Messin' with Ernie: The allegory

The Nebraska unicameral disrespected Sen. Ernie Chambers.

You know what happens when you disrespect people in the neighborhood? Nothing good. That the good senator, a north Omaha legend, is twice as smart as your average legislator and 47 times more cantankerous only adds to the s*** sandwich the body is having to eat now down in Lincoln.

Above, this is illustrated in a manner the SWPL crowd can understand.

Below, the particulars from the Omaha World-Herald about how some people never learn. That's why they go into politics.

After a legislative meltdown that concluded just before midnight, state lawmakers were admonished Tuesday morning to show respect for their colleagues over the final four days of the 2014 session.

State Sen. Greg Adams, the speaker of the Legislature, rose at the beginning of the session on Tuesday to urge senators to work together, after an acrimonious session Monday.

“We have to demonstrate respect and do our very best to maintain the credibility of this body,” Adams said.

On Monday, tempers rose on the floor of the Legislature as the minutes ticked away on what was the last day to advance bills from first-round debate.

That prompted a scramble by lawmakers to get their proposals attached to other bills.

But standing in the way was Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha who attempted, for a third time, to resurrect his vetoed proposal to ban mountain lion hunting in Nebraska.

That effort failed once again, but in the process a bill that carried three measures to expand insurance coverage to sick Nebraskans was blocked from advancing, and may be dead for the year.

“I'm not going to get what I wanted, but a lot of you are not going to get anything,” said Chambers, as the minutes clicked off to midnight, when the legislative day ends and the Legislature adjourns.

THE BELLUM UNICAMERENSIS began after the legislature failed to override Gov. Dave Heineman's veto of Chambers' cougar-hunting prohibition bill. The senator thought he had the votes to make the prohibition state law despite the veto, but he ended up convinced that he'd been double-crossed by some colleagues:

Chambers said he thought he had enough votes to give Heineman another defeat Thursday, but he was derailed by some of his fellow senators.

Sen. Russ Karpisek of Wilber offered Chambers an apology on the floor, saying he had pledged to be the 29th or 30th vote. At the last second, however, Karpisek said, he “blew it.”

“I don’t like the bill,” he said, “but I did give my word, and I broke it.”

Chambers said others defected, but he named only Sen. Tom Carlson of Holdrege. Carlson, however, denied that he had ever told Chambers he planned to support the override.

Carlson, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee and a Republican candidate for governor, voted to send the bill to the floor and approved it on final reading. But Carlson said he then heard from constituents who opposed the repeal, so he told Chambers before the first override vote that he was switching sides.

Chamber said he replied, “You’re running for governor and you’re getting a lot of pressure, and you can’t withstand the pressure.”

Later Wednesday, Chambers asked Carlson if he would reconsider before the second override attempt the following day. Carlson said he would.

Chambers said he took that to mean Carlson would vote for the second override attempt. Carlson said he meant that he would rethink his vote — which he did, though in the end he remained opposed to the override.

Carlson said he did not appreciate having his character questioned by Chambers, whom Carlson said he sincerely respects for his intelligence and legislative experience.

“I’ve offended him and he’s offended me, and I’m sorry,” Carlson said.

NOT HALF as sorry as he -- and the rest of the unicameral -- would be.

You may not like Ernie Chambers' word, but he's a man of it. He does not suffer those who aren't men, or women, of theirs. (Actually, the senator doesn't suffer a lot of people, but that's not important now.)



YOU'D THINK Nebraska politicians would have learned that by now, more than 43 years after he became the first African-American elected to the Nebraska Legislature. And just like the hammer-wielding doofus who screwed with the smart phone didn't count on that lithium-ion battery blowing a gasket, the unicameral's bill-wielding doofuses who screwed with Ernie Chambers never count on the good senator blowing his.

Which is kind of like being shocked that August is hot.

This year, the short bus departs Lincoln on April 17. My guess is that Ernie will shove a potato up the exhaust pipe just before it pulls away from the capitol, much to the amusement of Nebraska's mountain-lion community.

Spicoli lives!

