Earlier this week, we posted a gorgeous new video for a song called “Big Wave Rider” and we speculated about the origin of the name of the new psychedelic rock duo Rainbow Bridge. I guessed that they’d taken it from the famous Jimi Hendrix concert movie. As is often the case, I was wrong. The group’s drummer/keyboardist, Bridget Smith, has now explained all to us.

In an email, she wrote this:

Well, the name Rainbow Bridge kind of came to us serendipitously. We ([bandmember] Adam and I) remember it hazily something like this: We had been thinking about what and how to name the band, and I suggested Rainbow Bridge to him and he then showed me a list of potential band names he had previously written, which Rainbow Bridge was on. (Or vice versa.) So we knew that was the one. As for why we were both thinking of that name, or what it is a reference to, I think the main reference for us was the work of José Argüelles (new age artist/thinker and advocate of the lunar/Mayan calendar, also organizer of the 1987 harmonic convergence). He references the idea of rainbow bridge, a connection to other dimensions, and a rainbow bridge meditation to bring peace and harmony. We also liked all the other references it includes, i.e., the pet-mourning poem and architectural and natural phenomena since we are avid cat lovers and design/nature enthusiasts. And the Jimi Hendrix movie/Hawaiian happenings is cool too!

I looked up Jose Argüelles on the internet. I’d say that he is pretty out there. Except he is not pretty out there. He is very out there. He is a big deal in New Age circles.

Besides organizing the harmonic convergence-a two week span in August, 1987, when more than 144,000 people gathered in groups at designated sites around the world to meditate in celebration of a certain astrological alignment-and looking like a cross between the actors Nicholas Cage and David Straithairn, he was one of the founders of Earth Day, and his teachings are often credited with bringing the date December 21, 2012 into the public consciousness. Rather than believe the Mayan calendar’s “end of history” will be the destruction of the earth, though, as the recent Roland Emmerich movie would have it, Argüelles says it will be a good thing.

He believes humans come from outer space, the descendants of “intergalactic star travelers,” and that our extra-terrestrial ancestors will return in 2012 and make the world a wonderful place. “With the advent of planetary consciousness will come not destruction,” he says, “but at long last, universal peace.”

Humans, Argüelles believes, will play an important role in bringing our ancestors back. That’s where the The Rainbow Bridge comes in. The Rainbow Bridge is an electromagnetic field that goes around earth, connecting at the poles. It also has something to do with radiation belts, rotating geometric shapes and the crystals at the earth’s core. Humans will help build the Rainbow Bridge through meditation, through visualizing it. “Technically, you are directing the plasmic energy to come out of both poles and to come into a stream that creates a rainbow bridge around the earth,” he says. And that, “When the rainbow bridge appears, the star people and the ancestors will be able to come across on that.” Arguelles teaches the method, and says he has been practicing with people in Chile, and that they have had success at making rainbows appear in the sky. “We have been developing increasingly large groups of human beings who are willing to be telepathic biopsychic electromagnetic batteries.”

I can’t say that any of this makes a lot of sense to me. But sure, come December 2012, if I remember, I’ll close my eyes and think of the Rainbow Bridge. Why not? Couldn’t hurt. And that last sentence has already made my world a slightly more wonderful place.

Did you know that Chuck Schumer was once a fan of Harold Ford’s? In 2006? When he was running for Senate in another state? Apparently that is some kind of big deal that we should all be upset about.

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum-Google his name if you’re unfamiliar, you’re in for a real treat-is considering helping us all take back America by running for president in 2012. So if you’re looking to marry your dog, you’d better get on that at some point in the next two years. ’Cause it ain’t gonna happen in Santorum’s America.

Prepare for the outrage! Damien Hirst’s new New York show, opening on January 30 at Gagosian on Madison Ave., seems to mostly be new and yet already-done (by him) art pieces that consist of huge “manufactured diamonds” on shelves. Also: excellent timing. OMG it’s a commentary on ECONOMIC DISPARITY and ARBITRARY VALUE. Smells like 2008. Let us begin the campaign to request that all of the show’s profits be donated directly to Doctors Without Borders. (via)

And soon she’ll be homeless. The end.

Things For Which Texas Will And Will Not Take Federal Money

• “El Paso City Council did the right thing Tuesday when it approved spending $773,000 in federal stimulus money to buy 1,145 M-4 rifles,” opined the El Paso Times editorial board this week. “Police have to be ready for anything these days, from a Columbine-like school shooting to a terrorist attack.”

• “Texas won’t compete for up to $700 million in federal stimulus money for education because the program ‘smacks of a federal takeover of our public schools,’ Republican Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday.”

by Abe Sauer

It is news to nobody that we are a world undergoing “ad creep,” an invasive omnipresence of advertising. Now, ads are more than just “on” our lives but make up “how” we live. With apologies to the Tracy Awards and Kraft’s “Cheddar Explosion” program for the demolition of Texas Stadium, the ultimate in ad creep may be a small, cheap booze campaign going on right now in South Dakota.

