Dear Stephen Malkmus,

Sorry if I came off like a stalker when I told you that I’d sort of named my child after one of your songs.

It was strangely warm the day we met, in fall of 2005. I was wearing a sweatshirt, and sweating in it as I stood at the corner of Houston Street and Avenue A with a heavy bag of groceries in each hand. You walked up pushing a baby stroller and waited there, maybe five feet away, for the crosswalk sign to change. I got a giddy rush when I saw you. You are one of my all-time favorite rock n’ roll heroes.

Not that I hadn’t seen you in person before. I worked at a music magazine; and my roommate from college used to help put on those Tibetan Freedom Concerts you used to take part in. I interviewed your band mates Scott Kannberg and Steve West once while you sat at the next table over, being interviewed byLynn Hirschberg, I think for Rolling Stone. And I’d seen you backstage at the concerts, and at parties and stuff. Most recently, I’d seen you in my local coffee shop. Full City, the place was called, right across the street from the building where I lived. Full City got their coffee beans from a place in Portland, Oregon, according to a sign by the counter. You lived in Oregon, I knew, so at first I wondered whether you were particular enough about your coffee to have found the one place in New York that carried your preferred product when you were in town for work or something. But then Natalie, the proprietor of Full City, told me you’d in fact moved in to the neighborhood-moved in with your girlfriend, who lived right down the block.

I didn’t know you had a kid, though. I was surprised to see the stroller. This was maybe why I decided to say hello when I hadn’t the other times. I don’t usually approach a famous person when I see one on the street. I figure people don’t want to be bothered. But I was a new father myself at the time; my son had been born ten months earlier. We were standing right next to each other. It almost felt weird not to say something.

“Excuse me, Stephen?” I said, turning toward you. “Hi. My name’s Dave. I just wanted to tell you how much your music’s meant to me. It’s meant a lot.”

“Oh, thanks,” you said, in the same slack, slightly off-kilter voice I knew from listing to your records a gazillion times.

“That’s all,” I said, starting to turn back away. “I just wanted to say hello.”

“So, what’s up?” You smiled and shrugged and sounded friendly. Friendlier than I’d expected.

I was taken off guard. You wanted to talk to me?

“Oh. Umm,” I was totally psyched. But I didn’t have anything else to say. “I don’t know. I was just doing some shopping.”

The light changed. You nodded south and asked if I was going that way. I was. We crossed Houston and started walking down Essex Street together. You asked where I lived and I told you and you told me you’d just moved into the neighborhood. I didn’t say, “Yeah, I heard that,” because I thought that might be weird, but I did tell you that I’d seen you at the Full City coffee shop a couple times. “Oh, yeah,” you said. “They have good coffee there.”

My sweatshirt was much too warm and zipped up and I couldn’t unzip it or wipe the sweat off my forehead because my hands were full of the very heavy grocery bags. I was sweating a lot. It was like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. But if you noticed, you didn’t say anything. We talked about local real estate, which is about the lamest thing you can talk about, but was about the coolest thing I could imagine that day. Me and Stephen Malkmus, boring, bourgeois 30-somethings-together! I mentioned something I’d read and you said you’d read that, too. “We must have read the same article,” you said. I suppressed a thirteen-year-old’s giggle.

We passed Stanton Street and came to Rivington. You were turning east. I turned, too. I could’ve kept going south and turned later; I didn’t have a set route. But I did eventually need to turn east. I was enjoying the conversation. Were you? Probably not as much as I was, that would’ve been hard to imagine. But you didn’t seem to be not enjoying it. So I turned with you. After a couple more steps, I looked down into the stroller you were pushing and saw a baby girl. “What’s her name,” I asked. You told me and I said that was nice. (It was.) I asked how old she was and when you told me I said that I had a little boy around that age at home. We exchanged congratulations and then condolences, agreeing that the difficulty of this first year would mean that our children would be only children.

“What’s your little guy’s name?” you asked.