Last anyone saw of Jeff Spicoli, the dude was on the beach in Southern California, enveloped in an intoxicating haze.

Until today.

He's in Omaha -- absolutely. Because of the tasty waves on Carter Lake, no doubt. (Don't laugh. As windy as it's been around these parts lately. . . .)

Anyway, I didn't actually have an official Spicoli sighting, but I did see his handiwork while walking on the Keystone Trail today.

Look.

 

Spicoli was here.

 

And here.

And here.

And, for killer bud's sake, here.

When I find Mr. Spicoli, I shall prevail upon him to run for mayor. That would be totally bitchin'.

Dude!

3 Chords & the Truth: Thinking of radio

We're chilling out again on the Big Show.

We're getting mellow. We're doing music best listened to in the still of the night.

Think of an old radio, vacuum tubes glowing in the dark. Think of a lone DJ in a studio across town . . . or halfway across the continent.

Think of a couple of turntables, a classic microphone and timeless music, carefully selected by the lone disc jockey.

Think of yourself in a darkened room, with the radio, the announcer and the records keeping you company through the long night.

Just think.

YOU THINKING about that? Well, then you're thinking about this episode of 3 Chords & the Truth.

And I'm thinking you're going to love it.

I'm also thinking it'll be good for your nerves and good for your soul.

I'm thinking this is how radio used to be -- when radio was still radio and people still cared about radio.

Some things ought not be forgotten or abandoned. This goes for radio, which is not lost but merely relocated. To the Internet.

ENJOY the Big Show. Enjoy radio once more -- radio done with a little class and a lot of love. That's what we do here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

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

Louisiana: What doesn't kill you. . . .

If you are really good at something and really want to test yourself, move to Louisiana.

Anybody can be good at something if they have the right tools and institutional support. But only the crème de la crème can be good at something in Louisiana, where you'll be looked upon with suspicion for your uppityness and be consigned to toil in decrepitude while officialdom spends taxpayer dollars on more important things than, say, education.

Like, say, graft.

Or, say, an archive in Franklinton dedicated to a former two-term Republican governor. Who happened to be the political mentor of the present two-term Republican governor, Bobby Brady Jindal.

I'm pretty sure of two things: First, that my home state has serious problems with priorities and, second, that the best ceramics artists in the universe are found at Louisiana State University. I know this about the LSU art school because its ceramics program is ranked ninth in the country, and the students and professors have managed to achieve that level of notoriety as they dodge falling concrete ceilings while fighting off rats, raccoons and fleas in the Studio Arts Building. That's no easy feat as you struggle not to inhale asbestos particles or ingest lead-paint chips.

And then there's the electrical wiring next to ceiling leaks.

And the broken windows, some of which won't lock.

And the flood-prone basement.

And the lack of climate control like, say, heating and air conditioning. Ever been to south Louisiana in  August and September? An art student fainted during class last fall -- the temperature inside was nearly 100 degrees, the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reports:

Emily Seba/Facebook

Gleason said while she’s at the building she forces herself to take five-minute breaks outside. She spends about 26 hours a week there between class and work, and she worries the mold, asbestos and lead paint that LSU’s own facilities department confirmed is on most every surface might be harmful to her health. “It’s a concern,” she said.

When maintenance crews worked over the Christmas break to scrape asbestos off of steam pipes in the building, they removed some insulation, too. The steam got so hot, it ruined a student’s artwork nearby, Gleason said. These type of maintenance efforts occur regularly, costing a “couple hundred thousand dollars” a year, LSU Office of Facility Services Planning, Design and Construction Director Roger Husser estimated. His department, too, is eager to permanently solve the building’s problems rather than continue the Band-Aid method that’s driving up maintenance costs. But it’s not his call.

As the building’s conditions worsen, maintenance costs grow and students question their safety, renovation plans sit on the shelf, awaiting $15 million from the state needed for renovations. To show they won’t sit idly by as their needs get trumped by programs with big donors or lucrative ticket sales, students have planned protests on Thursday (April 3) at LSU’s campus and Tuesday (April 8) at the steps of the Capitol to ask for better working conditions and a safe environment.