Windsor Canadian, an unremarkable brand of whiskey, has, for years now, sponsored a remarkable ad campaign, “After the Hunt.” Simple as ad campaigns go, the After the Hunt promotion tags several hundred pheasants with Windsor Canadian “After the Hunt” markers and releases them into the wild. Hunters that “bag a banded bird and return the tag will be entered into a drawing to win one of five top prizes.” Of course, “bag” is a more delightful way to say “kill” and who knows how to make terrible things sound more delightful than ad copywriters? And don’t worry if your dead animal is not a winner of a top prize, “you will still receive a Windsor® Canadian travel mug and Windsor® Canadian Hat!”

Now, there are a number of obvious concerns about such a campaign. Is it even legal? And: what does Windsor Canadian pay for the privilege of advertising on land maintained by taxpayers? Since the tagged birds are released on public lands overseen by the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Park I got in touch with them.

Communications & Outreach Specialist Chris Hull told me the department was aware of the program but that it did not have any formal agreement.

“In fact,” he said, “we have kind of discouraged the practice. We don’t have any formal rules saying it can’t be done either. From my understanding, we told the Windsor folks, and others who want to release birds, that we would rather they not release them directly on to our GPA’s [Game Production Areas]. They get around it by releasing them in the roads next to the GPA’s.”

The Hunt’s website has a photo gallery of the “Pheasant Release 2009” that includes the shot above, of a Windsor rep and a public lands sign.

The advertisers pay no fee to the state, though they do make a $1,200 donation to the South Dakota Wildlife Federation.

Since hundreds of these birds are tagged with metal bands and not all of them are “bagged” for great prizes, and because they are farm-raised and likely totally hopeless in real wilderness, isn’t there a distinct risk of some predator ending up with a bit of sharp metal in its squishy-soft gastrointestinal tract? “I guess it would potentially be of some concern,” Hull said.

I wanted to add PETA’s input [Ed. Note: OMG, WHY?] but was ignored repeatedly by the organization’s press office. Despite not responding to my requests for comment on this animal-harming advertising program, the group did immediately add me to their fund-raising spam email list.

Rod Rehfeldt is a sales representative for Republic National Distributing Company, the wine and spirits wholesaler that handles the Windsor Canadian brand in the region. Rehfeldt said that the potential concern that the tags could harm a wild predator never crossed the promoter’s mind. He attempted to mitigate the concern by explaining that federal wildlife organizations tag thousands of migratory birds and certainly some of them must get eaten. Right? Right?

But Rehfeldt made a very good point: “Many people just cannot afford to pheasant hunt anymore. Our program gives them a chance to get a bird without paying the high fees of private reserves.” Public relations spin? Yes. True? Absolutely. Who gives a spit about a Windsor® Canadian travel mug; the real prize is the bird itself.

Hunting is ever more expensive. Not only have license and ammunition costs jumped in the last decade (even in New York), there are also schemes such as the Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program. For instance, farmers enrolled in CRP-MAP receive $4 or so an acre for allowing public access for hunting and trapping. In 2005, 5 million acres in the Dakotas alone were enrolled.

But with crop and land prices so high, there’s less incentive to be enrolled in any CRP programs, leaving less habitat for wildlife. Around 72,000 acres of private land was recently removed from the CRP in Minnesota. With more public hunting land lost, private reserves, such as for pheasant hunting, often charge $100 or more for access to well-stocked fields.

As ethically objectionable as it is to have an advertising campaign that takes as its core the killing of a living thing, the reality is that such a program benefits the hunters who have the least. And while those who object outright to hunting itself might find this trade-off acceptable, they might consider that this does not eliminate hunting: it makes hunting increasingly only for the well-off-just one more activity in which those with the money get to take part and about which everyone else just gets to reminisce.

The Way We Live Nowâ„¢ is sponsored. Everything-from athletic events to the simple act of pissing in a urinal, to hunting, one of the few pastimes we share with our ancestors-are retailed to us by corporations. Many “Americans” object to what they perceive as a nation becoming a nanny state, a centralized government that hands down scraps to the less fortunate, with which we should fashion some kind of endurable existence-but what is the difference between Washington D.C. and Madison Avenue allowing us our welfare pittance? One price is a tax bump; the other is dignity. A nation whose road and fire safety is courtesy of finger-lickin’ good chicken.

Okay, I lied about the penis thing. Here’s the heartwarming tale of a man who revived a chihuahua using mouth-to-mouth. Remember, in 2010 we see the good where we can.

I’m gonna vote for this one as Headline of the Day: “How a dead Welsh tramp threw the Nazis off course”

I’ve lived in New York too long, yes? Because I’m looking at this house (built by Stanford White, in Rhinebeck, for John Jacob Astor IV) and I can’t figure out why it’s so cheap at $12 million.