Rustmoth live at Ruby Tuesday's with Love Culture, The Soul Slingers, and a solo set by Tim Gross.

Showtime 10 pm. The perfect way to wind down after Comfest by having your hearing violently assaulted by surf punks.

With Rollo.



Added for the benefit of those not following Ted's LJ.

Video of Rustmoth's debut gig here:

http://www.youtube.com/rustmoth

Special thanks to Jason Pohlod for filming and editing this; he helped with loadin and loadout as well, completely unasked, and I think all he got out of it was a burger.

Bobby Jindal: "[T]heir legislation is larded with wasteful spending... includ[ing]...$140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.'"

Who're this gibbering Muppet's speechwriters? They're dumb enough to be hunted for meat. Do they really think that people are going to hear this line and say "Oooh, yeah, ignore those volcanos and they won't bother us?" Or that the federal gubbermint saying "Run for your lives! The volcano's exploding!" is a manifestation of the nanny state?

"First they told us about the cigarettes and the cancer, now they want to step in every time there's the tiniest river of molten lava! I'm telling you, Jedediah, they's gone too far this time."

My brother's a (very much Chicago-school) economist. I used to get in arguments with him along the lines of him accusing me of "not believing in the free market." My rejoinder was always something along the lines of "Sure I do. I believe in combustion, too, but I call 911 if my house is on fire."

The "invisible hand" isn't a God damned platonic ideal we have to pursue, it's a very rough model for how things will go if we don't do anything. If you're lecturing someone to set their self-interest aside in the interest of the Gods of the Free Market, you've announced that you don't get the point.

Immigration, weakened labor laws, regressive tax rates, and offshoring jobs all have no effect on American income. The best way to raise American incomes is for American workers to become more skilled.

This is best accomplished by gutting K-12 spending and financial aid for higher education.

Slight increases in the minimum wage cause devastating rises in unemployment.

Nine-digit executive salaries don't hurt anyone.

Every once in a while, when I mutter about leaving Columbus in favor of someplace that's warm year round, some anencephalic meat chunk within earshot will say, "But wouldn't you miss the changing of the seasons?"

Well, this year I did miss the changing of the seasons. Because I got sick for five days. Essentially I went to sleep on Wednesday and it was in the 80s, and I woke up on Tuesday and it was in the 30s. Autumn was somewhere in that window, and if I moved away, I might have missed the three temperate days Columbus has every year. What a loss.

I don't think there's a Nobel Prize for bitch slaps.

Yet.

M.T.: In point of fact I'm talking about the 262-page amendment Gramm tacked on to that bill that deregulated the trade of credit default swaps.

Tick tick tick. Hilarious sitting here while you frantically search the Internet to learn about the cause of the financial crisis — in the middle of a live chat interview.

More from the last angry man here.

At the age of thirty-four, a phone call should no longer set one's heart to racing.

Well, so, that's it. I submitted the last paper of my college career Monday night at eleven PM or so. Commencement's Sunday.

I am beyond weirded out. Yesterday the wife and I were kind of laying around, killing time, and I kept wanting to look at the clock and figure out what I was behind on and needed to run off and do.

Bank Gets Atlas Shrugged Onto Reading List With Bribe

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged'’ would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

For a lousy million bucks. Swell. I bet for ten million they'd make students read Flowers In the Attic.

The whole world can bite me. That goes for you especially.

Snow during the morning will give way to a mixture of rain and snow during the afternoon. High 38F. Winds S at 15 to 25 mph. Snowfall around one inch.

New hypothesis for central Ohio weather: we're brains in jars and the weather program is on the fritz, so they're rerunning the last known good configuration.

If you cannot spell scholarship, you will probably not be awarded a scholarship.

At least, I fucking well hope not.

Headline: Ohio colleges to improve education

Boy, they don't care whose feathers they ruffle over there, do they?

A loud knock on my apartment door disrupted my watching of Brandon, Dylan, and Brenda. I opened it to find my then-girlfriend British Liz who was supposed to be in a 4-hour evening class panting, trying to catch her breath.
“What are you doing here? What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Oh Jay…Simp…son…is…on campus…you have…to go…interview him.”
“Who?”
“OJ fucking Simpson!!!”
“But 90210 is on,” I said.

Read more, in "How I Met OJ Simpson and Survived Without Getting Stabbed Multiple Times!"

We went to his horrible bar called the Junction in Athens. It's one of the pickup bars for the Greeks at OU, but it's...well, it's pretty much the sleaziest one.

We never hung out there when we lived there. (Well, a couple of times on Quad Night, when you could get a drink with four alleged shots in it, but that was it.) We went because Matt's cousin was tending bar there and we wanted to say hi.

Of course, I pointed out that we weren't going to be able to sit and talk to a bartender in an Athens bar on a Saturday night, because of all the busy. In the event, I was right, so Matt got Howie and I each a pink, fizzy drink.

Howie sipped his. "It's kind of mediciney," he said. (Later, Matt told us why that was. I thought they had Red Bull and vodka and club soda in them, but he claims not. Hard to believe a bar would sell...well...never mind.)

So while we were, um, drunkenly writing on the walls in Magic Marker, these chicks stumbled out of the ladies' room. They made out for a while(in that "Is everyone watching?" kind of way), and I noticed their drinks matched ours. Then one of them started smiling at me and doing that flirty I'm-touching-my-neck thing, and I told my friends we had to go. I said that these women were so drunk they thought I was attractive. Our mystery drinks went unfinished.

Later I reflected that possibly this says poor things about my self-esteem. It's been a rough couple of months.

Part of the Family Guy Star Wars thing featured Rush Limbaugh playing himself.




( Read more... )

This weekend in Athens, we had dinner at the Union Street Diner. If you were at OU in the mid-90s, this is where Gold Star Chili used to be.

We got there well after the rest of our party, because we had to finish the beers we opened at the hotel before they boogied out. They were getting their food right as we sat down, and the waitress asked, "Will you need menus too?"

"Yes," we all said, and she sighed and headed back towards the front of the diner.

"Unless that would be some kind of totally huge hassle or something," I said to her departing back.

Chad said, "I think she did that because she forgot my side dish."

"Did you see her shirt?" I said. "It says, 'I get shitfaced drunk. How do you deal with stress?' That's what she decided to wear to work today, and her employer doesn't mind. That's kind of awesome."