But unless what’s sure to be creatively designed picket signs inspire a change in the political will of the Louisiana Legislature and Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration -- their protests this week and next, according to one lawmaker, will be in vain.

Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, a self-proclaimed cheerleader for the arts who toured conditions of the Studio Arts building last fall, said if it were up to him the project would get the needed funding, but “a handful of legislators are not going to be able to (get enough support) to fund it on their own.”

Without private funding matches, the arts building simply doesn’t rise to the priority level of other donor-backed projects, which tend to get bumped up the list much faster. Though Husser said the Studio Arts building has been in the capital outlay queue for “a very long time,” if the state sees an opportunity to take advantage of private match, it will usually take it. But that means projects without donor support will keep slipping down rungs of the ladder as privately aided ones climb up. “The pie is not unlimited,” Claitor said. “The budget is tapped out.”

I WOULDN'T say the budget is "tapped out," exactly. It's just that everything else in the budget -- from Medicaid to masking tape -- has been deemed more important than giving art students at Louisiana's flagship university facilities fit for human habitation . . . as opposed to that of rats, raccoons and fleas.

Still, LSU's School of Art is fielding nationally noted programs. It's rather like winning Olympic medals in the 100-meter dash while dragging a boat anchor.

For three straight Olympics.

Writes columnist Stephanie Riegel in the Baton Rouge Business Report:

Since the early 2000s, the building has been slated for renovation. Several times, the project was designated as Priority One in the state capital outlay bill, meaning it was at the top of the list to receive construction dollars. One spring, it appeared so imminent the faculty was told to pack up their offices.

But, as so often happens, other needs took priority. This year, the project—now estimated to cost $15.3 million—isn't even included in the capital outlay bill, much less specified as an item likely to see a single dime.

"It's depressing," says professor Kelli Scott Kelley, whose critically acclaimed paintings hang in galleries around the country. "It affects morale. It affects the ability to attract good faculty and good graduate students."

Which gets to the heart of why this matters beyond, of course, concern for the well-being of students and faculty. There is a connection between a thriving art school at the state's flagship university and the community in which that school is located.

Consider what the arts have done for the revitalization of downtown and the role the Shaw Center for the Arts has played in bringing about that renaissance.

Think, too, about the near-obsessive fixation in this community for all things purple and gold—about the glowing headlines that follow when graduation rates inch up to 69%, or about the time and energy the university spends trying to earn a spot in the top quadrant of U.S. News & World Report's rankings.

Do top-flight schools have chunks of concrete falling from the ceiling? Are students at Duke or Vanderbilt or even the University of Alabama forced to paint in sub-freezing studios? Do you attract the best and brightest students by building a lazy river at the rec center while ignoring critical capital needs?

THE ANSWERS to Riegel's questions are an obvious no, no and no. Yet. . . .

As I said at the outset, if you are really good at something and really want to test yourself, move to Louisiana. Compete against the best. Do it while dragging a boat anchor. Win anyway. Come home victorious to the non cheers of the non-existent hometown throng of non-existent well-wishers.

If it's acclaim you want in the Gret Stet, be an LSU football player. That or an 86-year-old, ex-con ex-governor with a granddaughterly trophy wife, a new baby and an ego overdue for its 2 o'clock feeding.

Baton Rouge High, 2007

Kelli Scott Kelley, the LSU art professor, was in my graduating class at Baton Rouge Magnet High. And where she finds herself now resembles, and eerily so,  our alma mater before the parish school board was left with just two choices: Tear down the whole school and rebuild it somewhere else . . . or tear down and rebuild most of the campus, renovate the main building and keep BRHS where it was.

Thankfully, the board chose the second option. Baton Rouge High, after 30-something years of abject neglect, now has facilities worthy of the world-class teachers and students within its rebuilt walls. Our old school has shed its boat anchor -- for now.

In Louisiana, sadly, there's always another boat anchor to weigh you down. In Louisiana, fortunately, some folks find a way to stay afloat regardless.

