Experience a city fighting back

Sorry, Newsweek.

A city that can produce a lipdub deemed "the greatest music video ever made" by Roger Ebert can't be one of "America's dying cities." A dying city isn't just a matter of population losses; a dying city is one that has lost its spirit.

A dying city is one in which the civic culture has unraveled and no one is his brother's keeper.

A dying city has no answer to the question "Why try harder?"


IF THIS LIPDUB is any indication of Grand Rapids' mettle as a metropolis -- albeit a small metropolis -- it's a lot healthier city than Newsweek is a magazine. Is what I am submitting for your approval, as Rod Serling might have said.

Now, I'm not qualified to judge whether Ebert is correct in Grand Rapids having produced the best music video ever, but I'd say this one is at least in the ballpark.

Experience Grand Rapids, indeed!


HAT TIP: The non-profit media conglomerate formerly known as National Public Radio.

Happiest calories in Omaha

This is Zesto in the Florence neighborhood of north Omaha.

This is the spot on North 30th Street where calories go to make people smile.

Burgers, fries, shakes and malts -- they're all here, and have been for decades. As have decades of kids in Florence.

And their parents, too.

Welcome to a lazy Memorial Day in Florence, just shy of sunset. There's a world of malteds, burgers and banana splits in a simple frame building with a big sign on top.

There's a world of memories in there, too. Whole worlds of them. Inside that Zesto -- more properly known as "Zesto's" -- is the history of the lost youth of the Baby Boom in North O.

And Generation X in North O.

In there lies the joys and fears, crushes and heartbreak of the Millennial generation in North O. At Zesto's also resides the head of one gentleman (above) who -- apparently -- just can't get enough of the place.

Every summer, we hear ESPN announcers singing the praises of the south Omaha Zesto's delicacies during College World Series broadcasts. In Florence, one finds the same good food and the same tasty shakes and malts . . . albeit with one big difference.


The North 30th Street Zesto's doesn't jack up the prices at the first crack of the CWS bat.

Some traditions never get televised, and they just have to rely on the neighborhood clientele. That and generations of memories. And the hearts and minds they inhabit -- hearts and minds forever young, eternally refreshed at a hot-fudge fountain of youth.

Somewhere, it's always 1965. And if you're in 1965 right now, and if you're in Florence, my future wife seems to have lost her new transistor radio somewhere between 25th and Whitmore and the Safeway on 30th.

If you find it, drop me a line. I'll get it back to her.

29 feet and rising

How high's the water, Mama?

Twenty-nine feet and rising.

And if the experts are to be believed, the Missouri River at Omaha is going to rise another 5- or 6 feet over the next couple of weeks, washing out crops, homes and parks all across the metropolitan area. Already, the water engulfs a small part of Lewis and Clark Landing downtown (at right).

Today the "Salute to Labor" sculpture, tomorrow on to the floodwall!

Above, we see flooding across an unfinished riverside park in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Below, sandbags on the now-closed floodgates on the Omaha side of the Maniacal Mo.


OF COURSE, that's nothing when you consider what's happening on the north side of Omaha and above.

Below, we take a panoramic view from high above N.P. Dodge Park, all of which is swamped and getting swampier.


NORMALLY, the Missouri River is beyond the tree line. Far in the distance, we see the bluffs on the Iowa side of the waterway.

And north of Dodge Park, a few miles beyond the city limits, there are scenes such as this.


AND SCENES such as this.


AND SCENES such as this.


HOW HIGH'S the water Papa?

Twenty-nine feet and rising.

Or, to further paraphrase Johnny Cash . . .

We can make it to the road in a homemade boat
That's the only thing we got left that'll float
It's already over all the corn and the oats,
Twenty-nine feet high and risin'.

3 Chords & the Truth: Pass the cold hooch

This edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is broUghtto you by the letter 3 and the number Chords&theTruth. ROFLMAO.

It also is broughtt to U by cold hooch and the distillers of North AmericA.

