3 Chords & the Truth: Debtpocalypse Now

Call me Nero -- I don't care.

Yes, the tea party is nuts, and insanity is totally a contagious thing in Washington.

Yes, because of this -- and because of America's political dysfunction being turned up to 11 -- we have become the Dysfunctional States of America.

Yes, we're pretty much screwed, and we're sitting here in the studio waiting on Debtpocalypse Now.

And, yes, we at 3 Chords & the Truth are going to -- so to speak -- fiddle while Washington burns. What the hell else are we supposed to do?

APART, of course, from sending the cast of Swamp People to the District and having them set lines all around the Capitol, baiting the hooks with $100 bills.

Unfortunately, we here at the Big Show have no sway over Louisiana alligator hunters (And that John Boehner kinda looks like a "tree shaker," doesn't he?) despite having hailed from the Gret Stet. So there we are, back at Square One.

With the music . . . and you.

And we're just going to have to make the best of it, cheering ourselves up with some excellent tunage. It's the American Way.

Or something.

SO I'M rosining up the bow, boys, and we'll march off to the poor house with a song in our hearts. And with the swampers doing that voodoo that they do among the reptiles on Capitol Hill.

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

When radio was an art form

Computer chips are boring square blocks with a porcupine fetish.

Transistors are little blocks of plastic, metal and minerals.

Vacuum tubes are Dale Chihuly masterpieces of glass and wonder. The older they are, the more spectacular, these little jars of fire and light that bring the world wondrous sounds.

I WAS THINKING about that after our little video demonstration Wednesday of my 1928 Radiola 18 console. Really, that radio is so old, it was made when RCA was an American company.

A big American company at the forefront of an exciting modern world of sound . . . and eventually sight.

Magic waves flying through the ether.

An entire world flooding your parlor at the flick of a switch.

It was the birth of the first "golden age" of mass entertainment. The birth of the "network." The birth of a truly mass culture.


THIS OLD Radiola represents an age of technology that looked a lot more like art. It represents an age, too, where life was more Chihuly and less commodity.


I WAS born into the last echoes of that age -- the age of wooden cabinets and shiny metal trim and tail fins. The age of RCA and Zenith and Philco and Silvertone. The age of flying by the seat of your pants and artistic statements.

The age where radios meant a warm, orange glow in a darkened room, a certain "ethereal" aroma and friendly voices from far away on a summer's night.

I was born into the age of vacuum tubes. And I miss it so.

First, you choot 'em. Then you make a roux.

If Julia Child weren't already dead, she'd have to kill herself in protest.

Why?

That Swamp People cookbook that master alligator hunter Troy Landry is writing. I could lapse into full snark mode at this juncture, but decided to leave that to TMZ. You know, the website that causes serious journalists to kill themselves in protest.

According to Landry -- the guy who basically cooks everything on the show -- SEVERAL publishers have already approached him about a book deal since "SP" premiered last year ... but he's still weighing his options.

Landry tells us, he's currently compiling a master list of all his recipes -- which includes his most famous dish called "Nutria Sauce Piquante" ... a gumbo made from a semiaquatic rodent called a nutria ... basically an over-sized rat.

DEM TMZ PEOPLE horrified at dem "rodent stew," cher.

Meanwhile, Louisiana chef John Folse is set to kill himself in protest of TMZ's failure to appreciate the difference between gumbo and sauce piquante. Me, I'm just wondering why it's OK for Hollywood people to wear extremely expensive coats made of rat pelts (a.k.a., nutria and mink) but it's not OK to eat what's left after you skin it.

That's what you call a conundrum. What's not a conundrum is knowing what the first step will be in each of Mr. Landry's recipes.

"CHOOT 'EM! CHOOT 'EM!"

Dancing the Charleston to heavy metal

When this radio was new, Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States.

The Jazz Age was in full swing.

Flappers were flapping in speakeasies, and everybody was swilling bathtub gin. Wall Street was still flying high, and brother most certainly could spare a dime.

Not that you'd need him to. Yet.

This is an RCA Radiola 18, most likely in a custom cabinet. This is what you call heavy metal.