Unfortunately for the state that forgot to care, however, many of those survivors soon enough will weigh anchor one last time before setting sail for a distant shore.

Guess what. A state that cares so little for its children . . . for higher education . . . for the arts . . . for its future . . . deserves exactly what it's going to get. Or not get, as the case may be.

Ask not upon whom the anchor weighs.

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby!

Here's the story of a governor named Bobby, who says he's thinking about being more than that.

In an admission that surprised absolutely no one, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told a reporter for a Heritage Foundation "news service" that he might run for Barack Obama's job in 2016.

"It's something we're thinking about. It's something we'll pray about. But...we have to win the war of ideas first," Jindal said last week. "We've got to win the elections in 2014. And after we do that, we're certainly giving it some thought."

Insert GOP boilerplate about Obamacare here.

Insert Jindal boilerplate about his miracle-working in Louisiana here.

Now, with the possibility of a President Jindal come January 2017, I think it might be useful to explore the genesis of some of the governor's "reform agenda" in the Pelican State. Here it's important to explain how an Indian-American kid named Piyush became a Southern governor named Bobby.

IT ALL comes down to The Brady Bunch.

"Every day after school, I'd come home and I'd watch 'The Brady Bunch.'" Jindal told 60 Minutes' Morley Safer in 2009. "And I identified with Bobby, you know? He was about my age, and Bobby stuck."

Well, that explains a lot. It may even explain his Louisiana "reform" agenda, where wackiness has ensued much of the time. Indeed, if we closely examine one of the earliest and most profound influences on young Piyush/Bobby, we can see the genesis of key elements of his "miracle" on the bayou.

First, let's see whether we can unearth his inspiration for entering the political arena:



THAT DONE, it shouldn't be difficult to come up with the blueprint for his voucher-driven "education reform" program. It's all a matter of a) salesmanship and b) free customer service:



GROOVY! Now, I think I have an idea concerning the inspiration for Jindal's brilliant plan to bring transparency and more "effective" ethics enforcement to the notoriously corrupt Louisiana state government:



THAT'S RIGHT . . . behind every brilliant political scheme, there's a pop-culture inspiration. Yes, there is.

Now, let's move on to the genesis of Jindal's reform of Medicaid and the state's charity health-care system:



FINALLY, how in the world do you sell yourself as someone of presidential timbre when your entire body of work as governor of a poor, small and crooked Southern state has left it just as poor, just as small and just as crooked as you found it? And then there's the whole "I destroyed Louisiana higher education" thing.

But then you go back to the well one more time.  

What would the Bradys do?"



YEAH . . . that's the (2016) ticket.

Duuuude! DUUUUDE! Like, there's a winner, man!

The rock band 311 is the Nebraska-est of all Nebraskans. The Cornhuskerest of all Cornhusker State celebrities.

Bigger than Warren Buffett's billions. Dwarfing William Jennings Bryan, Willa Cather, Tom Osborne, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, Malcolm X and all the rest. So utterly huge and beloved that the Omaha World-Herald, in Sunday's paper, spent half of its final celebrity bracketology report explaining who -- and what -- 311 is.

To the uninitiated, 311 is made up of a group of guys who grew up in Omaha. After some short stays in Los Angeles, the guys came back home and fleshed out the band in the early ’90s. After establishing a local following, they headed to the West Coast again and eventually signed to Capricorn Records and released their first record, “Music.” Over the course their next several albums [sic] — “Grassroots,” “311” and “Transistor” — 311 became a huge success.

OVER THE COURSE the next few years -- as journalism fades into the memories of old folk befuddled by the new-media landscape of pictograms, biggest-boob newspaper contests and online vlogs consisting of random grunts, moans and clicks emitted by random hipsters -- me am planning to Anna Thesia-Eyes me by drinking hev-E over the course the day Evey daye.

Gloorp. Umnff. Ooh ooh ooh! Grock! Click. Ick-ick-ick-ick pfffffftuuuuuu. Bububububu. BRAAAAAAP!