That's rite, ladiess and germimen, I have done this week's Episobe ob da Big Show despite the rabages ob a head code. The key is timing everything to fall betweEn coughing fits and node blowwingk.

It also ids brought to you by cold hooch, my patented cure for the common code. Cold.

WELL, it's not exactly a cure for the common code -- cold -- because there is no such thing atT thise present tyme. But with two shoits of whisky in every steaming cup of my modern miracle cure -- Eat yore heart out Coozan Dud LeBlanc! -- you absolubtley don't give a damm that you ha=bve a code in your node.

You R feeling as good as is posibl;e under the cirsumsytances.

And you should see what it dodse for this week's editiuon of 3 Chords & the Truthh! It's better than Vitameatavegemin for adding poop to the prodsuct, and keeping it from popping out at parties.

Listen today! And pass me that flask, wills 'ya?

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

We lost Gil Scott-Heron

Oh, hell, no.

Not Gil Scott-Heron.

Oh, hell, no.

We lost Gil Scott-Heron.

Dead at 62, died today.

Oh, hell, no.


IT CAN'T be true. But it is, says NPR:

A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St. Luke's Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a European trip.

"We're all sort of shattered," she said.

Scott-Heron's influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.

"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating `hooks,' which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, "Now and Then."

He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply "black music or black American music."

"Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we've come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us," he wrote.

Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," in the 1970s in Harlem. He followed up that recording with more than a dozen albums, initially collaborating with musician Brian Jackson. His most recent album was "I'm New Here," which he began recording in 2007 and was released in 2010.

YOU WANT to know why Gil Scott-Heron rejected the "godfather of rap" label?

It's because rap could not live up to him, not live up to him, not live up to him not live up to him not live up to him not live up to him. . . .

Rest in peace.

The Special Man and me

I say, I say, I say . . . I went to see the Special Man. There was a problem.

It is what it is.

Still, I can't get enough of this vintage New Orleans commercial.

Now it's just tone deaf as a cauliflower

I remember those days, fossil that I am.

Those days when Top-40 was king of the radio . . . and on AM. When FM stations were different -- and trying harder.

You know, when "stereo" was a selling point for an FM station.

When people were blind as carrots because there was nothing new on the radio. When people cared that there was nothing new on the radio.

When people said "radio" and not "Radio???"

YEAH, this 1974 ad for KGOR, taken from the pages of the North Star, Omaha North High School's student newspaper, is rather, er . . . esoteric. That's the point -- radio broadcasting at a time before a station such as KGOR had no selling point other than "Superhits."

That's it. Superhits. Or, "tone deaf as a cauliflower."

And if you get lucky, there might be a real person behind the microphone, reading liner cards that say "Superhits."

Well, I may be as blind as a carrot, but radio is as dead as a doornail.

Simply '70s: The tornado of '75

Thirty-six years ago this month, it was Omaha's turn to be devastated by a major tornado.

It wasn't a good year. What became known hereabouts as "the tornado of '75" followed by four months (almost to the day) what became known hereabouts as "the blizzard of '75."

Both extreme-weather events became Omaha touchstones for "just about as bad as it gets around here."

ABOVE is a 1985 TV report on the 10th anniversary of the great storm -- the F-4 twister, not the paralyzing blizzard. We'll call that the "short version" of what befell Omaha on May 6, 1975.


THIS IS what we'll refer to as the "long version" of Omaha's tornado horror story, produced back in the day by the City of Omaha.

IF YOU really got into those 16-millimeter Encyclopedia Britannica educational films in grade school and junior high, you'll love this. Lots of useful information, but it's kind of like a filmstrip, only without the "Booong!"

You may be too damned close when. . . .

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

This KFOR-TV storm-chasing crew's first indication it might have been just a little too close to a killer wedge tornado Tuesday came . . . when?

Not only should you not try this at home, you shouldn't try this professionally, either. This is one case when "killer video" almost really was to die for.

As it were.

As this recent outbreak of deadly weather so painfully points out -- again -- you have to have guts to live in Oklahoma. That's not a football insult coming from this Nebraska fan, either.

