The Electron Pencil

If you’re anything like me, you’re riding the President Gag roller coaster these days.

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Truly, my emotions are running riot. One day down, the next day up. On Monday, say, I’m afraid this vaudeville  presidency will be the death knell for America. On Tuesday, I might think, Hmm, maybe we can wrest control of one or both houses of Congress in ’18 and get the White House in ’20 and in a few years we’ll all have a good laugh about this burlesque regime!

You know, mood swings are a clear sign of depression.

And if you’re not depressed yet, well….

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Hondo Harangue

Here’s the link to yesterday’s Big Talk featuring Hondo Thompson, the new main stage emcee for the John Hartford Fest, now in full swing at the Bill Monroe Music Park & Campground.

And after you get your aural sip of him from the WFHB feature, you can grab a Hondo big gulp here for the unedited, full-length interview I did with him this week.

Talk to you later.

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… And He Is Us

We can cry about Russia and Fox News and Republican gerrymandering all we want. Go ahead, if it makes you feel better.

And believe me, that’s all we have left — making ourselves feel better. This, while our holy land becomes something ugly. We’re fiddling and diddling as the homeland burns.

We blame all the electoral and cultural shocks that’ve rocked us the last few years on media manipulation and foreign agents and dumb luck. Oh no, it’s not us, we tell ourselves. The Will of the People has been subverted. When we get everybody up off the couch and out to their polling places — next time, always next time — we’ll show ’em!

Stop. Just stop.

With the election victory yesterday of Greg Gianforte after he’d pounded some annoying reporter to the floor the day before, it has become crystal clear. We have nobody to blame but ourselves.

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We, the whole of us, have tipped the scale toward assholery. The majority of Americans, it can now be stated with complete confidence, are self-involved, brutish, thuggish, greedy, small-minded twits, stuck in a sub-adolescence where tough cowboys and virtually illiterate plutocrats are heroes. Role models even.

Make no mistake, we’re going to pay a price for this de-evolution. Oh sure, many of us have paid through the nose for it already but the nation still stands.

Our comeuppance will come from without.

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Stoned Talk

Here are the links to yesterday’s Big Talk with Limestone Post editor and publisher, Ron Eid.

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Because our audio processing software decided to go on a bad acid trip when Ron and I sat down for our tête à tête Monday afternoon, much of the original interview was lost or unusable. I wasn’t able to salavge, for instance, Ron’s hosanna-singing for the likes of Lynae Sowinski, his editorial director, Emily Winters, his spanking new marketing director, and editorial assistant Dason Anderson.

Next week I’ll welcome a guest interviewer, the inimitable Hondo Thompson, who’ll grill one or two big shots from the upcoming annual John Hartford Fest.

Talk to you.

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Here I am, again being coarse and luridly descriptive in my own, highly imitable way: Today’s post can serve as the very dictionary definition of circle jerk.

Or, at least, a picture of the post would accompany that dict. def. — that is, if any dict. carries a def. of same (besides Strong Language: A Sweary Blog about Swearing).

Anyway, my guest on Big Talk later this afternoon will be Limestone Post editor Ron Eid. He jumped with both feet into the frying pan that is journalism a few years after he’d graduated from Indiana University back in the early ’80s. It was an airline mag piece about a guy’s bike trip through New Zealand that put the bug in his ear. He figured, Hey, if some sonuvabitch can make a paycheck writing about traveling to cool places, why the hell can’t I. Eid promptly enrolled in a master’s program in journalism and saddled himself with so much debt that it was almost impossible for him to chase around the globe trying to write articles about cool places.

Life does get in the way when you’re making plans, doesn’t it?

Eid — A Long, Long Time Ago

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The Limestone Post, as loyal Pencillistas know, is a partner in Big Talk, along with this global communications colossus and WFHB radio.

Hmm. Next thing you know, I’ll be interviewing myself. Which, BTW, someone suggested to me with a straight face the other day. The only concern I’d have? That I might lie to myself. Something I’ve become adept at, lo these last 60-plus years.

So, tune in at 5:00pm to WFHB, 91.3FM for the Daily Local News and the regular Thursday feature, Big Talk. And don’t forget, I’ll post the link to the podcast here tomorrow AM.

Talk to you then.

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Cool Jerk

So, yeah, like, you thought I was gonna post a Circle Jerks vid here, right? C’mon, man, that was too obvious. Rather, I selected this 1966 gem from The Capitols.

Here’s a great genesis story about the hit that reached No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 7 on the Hot 100 chart. Some members of the Motown house band, the Funk Brothers, used to see pimps dancing at Detroit clubs back in the mid ’60s. The pimps adopted a cooler-than-thou attitude, natch, and it carried over to their dance style. The hot dance at the time was the Jerk but the pimps, being too cool to Jerk with, shall we say, the requisite gusto, opted instead to perform their own version of the dance with icy restraint. Myself, I recall thinking about such cool dancers some years later when I was a club kid, Man, that dude’s dancing so cool he’s not even moving!

Anyway, one of the Funk Brothers wrote a song about those guys and named it the Pimp Jerk. When the Bros. brought the tune to their Motown bosses, the label guys said, Uh-uh, mang, we ain’t puttin’ a platter with that title out, dig? So the Bros. renamed it Cool Jerk and there you are.

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