Stuff. To Do.

I know it’s Springtime and it’s supposed to be renewal and flowers and budding trees and things like that, but I’m tired of stuff right now, you know? Among certain other things that happened this week, there is also like this thing with the goofball in Korea who is gonna launch a nuclear missile on his grandfather’s birthday or something? It’s depressing!

We (as in U.S.) might set fire to the sky over this guy’s country because he says he has a nuke missile and he wants to use it, you know? Doesn’t this guy know how dangerous We The People are? Look what we did to a country that didn’t even have any good weapons, it turned out. We crazy!

Plus I thought all these Dictators liked movies? We know he likes Sports because of that ridiculous thing with the basketball that happened, but doesn’t this guy like movies? I refuse to Google this shit. I don’t want to learn about this fool. Didn’t he see Dr. Strangelove? Once this thing gets rolling there ain’t no stopping it! I wonder how many spies were in that group that went over for the basketball, huh? Seriously, I bet there was at least one spy. I hope there was a spy, I mean we gotta do something about this kook, I guess, but why is it our job, World Policewise? Can’t we just give him some money? Can’t China handle this one? They want to be Number One now, so why don’t they fix this guy’s wagon, hah? C’mon, China, it’s your century, everybody keeps saying, plus, you’re closer, right?

And what happened with this Drone Army we were building over in Africa, did we do anything with that? Are we getting anything out of these Drones, like, are we gonna attack Syria or something? Is it a secret? Also, how many sides are there, in Syria? Which side are we on? And since when is Hosni Mubarak still alive over in Egypt? I thought that was all done? He’s still on trial for being President? Are you kidding me?

Also, there are robots taking all the clicks out of my computer or something. I’m not Googling any of this shit because it just makes it worse.

Birds around my house are tweeting their natural analogue tweets now every morning before I get outta bed. They wake me up out of my vital Beauty Sleep and I don’t even get mad. They are back from being good birds someplace else, so I should have Joy and stuff because it is the Season of Life, with plants, and li’l baby birds to continue singing and get that early worm breakfast, and no more winter coats and whatever, but all I can think about is Hurricane Season will be back at some point and a whole bunch more people are gonna get washed out to sea because their house is too close to the melted polar icecaps and the Carbon Dioxide dissolved into the sea or the air or however it works with the science because of the pollution and there was a whole iceberg or glacier or something in South America that melted in like 20 minutes after freezing for a thousand years or something and now it’s melted and everything’s fucked up, man.

But it’s Springtime! You don’t have to dress in layers now, that’s Good Times, right? More Daylight, even if you don’t believe in Daylight Savings or whatever, you don’t have to lift a finger and there are more hours of Daylight because of what, the angle of the Earth, or the Earth is closer to the Sun or something? I can’t remember, but all I know is I heard somebody say maybe the Earth was a little wobbly or something or there’s a bulge and that could be also melting everything and there’s Fracking, to get more oil, and it’s causing earthquakes because of how you have to shoot water into the ground or something and so of course there are other guys saying no, Fracking doesn’t cause Earthquakes, people do, or something?

And also a whole buncha Manatees got killed? The Manatee is one of my favorite animals because it is mellow. It doesn’t attack people, it just cruises around and eats seaweed or something. If I was a millionaire I would have a Manatee ranch where they could come and hang out and not get hit by boats or killed, but I don’t, even though I play the lottery all the time, so now I feel bad because of the Red Tide, which chokes out all the oxygen or something, and kills the plants the Manatees eat, and so the Manatees get killed and this is all because of soap or phosphates in the water or maybe it’s chicken shit or some sorta waste product from farms going into the water? We still do this, we still dump stuff out that kills things? Can we maybe reassess the whole Chicken thing, because meanwhile, back in China, they have the “Bird Flu,” but they say they don’t have any big problem with “Bird Flu,” which is up to H7N9 now, and counting. I don’t know, is it important when the serial number of the Flu changes? It’s bad, right? Everything is bad? You know what, China? You need to fix this also. You guys are in charge of your own damn chickens, right? What good is having a Totalitarian Society if you can’t handle stuff like this? Meanwhile you are gonna get everybody in China a car? Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not a good idea, man. Everybody has admired you for a long time because of all the bicycles.

You know, I’m usually pretty upbeat, I’m a Positive Person, for real, but every once in a while it just all sorta piles up and I have a lot of questions. I’ll get over it. Maybe it’s just the pollen from all the fucking trees.

Previously: Beer With Baseball On The Radio Is Great, You Should Try This Delightful Combo

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias. Brian Garrett took that photo of manatee rescue.

★★★★ The spots on the starlings were starry, for once, under the white noon, as they pecked on a not-quite-established patch of grass in the garden. In the crosswalks of Midtown, the people-to-vehicles ratio was unfavorable to getting anywhere by taxi. People ate at sidewalk tables with their coats on, in the mirrored light. The white had turned blue, with the pale crescent moon straight overhead in midafternoon. The breeze was changeable but never too heavy; the blooming trees now dappled the sunlight. Clouds rippled, then arrayed themselves in long parallel rows. The sunset light off buildings uptown was lurid enough to interrupt dinner, for a look at the still-more-lurid west.