God help the Midwest

The Storm Prediction Center, a weather service division, said a repeat of the deadly April outbreak across the South could be setting up, with a possible large outbreak on Tuesday and bad weather potentially reaching the East Coast by Friday.

"This is a very serious situation brewing," center director Russell Schneider said.

-- MSNBC

The incredible shrinking god of Harold Camping

Flannery O'Connor -- Southerner, literary great and faithful Catholic -- once wrote to a friend that "these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn’t be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself."

That would reduce the deity of Family Radio's president, Harold Camping, to something on a subatomic level. You have to go pretty low to be understood by the 0-fer king of apocalyptic prognostication.

Monday was a day for irrationalizing in the Camping camp as the 89-year-old demonstrably false prophet explained that May 21 was a "spiritual" Judgment Day, and that we'll still all be Krispy Kritters come Oct. 21, just as he originally forecast.

Huh? As The Associated Press reporter no doubt discovered, a Camping you understand may well be a cause for alarm:

The globe will be completely destroyed in five months, he said, when the apocalypse comes. But because God's judgment and salvation were completed on Saturday, there's no point in continuing to warn people about it, so his network will now just play Christian music and programs until the final end on Oct. 21.

"We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning," he said. "The fact is there is only one kind of people who will ascend into heaven ... if God has saved them they're going to be caught up."

It's not the first time the 89-year-old retired civil engineer has been dismissed by the Christian mainstream and has been forced to explain when his prediction didn't come to pass. Camping also prophesized the Apocalypse would come in 1994, but said later that didn't happen then because of a mathematical error.

Camping's hands shook slightly as he pinned his microphone to his lapel, and as he clutched a worn Bible he spoke in a quivery monotone about listeners' earthly concerns after giving away their possessions in expectation of the Rapture.

Family Radio would never tell anyone what they should do with their possessions, and those who did would cope, Camping said.

"We're not in the business of financial advice," he said. "We're in the business of telling people there's someone who you can maybe talk to, maybe pray to, and that's God."

But he said he wouldn't give away all his possessions ahead of Oct 21.

"I still have to live in a house, I still have to drive a car," he said. "What would be the value of that? If it is Judgment Day why would I give it away?"

WHILE THE GOD of Harold Camping might be infinitesimal, so as to be understood by your average loony, my God is as big as the universe. (And I don't claim to understand Him. At all.)

And this little piss-ant of a false prophet -- he who has wasted big money and caused such widespread grief for those foolish enough to heed his mad teachings -- is going to have a lot of explaining to do upon his End of Days.

Bob Dylan, take us away!

You turn on the news, you read the Internets to see what's goin' on, you get consumed by the hurt and tragedy of this vale of tears . . . and sometimes you just need Bob Dylan to take you the hell away.

Sometimes, you just need to be taken the hell away. Far away.


BOB DYLAN'S BEEN doing that for us -- and also bringing it all back home to shatter our complacency -- for a half-century now. God grant him many more years of doing the same before knocking on heaven's door.

Happy early birthday, Mr. Zimmerman.

Every picture tells a story

If, as it is said, every picture tells a story, the book on what has befallen the small city of Joplin, Mo., will not be one of happy endings -- not anytime soon.

It will read as a tragedy, an almost unspeakable tragedy.

Early reports from the tornado-ravaged city put the death toll at 24. The Joplin Globe says officials fear the death toll will surpass 100, this in a city of just over 49,000. The stories of scores of lives in that corner of southwest Missouri will read as tragedies -- tragedies that climax in terrifying and horrific fashion.

What story does the above photo of St. John's Regional Medical Center tell? A shattered building once filled with the sick, and with doctors and nurses. A crumpled, upended medevac helicopter, tossed into a sea of crumpled cars -- this symbol of mercy and hope turned into one of devastation and mayhem.


WHAT STORY did the camera capture here, amid the rubble, the flames and the newly homeless? How many stories does this one news photo tell?

How great is our illusion -- our human delusion -- that we are in control of anything in this life. Just a day ago, a self-important hack "theologian" in Oakland, Calif., had the world focused on an Apocalypse that never came. On a Rapture that lifted no one unto heaven.