Sweat streamed down past my ear onto my neck. “Well, it’s kind of funny,” I said, and coughed a laugh in confession. “Because it’s actually a name that I know mostly from one of your songs.” I told you my kid’s name and you said, “Oh, yeah,” and recited the line from the song. This felt very weird to me, like parts of my life were coming together in ways I never thought they would, and I wondered how it felt to you. I wondered whether you were regretting your decision to strike up the conversation, or that you’d told me where you lived and your daughter’s name.

“We really just liked the way it sounds,” I said, hoping that might reassure you.

You seemed unbothered. “I’ve always liked that name,” you said. “I’ve always associated it with the Old South for some reason.”

We walked and talked past Norfolk and Suffolk Streets. You were nothing but nice the whole time. But when we came to the corner of Rivington and Clinton, you nodded to Caffe Falai. “We’re gonna stop in there,” you said. “Okay,” I said. I decided not to stop with you this time.

“What did you say your name was, again?” you asked. “Dave,” I said. You smiled a small, half-embarrassed smile and you indicated yourself. “Steve,” you said, shrugging again. You were just being polite. You knew I knew your name.

You’ve since moved away. Back to Portland and brought the family. Actually, I just learned you did wind up having a second kid. So congratulations and condolences again. I never saw you at Full City again after that day. I sort of wonder why, though I sort of have a hunch.

by Charlie

There’s a simple reason why the gentleman from North Carolina, who recently told C-Span that the network had too many black callers, is upset. Blacks already have a national hotline. It’s called 9–1–1. And if we can’t get through there, Steve Harvey’s radio show is usually a reliable backup. But let’s face it, no one listens to Steve Harvey anymore. Confused, blacks have been calling in on the white lines instead. This can be very problematic. I have solutions.

Black people. We have politics. Weeeeeee have opinions. We need popular, nationally televised hotlines too. B-Span: Black Cable Satellite Public Affairs for Negros. Redundant, but GENIUS. Here are a few setbacks: “public affairs” in blackspeak apparently means spitting your grande iced-chai half-caf caramel macchiato from Starbucks out on your computer screen, and “negro” is no longer recognized by the census bureau as “black.” So: who you gonna call if you want to complain about those racist white Republican sons-of-bitches? Send your comments to me! You don’t even have to be black. You just need to hate those racist white Republican sons-of-bitches.

Well now, you say, all black folk don’t hate racist white sons-of-bitches. You may be a black Republican and/or Jehovah’s Witness for example. That’s when I tell you I’ve been mentally drafting an open love letter to Michael Steele for over a week. I think he’s super; a black Republican who can appreciate the finer things in life-like bottle service and cheap ass bitches. On B-Span, it’s totally okay to be an assimilated negro: not hate white people but still feel the need to black it up every once and a while. Try it!

As the intelligent gentleman from North Carolina points out, the blacks talk about the same things over and over and over again. If it’s not “George Bush is a liar,” or “Barack Hussein Obama is Jesus Christ,” it’s “man, I need some more fried chicken and watermelon” or “damn, living with diabetes sucks.” (If you’re black, and you’re reading this, please be sure to send your comments at least twice.) True, this kind of programming runs the risk of getting really boring very fast.

But I’d like to point out that the Jews have been doing that shit for centuries (successfully, I might add.) It’s always, the Holocaust this, or the Holocaust that-and no one ever gets bored. EVER. So fuck me if the blacks can’t harp on racial injustice. We just need to come up with a way to keep it fresh and sexy like the Holocaust. We’ll shoa them. We need to FIGURE IT OUT.

Charlie is the pen name of a young professional woman in New York City who has an extensive chocolate chip on her shoulder and is here to explain things.

I’m not sure what’s better: The fact that this is an actual public service announcement by the Australian government to improve driving behavior, or this headline describing the controversy surrounding it: “Government’s ‘Don’t Be A Dickhead’ campaign takes aim at gingers, emos.” Win-win, I guess. [Via]

Mystery Solved: The Devil Did All That Terrible Stuff To Those Little Boys, Covered It Up, And Then Wrote An Expose About It In The Times

Father Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist, tells Italy’s Mediaset that Satan is responsible for the recent spate of bad press Pope Benedict XVI has received concerning child molestation in the Catholic Church. “There is no doubt about it. Because he is a marvelous Pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the devil wants to ‘grab hold’ of him,” says Amorth, who also notes the the devil “uses” priests to discredit the Church. A representative for Lucifer told us that his boss was not available for to respond to Amorth’s claims as he is currently “pretending to be a vulnerable, trusting deaf boy in hopes of tempting a priest into raping him.”