If you love vacuum tubes, this is your radio. See the big tube in the back? That's the rectifier, and it appears to be original to the set, manufactured sometime between summer 1927 and 1929. It's one of the earliest radio sets to run on "lamp current" -- that's 120 volts AC to you and me.

IN 1927, the norm was for your home radio (assuming you could afford one) to operate off of a couple of batteries -- one of them a big wet-cell not so different from what's under the hood of your car. That changed with the Radiola 17 and Radiola 18.

In 2011, this Radiola 18 still works just fine. A little arthritic, maybe . . . but aren't we all?

If you're not duly impressed (and I add that, as far as I know, this old girl has never been restored), let me ask you something.

Do you think your iPod will still be functional in 2095?

Do you think you will?

Philco, my Philco

Seven decades ago this summer, Philco rolled out the new radios for the 1942 model year.

This was one of them.

Oh, the things it's heard -- Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, D-Day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, peace, war again, the space race and everything from swing to rock.

And 70 years later, it still has its antenna perked . . . listening for the next big thing. For it endures.

Let's see how your iPod's faring in 2081.

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.


UPDATE: OK, here's a fancy, studio-ish photo of the old girl, taken just a while ago for your further edification.

Ode to a heat index

Glibby gloop gloopy Nibby Nabby Noopy
La La La Lo Lo
Sabba Sibby Sabba Nooby abba Nabba
Le Le Lo Lo
Tooby ooby walla nooby abba nabba
Just another heat-stroke song

-- Apologies to 'Hair'
. . . and Oliver, too

Well, it's OK if you like big towns

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So, the Today show thinks a one-man town in Wyoming is small.

In the realm of Population: 1, however, Buford is a freakin' metropolis. It even has a skyline . . . sort of.

And it's on the dadgum interstate highway. It has traffic. The store there is full of people pulling off I-80 for gas and sundries.

When is a town of Population: 1 not really all that small? Look at Buford, Wyo.

Unfortunately, the folks at NBC News didn't look much farther than an interstate exit . . . much less its own archives. In the NBC archives, and on the 'Net, is a 2005 piece about a one-woman town in Boyd County, Neb.


MONOWI, by God, Nebraska puts the Population: 1 back into Population: 1.

Not that you can tell that -- again -- to them slicksters in New York City.


READ that last sentence like this.

Not exactly a tree-shaker

Looky what you just might find when mowing the lawn in south Omaha.

After seeing this picture on the Nebraska Humane Society's Facebook feed, I had visions of animal-control officers struggling with the little alligator and yelling "Choot 'im! Choot 'im, Elizabeth! Choot 'im!"

ALAS, this is Nebraska and not Louisiana, we're not Swamp People, and we don't play them on the History channel, either. Besides, baby gators are cute little things and, according to the Omaha World-Herald, we seem to have a soft spot for 'em.

Once, of course, we decide we're not hallucinating in the brutal heat.

Noland, 63, spotted the alligator, still alive but lethargic, about 9 a.m. behind the Alano Club at 1523 Vinton St.

Mark Langan with the Nebraska Humane Society said the alligator was most likely a pet that got away or was set loose when it got too big.

Noland choked up and grew teary-eyed as he recalled his first glimpse of the gator. "His sad little eyes just tore me up ... It was unique. I'll never forget that little fella."

The gator's rescuer plopped him in a container of water and massaged the cool liquid into its skin.

"He was feisty once he cooled down ... He had life and his eyes sparkled up," Noland said. "He was ready to rock on somebody and I was glad to see that ... because I thought he was going to die."

AWWWWWWWWWWW. And, for God's sake, keep Troy Landry away from the little feller.



UPDATE: I blame Troy Landry for this. Somehow.

There is no 'USA' in 'class'

"Japs"? "Pearl Harbor"? Really?

Americans rarely miss an opportunity to make profound jackasses of themselves.

The Women's World Cup ended up being no exception.

I had been thinking that Team USA's heartbreaking loss to Japan was somehow metaphorical. On the other hand, recent American history doesn't really jibe with a hard-working team that plays its heart out and loses a close one to a superior opponent.