Today, this apocalypse came in an instant, unheralded and unforeseen. The "Rapture," in a real sense, came for many in the twinkling of an eye when hell touched down upon God's country.

Where is Harold Camping and Family Radio now? Can we recover the $100 million a vain and foolish man spent on spreading false prophecy and apply it instead toward God's mercy upon a small city in a far corner of Missouri?

LOOK HERE. What story, this?

All the king's forces and all the king's men . . . reduced to two brave souls, a sole injured one, a salvaged mattress and a commandeered pickup truck?

How a disaster can come so suddenly and be so big as to overwhelm the capability of civil society, or municipal government?

The ingenuity and grace of citizens in the middle of America amid unthinkable horror and unending devastation?

The triumph of the human spirit?

The desperate fight for life?

Every picture tells a story. Some tell several.

A new, horrible chapter in the story of Joplin, Mo., is being written before the camera's eye. May God have mercy on those who climbed out of the rubble . . . and on the souls of those who did not.

Half past the Apocalypse

It's half past the Apocalypse, Omaha time, and apparently we're all still here.

Omaha is strangely intact, and the awful, massive earthquake strangely absent . . . and I'm strangely unraptured. Don't they know it's the end of the world?

It ended in Family Radio's bank account.

3 Chords & the Truth: Enraptured

While Harold Camping and his Family Radio devotees have been preparing to be caught up to Jesus in the sky today, I've been working on this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth, just in case.

I sincerely hope you find the program . . . enrapturing.

And if I'm still around, and you're still around, come Sunday we'll have us some fun.

And if I'm still around, and you're still around, and the Rapture-ready folks aren't anymore come Sunday, next week's edition of the Big Show will be broadcast via the facilities of KYFR, 920 on your AM dial, Shenandoah, Iowa.

Being that Mr. Camping and Family Radio won't have any use of KYFR anymore, we will be returning that frequency to rock 'n' roll for the duration.


I'VE EVEN got a slogan: "Rock around the clock while the world goes to pot." That's because Jimmy Buffett already took "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw?"

It's not like we'd have anything to lose, being that eternal doom already awaited.

Anyway, enjoy the show . . . for whatever time we all have left.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there (or not). Aloha.

Simply '70s: Hadacol to a polka beat

Way back in the day, Louisiana had "Coozan Dud" LeBlanc and his Hadacol cureall.

Decades later and 1,000 miles farther north, Omahans had Joe Zweiback and his miracle-making Gera-Speed, with its "28 essential nutritional factors." And not just in itty-bitty amounts, either.

Down the hatch . . . and now back to today's wrestling match. Er . . . "rassling" match.

There's a difference, you know.

Vivian Maier, genius

Read this.

(And this.)

See that.

(And that.)

Lead us not into temptation. . . .

If you want to stop abortion, mind the company you keep.

If you believe homicide in utero is an abomination, a deadly affront to the rights and dignity of the most powerless and vulnerable members of the human race, don't fall in goose-stepping formation behind a man who sees our society as a tug of war between producers and parasites.

Don't take seriously the "faith-based" entreaties of a popinjay provocateur who once proposed voluntary sterilization of welfare recipients to prevent "a small minority of people working to fund and finance everybody else who isn’t working or producing."

And if you value the dignity of human life, live in Louisiana and come upon a "pro-life" rally with state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, at its head touting his bill to outlaw abortion . . . quickly walk the other way. No, run the other way.

MEANTIME, even though I'm safely in Nebraska, I really need to stop looking at the hometown rag, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate, online:

Supporters of LaBruzzo’s bill moved to a terrace garden outside the House side of the State Capitol. Opponents of his measure, many wearing pink, followed.

LaBruzzo climbed atop a planter with Rebecca Kiessling, a lawyer he identified as the person who handled the rewriting of the legislation, to address the crowd of about 50 people.

“This is going on across the country,” said Kiessling, of suburban Detroit.

