent as it is misplaced, from the misplaced superiority complex of those frat boys in Oklahoma to the crusading self-righteousness of too much of our domestic and foreign policy. But there is no exception to some eternal truths, and the fall resulting from our misplaced pride -- pride writ small on our hearts and writ large in our society -- will be epic.

The truth is we're all SAE wannabes, and we're always looking for the next n*****. This will not end well.

3 Chords & the Truth: Rock on, Beethoven!

Rock on, Beethoven, and tell Chuck Berry the news.

Rock on, Beethoven! Rock on, Beethoven!

Rock on Beethoven, and tell Chuck Berry the news.

The news is that this week on 3 Chords & the Truth, classical music isn't just for the stuck up, the snooty and the hopelessly square. I mean . . . in case you haven't noticed, some of your favorite rock bands have deep classical roots.

Likewise, some of your favorite rock icons have composed some nice classical pieces. We're talking about you, Sir Paul.

So who says you can't play classical music along with everything else in our little musical stew? Not me, because here we go . . . an entire set about how the classics can dig those rhythm and blues.

IN OTHER WORDS, rock on, Beethoven! Rock on Beethoven!

Rock on, Beethoven, and tell Chuck Berry the news.

You know, that's a lot to chew on for one episode of the Big Show. But here's the thing: That's only about a third of this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

And here's the other thing: If you want to find out what the other excellent two-thirds of the program is . . . you need to click somewhere to stream or download the Big Show, because I ain't spilling the beans on nothing else.

So there.

That is all.

For now.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Where the music takes you

Wondering what the deal is with 3 Chords & the Truth?

This, pretty much.

Anymore, you'll be hard-pressed to find freeform radio on your radio dial, AM or FM. But you will find it here on the Big Show.

Of course, we add our own little twist to the concept . . . but then again, it's freeform. Everybody adds their own little twist to the concept.

That's the beauty, and the vitality, of freeform radio. Which you'll find right here on 3 Chords & the Truth. Just on the Internet. And a new episode's coming in just a couple of days.

Be there. Aloha.

3 Chords & the Truth: The electric 3C&T acid test

Y'ever watch Mad Men?

You remember the episode when button-down, Madison Avenue, gimme-a-bourbon-and-a-girl, 1960s ad exec Roger Sterling dropped some acid?

This ePisode of 3 CHORdS & THE tRuTh iS kiNd OF lIKe ThAt, maN!

It's a mInd-blowING exPeRIEnCe! It's OUTTA SIGhT! It's gettiNg farther OUT, Man!

GrOovY!

You know?

ANYWAY . . . this episode of the BIG SHOW is GUARANTEED to, lIkE, TOTALLY blow your mind, MaN!!!

So, take a piece of paper. Write your name and address on it. Say you've been listening to the Big Show. Then write "Please Help Me."

Now, pin the note to your shirt.

I say, now, pin the note to your shirt. Now, pin the note to your shirt. Now, pin the note to your shirt. Now, pin the note to your shirt. To your shirt.To your shirt.To your shirt.To your shirt.To your shirt.To your shirt.To your shirt.To your shirt.To your shirt.

To your shirt.

NOW YOU are prepared to listen to the podcast this week. Sit down, tune in, turn on and enjoy, man. It will be a mind-expanding experience.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Is it kicking in? BeCAUse I'M rEAllY Not FeElInG aNYThing Yet. !!!

Our psychic newspaper friends in Lincoln

Well, this actually hasn't happened, but the Lincoln Journal Star stands behind its ability to predict the future, we predict.

A story on the expected same-sex marriage ruling was posted to http://t.co/FIrQLPI4OA in error Tuesday night.
— Lincoln Journal Star (@JournalStarNews) February 25, 2015

And here are some other clairyoyant headlines from today's Journal Star (motto: "It's gonna happen, you just wait and see"):

* Obama tells press 'Yes, I am a Muslim from Kenya'

* Hillary Clinton becomes first woman president, sends Bill to Gitmo

* Ricketts lures Simonize factory to Lincoln

* Unicameral OKs Beercade franchise for old Senate chamber
 
* Sandhills ranchers cut off beef to 'uppity' Omaha eateries

* Omaha cop shoots mayor, thought she had gun

* Judge upholds ban on opposite-sex marriage

* JS reporter Pilger held in slaying of online editor


HAT TIP: Romenesko.

Bobby Jindal and the purity of essence

It's getting to be that time again.

The presidential election is a little more than a year and a half away, so that means it's time for us to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb-throwers.

In brief, we must take the following seriously. Here's the jist of the latest political news (and remember that you heard it here first):

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal can no longer sit back and allow Obama infiltration, Obama indoctrination, Obama subversion and the international Muslim conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

And, by God, he wants to do to the Islamic State terrorists what he's done to LSU.

Gov. Bobby Jindal continued his attacks on President Barack Obama, proclaiming just outside the White House Monday (Februrary 23) that Obama is "unfit to be commander in chief" based on his refusal to commit resources needed to defeat and kill radical Islamic terrorists.