It’s hard to find an exact release date, but one of the greatest albums ever recorded by anybody came out thirty years ago this month. I can remember right where I was the first time I heard “Blister In the Sun,” the first song on the first album from The Violent Femmes. I was in my friend James’ kitchen, where we’d go every afternoon in sophomore year to pinch a pipe’s worth of pot from the brick his mom kept wrapped in plastic under the telephone book in the drawer next to the fridge. James had a tape, a taped tape, a cassette recording someone had made for him. I forget who. But The Atlantic’s Sean Michael Robinson gets it right in describing the way, “friends passed it around like a dirty magazine.” This would have been in 1986, three years after the album came out, but I can still picture James’ face standing in the front of the cupboards we’d lean against across from where where we’d set up his box on the counter. And I can imagine the look on my own, as those first, instantly-embedded-in-your-brain-forever 16 notes came out of the speakers. And after those, and ensuing four drum beats, and the titillating references to drugs and cum stains, what I remember as being so revelatory was the fact, “Hey, you can make punk rock on acoustic instruments!” From the bristling frustration of “Add It Up,” so resonant for any virgin’s ears — “I look at your pants and I need a kiss!” — to the hepcat vibes on “Gone Daddy Gone” — like an aural accompaniment to a Jim Jarmusch movie — to the gentle, plaintive beauty of “Good Feeling,” its home-madeyness felt somehow closer to our lame, suburban existence than the Sex Pistols or the Clash or the Dead Kennedys or any of the other bands whose names we penned onto the canvas of our Converses ever had. It was so weird and different-sounding — very much unlike anything else I’d ever heard before. And since, too. Though you can hear certainly hear Gordon Gano’s whine in lots of music that has come since. (That of the Pixies, most notably to me.) The band went on to make lots of other records — some of the other ones really good, too. And they played their first concert in six years this past weekend at the Coachella festival in California. (You can watch a full video of their performance here. Gano looks sort of like Donald Rumsfeld now.) But it’s never gotten better than that first album — by anybody, really. As I sit here listening to it today, I’m struck by how it’s still just a perfect, perfect flawless thing. Completely whole and simple and unto itself.

“Thousands of ducklings deemed unfit for human consumption following China’s latest bird flu outbreak are being sold as live snake food. Poultry farmers have resorted to selling truckloads of the newly-hatched ducklings to snake farms for a few pence each after 14 deaths in China were blamed on the lethal H7N9 virus. One duck farmer said of the creatures’ unpleasant fate: ‘It’s either this or we just gas them all’.”

“What time is Margaret Thatcher’s funeral tomorrow?”

April, according to NBC, is “a painful and unforgettably violent month in this country’s history.” Other painful and unforgettably violent months in this country’s history include January, February and March, in addition to May, June and July. Sadly, we would be remiss if we did not mention August, September, October and November in this grouping as well. Also: December.

“[I]t’s literally like listening to a symphony of color and aroma, with comfort-inducing aftereffects.”
 — Guess what it is. Go ahead, GUESS!

by Abe Sauer

The NRA has responded to the Mike Bloomberg-backed Mayors Against Illegal Guns by casting doubts on whether or not the “curious” man in the group’s latest pro-background checks ad is who he says he is — or AN ACTOR. Despite MAIG’s insistence that he’s a real West Virginia gun owner, one blog has offered $500 for anyone who can prove he is (or isn’t).

One of the NRA’s key questions is how a real gun owner would have such terrible “trigger discipline,” meaning, placing a finger on the trigger at any time before the exact second a shot is to be taken. “The NRA recommends Mayor Bloomberg use some of his money to sign this man up for one of our industry standard firearm courses,” intones the pleasantly voiced pro-gun female narrator.

But they’re right. That is embarrassingly bad trigger discipline and that man desperately needs an NRA safety class. In fact, if the NRA is handing out safety classes, we hope they invite Governor Sarah Palin to one, when they see her at the May 3 NRA-ILA Leadership Forum in Houston.

In May, Palin will speak at the event alongside such firearm dignitaries as Bobby “Fast Drawl” Jindal, John “The Mustache” Bolton, Rick “Seven Shooter” Santorum, Judge Jeanine “Play One On TV” Pirro, Glenn “One in the Chamber” Beck, Colonel Oliver “Secret Recipe” North and Governor Rick “[For Assistant to Complete]” Perry. The event will also feature the return of the NRA’s “Wall of Guns,” including a raffle for “your choice of firearm(s) from either side of the wall.”

Seeing as how it was just a couple years ago that “lifelong hunter” and pro-gun Governor Palin similarly demonstrated extremely poor trigger control during her Alaska hunt, we sincerely hope the NRA takes the opportunity to extend the former Vice Presidential candidate an invitation to one of its industry standard firearm courses.

And don’t excuse the reality show hunt as “just one mistake.” Your keynote speaker has demonstrated that she has no idea that her finger is “dangerously close to the trigger” on a number of gun-handling occasions.

But don’t take our word for it. After watching the Governor in action, even the pro-gun rights people over at the venerable Field & Stream recently called Gov. Palin “an extremely inexperienced shooter.”

Heck, invite Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein and make it a bipartisan standard firearm course. We can clearly all stand to learn something.

Finally, and since the NRA raised the subject, we know that NRA Board Member Ted Nugent will be at the May event despite promises about Obama’s reelection and prisons v. graves. But, from the looks of it, the NRA might want to sign Mr. Nugent up for one of those courses as well.

Abe Sauer is the author of How to be: NORTH DAKOTA. Palin with gun via The Daily News. Nugent album cover via lp-covers.blogspot.