She is with Personhood USA, a Colorado-based group pushing anti-abortion legislation on the state level.

Kiessling said the U.S. Supreme Court likely will not soon overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that allows abortions. “Let’s recognize the unborn child as a person in a full legal sense,” she said.

LaBruzzo said he welcomed a predicted challenge in court if the legislation is approved by both chambers and signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Laura Mullen, of Baton Rouge, was one of several HB587 opponents who took LaBruzzo up on his offer to discuss the issues. When asked about medical implications of banning abortion, LaBruzzo interrupted questioner by saying he was directed by his religious beliefs.

“You’re not discussing it all,” shouted Brett Chance, of Baton Rouge, another opponent.

IF LOUISIANA pro-lifers are "directed" by their religious beliefs, as LaBruzzo claims he is, they have to understand there is a fundamental religious principle they can't escape. One the inheritor of David Duke's House seat can't rewrite like some legislative bill.

It's not complicated, and it goes like this: Satan can't destroy himself. You can't devote your political or philosophical life to evildoing and think you're going to do away with evil. You can't spend your legislative career denying the worth and dignity of "the least of these" -- pushing ill-conceived bill after ill-conceived bill designed to brand some human beings as parasites and deal with them accordingly -- then set your eugenicist self up as some grand defender of human life.

It's like entrusting Satan with the keys to the Kingdom; it would not end well.

Don't believe me, ask Jesus (Mark, Chapter 3):

22

The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebul," ¹⁰ and "By the prince of demons he drives out demons."

23

Summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables, "How can Satan drive out Satan?

24

If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

25

And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.

26

And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand; that is the end of him.

27

But no one can enter a strong man's house to plunder his property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house."

IF YOU'RE in Louisiana, and you're pro-life -- or even if you're a national pro-life figure and get a call from some piss-ant bayou pol you've likely never heard of before -- listen to me now. It's important.

John LaBruzzo is the devil. And if you hang out with him, Satan is going to plunder your house.

You have been warned.

Simply '70s: The Datinator

Once upon a time -- 1973, to be exact -- Arnold Schwarzenegger had to go on television to get women. Now, the women he's gotten land him on television.

Ah, the passage of time.

Two all-beef patties, special snark, lettuce, cheese

If you're a "sweet, sweet man" who's an average-Joe version of Adrian Monk -- albeit one who just happens to have consumed his 25,000th Big Mac -- you know what that makes you today?

"America's saddest man."

No, it must be so. It was on Gawker.

Because, obviously, there's nothing more pathetic than eating two Big Macs a day, just about, for the last 39 years. And nothing stranger than saving the receipts. Or packing a couple for road trips . . . just in case.

There's nothing in the world more worthy of ridicule than that. Not even being Arnold Schwarzenegger.


A WORKING SHMOE who loves him some Big Macs (and is very, very thorough about it) is way sadder than fathering a bastard child -- or is it two? -- during your marriage, then watching your wife and your four legitimate kids squirm in the TV lights after your sins come to haunt them.

Nah, Don Gorske of Fond du Lac, Wis., is the freak here. And it's just like a bunch of rube cheeseheads in flyover country to celebrate a sad, pathetic specimen such as that.

Ergo, let's laugh at the freaks. The laughable freaks, that is, not the heavy-hitter, "serious news" freaks. In a world ruled tag-team style by snark and unseriousness, it's important to keep these things straight.

Except when they're gay.

And you have to admit Mr. Gorske of Fond du Lac, Wis., and all that saturated fat is sooooooo "gay," though not gay. OK?

Don't think about it. Laugh at the freak. This one, not that one.

I admit it; I was about to do the same damned thing -- right in this space. But then I thought about it.

Guess that makes me one up on American media culture, but probably not on Don Gorske of Fond du Lac, Wis., and "sweet, sweet man" status. If ever I ate my 25,000th Big Mac (and there's no chance of that at this late date), I doubt the whole town would come out to celebrate me and my digestive feat.

A few, though, might drop by to wonder "How come that sorry son of a bitch ain't had a heart attack yet?"