Me kayn hav jobbe nau att nooz-Paypr?

3 Chords & the Truth: Freeform saves

I'd like to think that God hates both sin . . . and corporate radio. Which, of course, is in the business of devouring souls.

Corporate radio and souls is kind of like Hitler and the Sudetenland -- you can't assimilate just one. And after sucking the soul out of radio, outfits like Clear Channel have their eyes on. . . .

You figure it out.

But this isn't about Clear Channel or any others among the corporate media soul-suckers. This is about the Big Show -- 3 Chords & the Truth. You see, here is where radio has taken refuge from the corporate invaders.

Here is where freeform lives.

Here is where somebody puts a little thought into what goes into your ears, because "here" is where your Mighty Favog loves your ears like he does his own. OK, that sounded a little creepy, but you know what I mean.

LET ME be perfectly clear: 3 Chords & the Truth good. Corporate radio bad.

You're going to hear something new to you on the Big Show. You're going to experience true musical diversity. You will not experience crap. This is where radio has taken refuge from the corporate and cultural storm.

We live in a world where people now pay to have others "curate" music mixes for them -- another case of folks paying through the rear for things that once were free and plentiful. Music curators? Really?

I am old enough to remember what we used to call that -- FM radio. Pull up a chair, relax for 90 minutes and get yourself curated for free . . . right here. 3 Chords & the Truth is freeform FM radio, only on the Internet.

Don't get taken. Don't get soul-sucked. Do listen to the Big Show, which will help to fend off that other stuff.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

What it looks like when newspapers give up

   
The local newspaper, just in time for March Madness, got the bright idea of having a championship bracket for "the Nebraska-est Nebraska celebrity."

Put aside our culture's idiotic obsession with "celebrity" for a moment. Forget even the apples-vs.-oranges stupidity of pitting William Jennings Bryan and Willa Cather against has-been alt-rockers 311 and "the Maroon 5 guy."

No, consider instead that when you start out with an unserious premise that elevates celebrity over all else, then put it all to a vote by those readers (and given how the voting's gone, "readers" might be too generous a description) who didn't think this was just too dumb to take seriously. . . .  

Well, let's just say you're going to get what you get.

Good and hard.

SO BRYAN and Cather and Malcolm X and Ted Sorensen are s*** out of luck. As are Gerald Ford, Johnny Carson, Fred Astaire and Marlon Brando. And Bob Devaney, Tom Osborne, Bob Gibson and Scientology nutbag L. Ron Hubbard. (Actually, I was counting on Scientologists stuffing the virtual ballot box on this one. I was wrong, alas. The sheer inanity of the Omaha World-Herald exercise must have fried their E-meters.)

Hell, Henry Fonda didn't even make the tournament. "Yours, Mine and Ours" must have totally screwed his RPI. 

Well, either that . . . or this:


NO, facing off for the "the Nebraska-est Nebraska celebrity," we have 311 and investing guru Warren Buffett, whom we all love for having craploads more money than we do. That, friends, is "journalism" today.

Good and hard.

I hope 311 wins. Not only would that be the most absurd outcome possible, but the World-Herald would mercifully be spared having to explain why the boss won.

Between this sort of thing and its steamin'-hot love affair with "charticles," I wouldn't be surprised if some day soon, the hometown daily becomes the first American newspaper to break through the Pictogram Barrier and become wordless altogether.

And to think that we thought in 1982 that USA TODAY was as dumbed-down as newspapering could get. There are none so naive as those who think things can't always get worse.

Huh. Huh-huh-huh.

Because there's one born every minute

I'm an audio geek.

OK, I'm an audio geek who likes to look at this kind of stuff on eBay. Anyway, I know a little about what old hi-fi equipment is worth -- particularly the stuff that's so coveted that folks will pay insane prices for it.

But a starting bid of $650 for a Sherwood tuner and amplifier? That strikes me a a little bit, shall we say, outrageous. Then again, a sucker really is born every minute, and there are people out there for whom price is no object.