"I take no joy in saying that," Jindal said after he and other governors met with the president for nearly 90 minutes. "I don't say so for partisan or ideological reasons."

But he said a president who cannot call the enemy "radical Islamic terrorists," or is willing to rule out ground troops, except for very limited missions, isn't leading the United States to victory over a brutal enemy that he says only can be stopped by killing them.

Jindal,who is expected to seek the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, had expressed the same sentiments in a column that appeared Monday on www.foxnews.com.

Wrote Jindal: "Let's review some of what these radical Islamic terrorists have done recently in broad daylight: beheaded American captives and filmed it; beheaded 21 Christians in Libya and filmed it; burned a Jordanian pilot alive in a cage and filmed it; and attacked a school in Pakistan, killing over a hundred children and teachers."

LOUISIANA'S gallivanting governor also outlined in the Fox opinion piece what he expected the president to do when dealing with Islamic terrorists:

Radical Islamic terrorists are cutting off people’s heads, killing children, crucifying people, and burning people alive, and we need to find jobs for them? An international jobs program is not a strategy to defeat terrorists.

Perhaps the most incredible statement yet from this administration came from our State Department, which said, “we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war.”

This is madness. Killing the enemy is exactly the way you win a war. More than any other statement, this one demonstrates in broad daylight that the president is not up to the job.

PERHAPS Obama should listen to Jindal, who knows a thing or two about killing -- killing his state's health-care system, killing his state's university system, killing his state's ethics-enforcement system. . . . 

Verily, LSU never knew what hit it. Neither did he rest of a state laid waste by its governor, who now stands ready to bomb the rubble.

ISIS militants, I suspect, are somewhat amused by the possibility Jindal might be president someday. American voters, meantime, ought to be underwear-soiling terrified by that same prospect.

The airwaves are alive with the sound of nitwits

Mein Gott, I haven't heard someone actually use the word "jigaboo" in, like, 25 years. But an anchor-blatherer at the Fox station in Cleveland just did this morning.

Like Kristi Capel on Fox 8, I was stunned at the vocal chops of Lady Gaga last night as I watched her Sound of Music medley on the Oscars. Like Kristi Capel, Mrs. Favog and I were thinking "Who the hell knew?"

We kind of had an inkling from her recent duet album with Tony Bennett. But apart from that and last night's TV performance, it's not like that phenomenal voice is evident from the music she usually performs.

But unlike Kristi Capel on the Cleveland airwaves, "jigaboo music" is not how we would choose to characterize Lady Gaga's normal fare. Then again, we're not perky, young TV blatherers . . . and we're old enough to know what the word means. We also are old enough to have sense enough not to use it.



IT'S LIKE Capel is the much younger, perkier reincarnation of the elderly Omaha neighbor who last used that word in my presence when describing folks who have more melanin in their skin than I do. Or he did. And I recall thinking at the time, more than two decades ago, "Who the hell uses that word anymore?"

It was almost more amusing than it was offensive, though offensive it was -- and is.

But wait, there's more. At least Mr. O'Hara didn't use the word when speaking to an African-American man, WJW co-anchor Wayne Dawson. Capel did. Behold the perils of TV-news "happy talk" as transcribed by Raw Story:

“It’s hard to really hear her voice with all the jigaboo music — whatever you want to call it — jigaboo!” Capel opined.

“She has a nice voice,” Dawson, who is black, said after a nervous laugh.

“She has a gorgeous voice,” Capel agreed. “I never knew. Very nice.”

I . . . I . . . I . . . uh . . . ummmmmmm . . . holy crap!

As God is my witness, I dearly wish Dawson had gone all Richard Pryor on her ass.

I REALLY, really do.

That said, I really cannot think of a better example of the "twit problem" American TV news has gotten itself into since the days of Ron Burgundy. Is it really too much to ask that the folks who purport of inform us on "TV news" actually, you know, know something?

This was Capel's response when viewers began to scream bloody murder. Really.

@John_Ferguson_ @fox8news I apologize if I offended you, I had no idea it was a word or what it meant. Thank you for watching.
— Kristi Capel (@Kristi_Capel) February 23, 2015

FURTHERMORE -- and this is a radical, radical thought, I know -- is it too much to ask that if television journalists have no idea what they're saying, they just say nothing at all?

We might all enjoy the peace and quiet.

3 Chords & the Truth: The music tour

Oh, the places we'll go! The things you'll hear!

I'm your captain, the Mighty Favog, and we're ready to take off on a journey of musical discovery, courtesy of 3 Chords & the Truth Tours.

We will be departing from the Group Vocal Lounge sometime in 1957, and we'll journey to the farthest reaches of jazz, with a  lounge-sound layover before returning to Jazz Junction, then embarking on a whirlwind journey through exotic places and exquisite enclaves of rock 'n' roll artistry.

YOU'LL HEAR fascinating rhythms and have an immersion experience in late 20th century pop music on the Big Show before stopping for an extended stay in 1965, where you may even encounter a cannibal and headhunters.