It jibes more closely with a backbiting, infighting, hapless bunch of losers that finishes last in its NBA division.

WHEN LOSING a soccer game results in enough American jingoism, meanness and outright racism on Twitter that it all starts to "trend," you start thinking more along the lines of "bad omen," not metaphor. You also start thinking, as you let your mind start wandering to the debt standoff and the political dysfunction reigning in Washington, that probably we have the government we so richly deserve.

Politicians utterly devoid of class and eager to hurl invective (and worse) at The Other are guilty primarily of mirroring their constituents -- and American sports "fans" -- a little too closely.

I reckon the right team won the World Cup. And judging by recent history in matters small and large, the predictable country is about to lose the future.

The mark of. . . .

This is kind of like being the only kid in your school named Phuc, only worser.

As in bang, bang, shoot, shoot, messing-with-Mexican-drug-cartels, holy-crap-I-might-end-up-dead bad.

As in "Just call me Judy. Please?"

Reuters has the sign-o'-the-times story, right here:

A Texas state senator's beloved signature symbol will be reluctantly stripped from her campaign vehicle and rally signs this weekend after police in her border town warned it could draw unwelcome attention from Mexican drug cartels.

Veteran Democratic Sen. Judith Zaffirini is known by her friends, loved ones and constituents simply as "Z."

But authorities told her sister recently that the symbol, which translates in Spanish to "zeta," could cause the truck to be mistaken for vehicles belonging to the deadly "Zeta" cartel, based on the Texas-Mexico border.

Zaffirini told Reuters on Saturday she was grateful for the warning, but found it "disappointing" and "mind-boggling."

"Sadly, we will remove the 'Z' from our campaign vehicle and will not use it at rallies or other public places," she said.

Late last month, police in downtown Laredo pulled over Zaffirini's sister, Josie Pappas. The officer pointed to three bumper stickers on the pick-up's back window.

The stickers, bearing the word "Zaffirini," were applied in a big "Z" formation on the glass of the blue Ford F-150 truck.

Pappas told Reuters the officer asked her if she had noticed "cars full of men passing me by and staring back" at her car recently.

Harry Chapin, 1942-1981

Harry Chapin's been gone 30 years today.

Even after all these years, that's a damned hard pill to swallow. I wish to associate myself with these remarks in the Chicago Sun-Times:

To mark the anniversary, I listened to “Greatest Stories Live ” again. It holds up well. Though I skipped, as I always do, the final song, “The Shortest Story,” an excruciating dirge for a baby starving to death in Africa. The thing about Chapin is, some of his music is indeed hard to take; if you think the hits are downers, you should hear the more obscure stuff, like “Burning Herself.”

But that doesn’t make it bad. He was a man who deeply cared about matters most ignore. When he died in his little Volkswagen Rabbit, it could have been an irony lifted from his songs: Chapin was on his way to do another free show — half his concerts were for charity. No wonder hip folk despised him: He lived the life that they only paid lip service to, pinning on a ribbon and calling themselves bighearted while Chapin gave away half his income.

The music stands up. His music is less dated than some of Bruce Springsteen’s, because it was never current to begin with. Anyway, listening to his song “Circle,” watching the morning sun reflect off Metra cars in the train yard heading downtown Friday, I thought Chapin didn’t really die at 38. Harry Chapin lives on, as much as any artist can.

3 Chords & the Truth: Kicking back

It's too dang hot.

It's too dang steamy.

I think on 3 Chords & the Truth this week, we'll take it too dang easy. Well, not too dang easy. I mean . . . you know.

It's just that it's summer, and that means it's time to kick back some. Enjoy life. Take things at a more leisurely pace.

Avoid heatstroke.

I MEAN . . . you know what I mean.

Right?

Anyway, taking it just easy enough to avoid hospitalization in this wicked July weather while being just industrious enough not to suck is the rather reasonable goal of this week's edition of the Big Show. I hope this is a goal with which you can get fully on board.

The music's still good even when you're kicking back. Better, actually. Because you're kicking back.