A VINTAGE McIntosh tuner or amp is fairly valued at an astronomical figure because that's what the market will bear based on quality and popularity. A mid-1950s REL Precedent is fairly valued at an insanely astronomical figure because it's even better than a McIntosh and many times as rare.

But for pretty much anything else not a vintage Marantz amplifier or tuner, not so much. You can buy a lot of good stuff for the $650 you'd be spending on this "good but, oh, come on" tuner and amplifier.

Money doesn't grow on trees, you know. When it does, you can pay that kind of money for this kind of vintage hi-fi-gear.

This has been your Revolution 21 Geek Minute for today, March 19, 2014.

Sign of his times

The foremost proponent of divine hatred of "fags," America, Israel, Catholics, Ireland (no, really) and the rest of the world, too, reportedly is about to leave this accursed coil for an encounter with divine justice.

I wonder what the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church might think of finding one of his own signs at the end of the glory road.

After all, if God hates me, what would keep the Almighty from hating Fred, too? To presume otherwise would be the height of false confidence, don't you think?

And if God is the enemy of thee, what's to say he's not also the enemy of me? To presume otherwise is . . . presumption.

The two things we know about God are the two things we just can't keep straight about Him -- first, that the Almighty is all-merciful and, second, that He is perfectly just. We tend to presume upon one characteristic or overemphasize the other.

IN THAT RESPECT, the theology of God Hates Fags, America, etc., and so on isn't that much more screwy than what we hear about the supreme being from the rest of our culture, media or Father Feelgood. It seems to me that the theology of Fred Phelps -- the one he's about to have to defend under the glaring spotlight of Divine Truth -- is just more concentrated . . . and consistently negative.

If I'm Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., I'm worrying that I just might be screwed even if I'm right, because my God is a God who's spoiling for a smite. And I'm about to be in the crosshairs of the Holy Flamethrower. If I'm Fred Phelps, I'm thinking "I made myself and everybody else miserable for a God I can't even trust?"

What the hell kind of god hates everybody and everything? The answer lies in the question -- the "god" of hell.

And the problem Rev. Phelps will find himself hard up against is not the seething hatred of God for "fags," America, Israel, Catholics, Ireland, the world or . . . if the bad reverend has miscalculated . . . him. God does what He must and what He will, but hatred of his children isn't in the divine equation. God hates sin; God loves sinners.

NO, the problem Rev. Phelps soon will confront is that one of his scary band's whacked-out signs might actually be spot-on . . . and that it will be the one marking the end of his road.

This one.

Lord, have mercy.

3 Chords & the Truth: Stand by me

"I'll take Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Shoop for $1,200, Alex."

Alrighty, Favog. Here's the answer for $1,200: "Although The Marcels technically put the 'bomp bomp ba bomp, ba bomp ba bomp bomp' into popular music, you would be "Searchin'" from "Spanish Harlem" to "Kansas City" to find anyone who could make a "Jailhouse Rock" more than this songwriting duo."

"Who are Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller?"

"That's right! But you lose."

"HUH???"

"Our new sponsors are Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Favog."

"I thought it was 3 Chords & the Truth."

"We USED to be sponsored by the Big Show. Tough break."

"Oh, yeah? Meet me behind Smokey Joe's Cafe in an hour and tell me that to my face. I'll open up a can of Rama Lama Ding Dong on yo' ass."

DON'T end up like Alex. Play it straight, stay on my good side and listen to this week's excellent adventure that we lovingly call the Big Show.

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

A what player? Porno player? What? Pono?

An old friend sent me an email to ask my thoughts on Neil Young's Pono Player.

My first thought was that the last thing I ever want to see is Neil Young nekkid.

My second thought, after a second look, was "Oh. Pono Player. That's completely different, then. Never mind."

I actually hadn’t been paying attention to the Pono Player in the slightest -- I guess when you get off the what’s-new-in-music bus, you get off the bus. I guess that was a bad thing for a guy who does a music podcast to admit, wasn't it?

Oops.

Anymore, I find that I inhabit the old-fart universe where we daydream about how good the buses used to be before all those little pimp-wannabe a-holes got on and ruined it with their f-ing hip-hop crap. And I frankly find little contemporary music that excites me enough to run out and buy it, either in the store or online.