“Investigating one of the nation’s most prominent unsolved murders, a Hollywood detective pitched softball questions and homemade muffins to a serial killer. He asked: Did you kidnap freckled 6-year-old Adam Walsh from a Sears in 1981? ‘Nothing to do with it,’ Jeffrey Dahmer answered, taking another muffin.”
 — WTF.

“One of the violators said he was confused by it. He said he hopped in front of him.”
-Sgt. Dennis Smith of the Glendale Police Department discusses a ninety minute “enforcement sting” in which Officer Tom Broadway ambled across an unmarked crosswalk dressed in a giant bunny suit to make sure that drivers were stopping. While a city councilman called the operation “stupid” and “breathtakingly dangerous,” the force argues that it is an important teaching tool for motorists.

Now you can read every David Broder column ever at one handy location.

by Juli Weiner

34 “Whatever Makes You Happy”

33 “Nashville”

32 “Ride”

31 “Headache”

30 “Polyester Bride”

29 “Support System”

28 “Supernova”

27 “Baby Got Going”

26 “Johnny Feelgood”

25 “Girls, Girls, Girls”

24 “Flower”

23 “Cinco de Mayo”

22 “Strange Loop”

21 “Crater Lake”

20 “Glory”

19 “6′ 1”

18 “Big Tall Man”

17 “Help Me Mary Please”

16 “Jealousy”

15 “Stratford on Guy”

14 “Mesmerizing”

13 “Dogs of L.A.”

12 “Johnny Sunshine”

11 “Explain it to Me”

10 “Fuck and Run”

9 “Divorce Song”

8 “Canary”

7 “Shane”

6 “Gunshy”

5 “Go on Ahead”

4 “Alice Springs”

3 “Shatter”

2 “Chopsticks”

1 “Ant in Alaska”

Juli Weiner IS NOT JOKING.

There have been calls to demolish a small chapel in Obersalzberg, Germany, because some of its masonry might have come from a nearby mountain retreat that belonged to Adolf Hitler.

This fight over Hitler’s flagstones may seem absurd at first, but they are nevertheless of high symbolic value. After falling in love with Obersalzberg in the 1920s, Hitler established an informal, second seat of government in the Alpine region and many of his henchmen likewise built villas near Hitler’s Berghof. Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress and future wife, once lounged on the flagstoned terrace in her bathing suit. Hitler greeted children and petted German shepherds on the stones. And the Nazi dictator played host to leading party officials, including Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann, on them. Indeed, speaking of the Berghof, Hitler once declared that “all of my great plans were developed there.”

While there’s been no actual confirmation that the stones belonged to Hitler, the mere possibility troubles locals, who worry that Neo-Nazi skinheads might make the site some kind of shrine. I’m not sure how the whole situation will resolve itself, but it says here that they should take the whole thing down. Once your stones get evil on them, they never come clean again.

Times gossip blogger David Carr is laying out scenarios in which one might enjoy the iPad: “Your partner is watching ‘The Amazing Race,’ which you find less than amazing. Your day is done and you just want to lay next to him/her and bathe in a glow. You’ve already downloaded a rental of ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ which cost $4.99 and took 30 minutes. Put on headphones, hit play. You are alone, together, each of you in your own mediated universe. You hold hands anyway.” You know what? I really have NO INTEREST in living like that. I’d rather just wheel my lardy bottom into the permanent virtual reality chamber and hook up the Dr. Pepper I.V. and just CALL IT QUITS. God. Also? SCRABBLE SUCKS. And I don’t need a $650 SCRABBLE MACHINE. I don’t even need a ZERO DOLLAR Scrabble machine. If I wanted to play Scrabble, I’d spend more time on Facebook. And if I wanted to have a gigantic iPhone that doesn’t make phone calls, and basically looks like a thumbprint and hand grease analyzer, well I’m sure that SAMSUNG makes a product that suits my needs.