Circular reasoning 'R' us. Because it's summer, and it's hot -- no reason to bust a gut. Or fry your brain.

YOU KNOW what I mean.

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

That coulda been AL-QAIDA lemonade!

In Georgia, the law's the law. And you have to be "consecutive" in enforcing the law.

If you're one of Midway's finest, that means you have to consecutively work the steps of policing an unheard-of burg in the wilds of Carter Country.

First . . . be an idiot.

Being a bully, you can work on when you run across a lemonade stand run by three little "girlses."

UNFORTUNATELY, a Savannah TV station thought it was sufficient to do only a news story on Barney Fife Gone Wild (and in drag):

The girls had only been opened [sic] for one day before Midway’s police chief and another officer cruised by and saw the stand.

“They told us to shut it down [and we didn't know why],” 10-year-old Skylar Roberts said.

“We had told them, we understand you guys are young, but still, you’re breaking the law, and we can’t let you do it anymore. The law is the law, and we have to be consistent with how we enforce the laws,” Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar said.

By a city ordinance, the girls must have a business license, peddler’s permit, and food permit to set up shop, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day and a total of $180 per year. City officials said it’s their job to keep everyone safe and healthy, and there can be no exceptions to the rules.

“We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance,” Chief Morningstar said.

“It’s almost like they don’t have anything better to do. I’m going to let it go. I’m trying to teach them good. I don’t think if I keep on, it’ll teach them a good thing,” Amy Roberts said.

NO, DOING a story on this and letting it go is neither good television nor good citizenship. What's required here is the Full Gomer.

STEP 1: Get copies of the municipal code and the state criminal code. And a lawyer.

STEP 2: You, the lawyer, your cameraman and the assembled volumes of The Law (which is The Law, you know) stake out Chief Ditzo and her Keystone Crusaders.

STEP 3: Wait for them to violate something. Keep the camera running.

STEP 4: Once the violation has occurred and been duly videotaped, you, the lawyer, the assembled volumes of the state and municipal codes and the cameraman pile out of your stakeout location -- camera running -- yelling "Citizen's arrest! Citizen's arrest!"

MAKE SURE you go step-by-step in this, and don't try to do all this stuff concurrently. That wouldn't work.

Because you have to be consecutive in enforcing the law.

Not this Bing, that one

You know you're getting old when . . .

Your first thought, when hearing the name of Kate Hudson's and Matthew Bellamy's new baby is "They named the kid after Bing Crosby?" while Mashable's first thought is "They named the kid after a search engine?"

But what I really want to know is how Hudson got hooked up with one of the Bellamy Brothers. Aren't those guys waaaaaaay too old for her?

I guess the May-September couple just let their love flow, and nature took its course. It happens.

Muse?

Muse about what?

Vacuum tubes and lost worlds

I am leaving Mississippi in the evening rain
These Delta towns wear satin gowns
in a high beamed frame
Loretta Lynn guides my hands through the radio
Where would I be in times like these
without the songs Loretta wrote?

When you can't find a friend, you've still got the radio
When you can't find a friend, you've still got the radio
Radio . . . listen to the radio
Radio . . . listen to the radio

-- Nanci Griffith

You can't spell 'bum' without 'B' and 'M'

See! I told you Ray Nagin
was full of it! Enough said.

Picture of the day

If you knock on the door, and you're in a vacuum, does it make a sound?

Well, inside the space station, it does. Unless, of course, the airlock has been bled of air. Then . . . no.

Assuming the vibration doesn't travel past the airlock. If it did . . . probably.

Unless, of course, nobody was in a position to hear it. In that case, does it still make a sound?

Audio at 11. Or not.

Reporting from space . . . well, not actually from space . . . more like the voiceover booth at the end of the hall . . . well, not exactly at the end of the hall, more like just before you get to the end of the hall . . . Hank Kimball, Eyewitness News.

Loving money to death

Congressional Republicans -- now using the "debt ceiling" to play chicken with Götterdämmerung -- are traitors.

What remains to be seen is traitorous to whom and what -- swords or plowshares. Or, perhaps, both . . . all of us being much dependent on each.