About half of that dwindling amount is either a new jazz recording I fancy . . . or the latest Rosanne Cash record. Hell, I haven’t even bought the new Springsteen record yet.

I guess that was a bad thing for a guy who does a music podcast to admit, wasn't it?

Oops redux.
  
What I do now is scour the used-vinyl bins at Homer's and at  Goodwill, looking for treasures. Usually, those are albums that my generation's parents would have liked, back from when our parents were much younger than us . . . and often from before there was an us.

One advantage of this kind of record-picking is that “old people” took care of their LPs; teenagers didn’t. Unless the teenager was geeky ol' me. Anyway, I find that a pristine LP from 1962 -- say, on RCA Victor before they began to cheap-out on material and quality control in the late ‘60s -- is a sonically transcendent experience, and that’s an all-analog deal from the vintage ribbon mic in the studio to the vintage tape recorder in the control room to the turntable right next to me.

OH . . . right. About that Porno . . . uh, Pono Player thingy.

I’m probably the target audience for the Pono Player -- me and some wealthy audio freaks (all 487 of them), along with some hipsters who just discovered vinyl and have deemed it hip, happening and now. I -- we -- already have our Pono Players. We call them “records.”

Often, we also call them CDs Not By Rock Bands, who all have turned the compression and hard limiting up to not 11 but instead to 479 in the mastering studio.

Right now on my iMac's hard drive, I have 18,585 songs. That probably represents less than a third of what I have on LPs, CDs, 45s, reel-to-reels, cassettes and 78s. A not-insignificant amount of those hard-drive music files came from iTunes. But I digress.

Anyway, my default quality for the MP3s on the ol’ iMac is 320 kbps, which maxes out that encoding scheme. One might reasonably ask why 320 kbps MP3. The reasonable answer is that the MP3 format is ubiquitous and that, at 320 kbps, I can’t tell the difference from a CD. And to be so honest as to be completely unhip, unhappening and very un-now, a well-recorded, competently mastered CD (as allegedly compromised as it is in the geriatric-rock-star ears of Neil Young) sounds really good, though a little less “warm” than analog.

AND THAT, basically, is what Young, Bruce Springsteen and all their Kickstarter investors are betting millions on with the Pono Player -- absolute subjectivity. Really, once you manage to transcend low-bitrate MP3s of music that’s been so compressed, limited and clipped that the audio file looks like a green 2-by-4 on your digital audio workstation, “better” is as much in your imagination as it is in your sound system.

Remember SACD players? Better still, remember the studies showing that “Super Audio” CDs didn’t really sound better than regular CDs? All the “technical superiority” in the world really doesn’t matter if studio microphones can’t achieve it and, at any rate, only your dog could hear it. 

So my worth-what-you-paid-for-it verdict is this: If you bet the farm on the Pono Player, don’t be surprised if you end up feeling quite (ahem) “Helpless” as your investment gets Zuned.

3 Chords & the Truth: Don't let it go

Dit dot dit, dit dot dit dit ditta ditta! Dit dot dit, dit dot dit dit ditta ditta! Doodle oop! Doodle doodle doodle oop! Milly Freezmaz is te ta te ta ta!

And Theo Cloirk Alfred Thompseen is de do do do de da da da! That because is Milly Freezmaz wickedly talented as Adele Dazeem!

-- John  Travolta

What's all the fuss about?

Well, I guess it's about the Big Show, and apparently Hollywood is pretty excited about it.

Why is that? Well, I guess you'll have to listen to find out.

BE FOREWARNED, though. If you do, you won't be able to let it go. And if we're lucky, the attention will do for 3 Chords & the Truth what it did for Adele Dazeem . . .er, Idina Menzel.

It's Theo Cloirk Alfred Thompseen 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there.  Aloha.

Old-school high fidelity geekery

The speaker: A mid-'60s Electro-Voice "Wolverine" 8-inch, full-range driver in a new Gough speaker enclosure built by a friend who has a custom furniture business from the original 1960 plans sold by Jabez Gough of Cardiff, Wales.