Please fasten your seat belt as we get under way, and have a most pleasant journey on 3 Chords & the Truth. And as the locals say . . .

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Your 'Cantore loses his s***' post du jour

  It's official.

  Thundersnow . . .  

(Jump to the 3:20 mark)    is better . . .  

than sex.  

And better than winning 

the Powerball jackpot, too.

Stupid me. I just think "Well, crap. 

I'm gonna have to shovel more than I thought."

3 Chords & the Truth: Pro DJ. Do not attempt.

Don't try this at home. Even if you're in a mood.

Yes, I'm in another one of my musical moods here in the 3 Chords & the Truth studios in central Omaha, by God, Neb. But I also am a trained professional, more than qualified to act upon those musical moods and share the results with you.

In other words, leave this thing to me and nobody gets hurt. More importantly, nobody's gonna be transitioning from the Backstreet Boys to Metallica. Eww.

And blecch!

AS FAR as this week's edition of the Big Show goes, you'll be hearing lots of classic soul and lots of classic pop, jazz and easy listening, too.

Mood. Mine.

Fortunately, my little musical moods lead to good stuff on 3 Chords & the Truth pretty much every time. I would say "positively all the time," but everybody hates a braggart.

Oh . . . before I forget, we also have some excellent -- and absolutely free -- advice for you at the end of the program this week. Stay tuned for that.

AND THAT about covers it. Stream it or download it, it doesn't matter. The Big Show will be the same Big Treat for your ears.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there.  Aloha.

Polly want a divorce lawyer!

Forget your Smart TV, watch what you say in front of your cockatoo.

The adoptive owners of this cockatoo now get to hear all about her previous owners' acrimonious breakup a couple of times a day.

According to Elaine Sigmon of North Carolina, her Moluccan cockatoo Peaches once belonged to a couple who has since broken up. Today, the bird often breaks into loud (and possibly expletive-laden) tirades, dramatically moving her head from side to side as she screeches and "argues."

Sigmon told The Huffington Post that she thinks Peaches probably picked up her penchant for bickering from her previous owners.

"We had Peaches for several days when one afternoon she began ranting and raving as if blessing someone out," she said. "My husband, Don, was sitting in the chair near her perch and she began to aggressively point her head toward him just like someone pointing their finger while arguing ... We're not sure what she is saying, but she is really giving her opinion."

ON THE one hand, I can't stop laughing at this. On the other . . . that poor, traumatized bird!

I hope the Bickersons feel really good about their legacy -- the breakup that never, ever ends. No, we're not laughing with you, toxic original pet parents, we're laughing at you.

Farewell, Radio Shack

If I had a dollar for all the stuff I've bought at Radio Shack over the last four decades or so . . . I'd still be so far in the hole on the deal, it wouldn't be funny.

I loved Radio Shack, especially when Radio Shack was still the Radio Shack I knew when I was young. And now it's going to be gone, with the "surviving" locations being Sprint stores with a "Radio Shack section" in them.

Sure, I can get everything I got at the Shack online now, but it's not the same. And it's not as convenient -- no more making a quick trip down the road for that part or connector I need right now.

ON HBO'S Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes aim at the snarksters laughing at the demise of a 94-year-old company. Good for him. Double good for him in producing the farewell commercial he -- and I -- would like to see run on TV.

Take that, you hipster, Millennial scum!

For old farts like me, Radio Shack was where you went to drool over cool stereo and communications gear. It's where you went to get a new needle for your phonograph. It's where you, as a kid, bought cool Science Fair electronics kits. It's where, like the corner drug store, you could test the vacuum tubes from your radio or TV.

It's where you bought batteries and Supertape. Remember audio tape?

Radio Shack is where I bought those boxes that let you put several inputs into a single "AUX" imput on your stereo. Several VCRs or DVDs on the "video in" input on your television set.

If you needed it, Radio Shack had it.

AND IF YOU wanted to spend some quality time pining for all the cool stuff that you didn't have but wished you did, you pulled out your Radio Shack catalog. That's all gone now, relegated to blessed memory like all those other lost things from the lost youth of middle-aged Americans.

If you want to snark about that, go ahead. I hope one of the soon-to-be-unemployed employees of the fallen electronics giant knocks you into next week.

Portrait poses prob for Piyush

Somehow, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has found time to stumble into a huge controversy over his official (above) and unofficial portraits hanging in the state capitol. 

You'd think destroying an entire state wouldn't leave time for extracurriculars. Go figure.

3 Chords & the Truth: What we got

We got New Wave.

We got Latin jazz.

We got classic jazz.

We got Cugat.

We got Green Day.

We got Basie.

We got pop.

We got rock.

We got soul.

WE GOT IT ALL, and you won't believe how we get from there to here.

We are the Big Show.

We are 3 Chords & the Truth, the podcast for people who love music.

It's a journey -- yes, it is -- and it happens every week at this same Bat Time on this same Bat Channel.

Be there. Aloha.