That, I think, is the most likely scenario in this whole debt-ceiling imbroglio. Congressional Republicans, the frothing-at-the-mouth tea partiers as well as the GOP presidential candidates, are traitors to the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, we are not thus far treating them as such.

Watch Gwen Ifill's PBS Newshour interview (above) with Jay Powell of the Bipartisan Policy Center. In it, the former George H.W. Bush appointee explains what happens starting Aug. 3 if the debt ceiling is not raised.

IN SHORT, President Obama is right. Social Security recipients likely will be you-know-what out of luck as federal spending, in the span of one day, will have to be slashed by 50 percent.

Given that level of budgetary carnage, what are you going to cut? Swords or plowshares? The military (now busy with three conflicts) and the Justice Department . . . or Social Security payments, food stamps and welfare?

ERRRNNNNNNNNNT!

We have a winner! Sorry, Grandma . . . it ain't you. Or that hungry child over there.

This is what the GOP and the tea party are playing with. This looming human carnage illuminates their treachery.

If humanity isn't your thing, however, consider the economic consequences of vaporizing that much gross domestic product. What do you think that will do to the markets?

And the nation's cost of borrowing.

And yours and mine, too.

And maybe even your job -- assuming you still have one.

IF AMERICA is a faltering empire on life support (and it is), I fear we have just hired the ghost of Jack Kevorkian as a primary-care physician. See, politicians are there to give us exactly what we want or, failing that, convince us what their benefactors want is what we do, too.

But America is built upon love of money as much as love of freedom. As much as we love our money, we hate our taxes, and Republicans have made their modern-day name on promising us more money, fewer taxes and a free lunch, too.

We so love what reality now conspires to deny us behind our façade of bread and circuses. O! We are Fortune's fools.

With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!
Here's to my love!

O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

Mr. S***, meet Mr. Fan

The Republicans say they just want to bring the American people "smaller government."

They have succeeded beyond their wildest tea-party fever dreams.

What we have now is ungovernment. It's like The Uncola, only it will really f*** you up. Read on and weep for your country -- what remains of it, for however long -- and yourselves.

President Obama on Tuesday said he cannot guarantee that retirees will receive their Social Security checks August 3 if Democrats and Republicans in Washington do not reach an agreement on reducing the deficit in the coming weeks.

"I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it," Mr. Obama said in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, according to excerpts released by CBS News.

The Obama administration and many economists have warned of economic catastrophe if the United States does not raise the amount it is legally allowed to borrow by August 2.

-- CBS News

Six months ago, how many Republicans would have believed: 1) that the Obama White House would have backed a plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years; 2) that the president would agree to link the debt limit to spending cuts; and 3) that Obama would put Medicare and Social Security on the table? The Tea Party and deficit hawks like Jim DeMint would have won the argument when it comes to debt, and they would have achieved something -- especially on Medicare and Social Security -- they’d probably never get under a Republican president, unless he or she had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. But Republicans walked away from the deal, because they wouldn’t give up the one thing that Democrats were asking for in return: any increases in tax hikes for the rich.

-- First Read blog,
NBC News

Simply '70s: Because I'm a geek

Because I'm a geek, here's a look inside a radio station.

In Detroit.

In 1970.

Because I'm a geek, I miss stuff like radio in Detroit in 1970. And because I'm old, I remember radio in 1970 pretty well.


ALSO because I'm a geek, I liked it when television news featured, uh . . . news.

And because I'm a geek, I liked it when you could distinguish, back in 1970, the network news from the network soaps.


AND BECAUSE I'm a really big geek, I like to watch stuff like this on YouTube.

Some people see a guy getting all worked up over an old cassette recorder, and their weirdo alarm goes off. Geek that I am, I'm thinking "Why does this guy have all the fun and not me?"

It's not an old, never-unboxed radio-cassette deck. It's a time capsule from 1970 -- and you get to play with it because it was built much better than anything you'll find in 2011.

Now, if it could pull in radio stations from 1970, you really might have something there.

Says the geek.