The hi-fi: A 1956-57 Realistic amplifier and FM tuner. The glory of vacuum tubes!

The result: Pretty dadgum amazing . . . and all in glorious monophonic sound, being that stereo was awfully new-fangled in 1957.

Now, what you can't feel is the floor shaking -- all from a 10-watt tube amp. What you can see is that our house is undergoing a never-ending remodeling. This dining room here is due for a new floor next week . . . then on to the painting and whatever else.

I'm sure there will be "whatever else."

U.S. to Putin: Do as we say, not as we do

"What?" people across the Western world are asking today. "Is Putin nuts? Has Russia gone mad?"

Well, when you've been pushed to the breaking point, you usually don't act in a rational manner. This is just as true for nations and presidents as it is for Joe Schmoe.

But I remain to be convinced that Vladimir Putin is acting irrationally. It depends on how far he takes it in Ukraine.

The United States, NATO and the European Union have pushed Putin and Russia up against the wall -- not in East Germany or Poland, but right on its own border -- twice in recent years, first in Georgia and now in Ukraine. But Ukraine is no far-flung Georgia; you can drive from Kiev to Moscow (530 miles) in a day. That's hitting close to home.

Then there's this from a remarkable piece in The Nation by Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University:

But the most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a US-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy—is deceitful. The EU’s “civilizational” proposal, for example, includes “security policy” provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.

Any doubts about the Obama administration’s real intentions in Ukraine should have been dispelled by the recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused on the source of the “leak” and on Nuland’s verbal “gaffe”—“Fuck the EU.” But the essential revelation was that high-level US officials were plotting to “midwife” a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president—that is, a coup.

WHO ARE the imperialists here again?

Under these circumstances, if I were Putin, I'd probably invade the historically Russian regions of Ukraine, too. Certainly, I'd forcibly repatriate the Crimea, which was "given" to Ukraine by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, when. But is it really "forcibly" if the inhabitants are happy as hell you're there?

That's what we kept pointing out when we rolled into Baghdad, after all. In Iraq, they were happy . . . until they weren't, because we were both foreigners and "infidels." In eastern Ukraine, it's not the Russians who are foreigners, it's the folks in western Ukraine.

Ukraine not only isn't our fight, hell, I don't even think we're necessarily right or that Putin is necessarily wrong. Check that. I think we're absolutely wrong for meddling in a sovereign country on the border of another nuclear-armed sovereign country that has every reason to be paranoid about our meddling.

The United States' "because freedom" act has grown old over the decades, mainly because it's always been more "because market capitalism." We've always been, globally, sort of like that fella who first gets religion and makes everybody's life miserable with all the ham-handed proselytizing, just like the old Soviets were in trying to spread their communist ideology.

MORE AND MORE, though, we look less like the sincere, overeager Bible-thumper and more like Elmer Gantry. Don't think Putin doesn't see that much more clearly than we do -- being a saint often is a hindrance in spotting hypocrites and con artists.

Or as one Russian legislator aptly put it:

But the parliamentary session roundly dismissed western criticism in advance. Senator Nikolai Ryzhkov said Russia should be prepared for the west to "unleash their dogs on us". "They ruined Yugoslavia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, all in the name of western democracy. It's not even double standards, it's political cynicism."

ALLOW ME to paint the broad canvas of American hypocrisy with a historical brush: If the Russians had their own Monroe Doctrine, we'd all be soooooo H-bomb vaporized right now.

Really, it would all just be so much more honest if President Obama would call regular press conferences to threaten the Rogue Nation of the Day with annihilation if they, for whatever reason, fail to do as we say, not as we do.

Because Cuba 1898.

Because Dominican Republic 1965.

Because Vietnam.

Because Grenada 1983.

Because Panama 1989.

Because Iraq 2003.

Play realpolitik if you must -- though I really wish you wouldn't play it while drinking . . . or with John McCain on your team -- just dispense with the moralistic bullshit.