Category Archives: Velvet Underground

Hot Air

Storm Of Battle

Doug Storm, the dynamic, dynamite host of WFHB’s Interchange is gathering the 2015 Bloomington mayoral combatants in his studio for a battle royal Tuesday evening.

The four candidates for mayor — John Hamilton, Darryl Neher, John Turnbull, and John Linnemeier — have agreed to face the nation…, er, well, the city live on-air with Storm officiating.

Candidates

[L-R] Linnemeier, Neher, Turnbull, Hamilton

Storm wants the B-ton citizenry to submit some Q’s before the show so if you want to know how Neher or Linnemeier might react if the ISIS hordes threaten our thriving, throbbing megalopolis send an email to Doug at interchange@wfhb.org.

The party primaries will be Tuesday, May 5th with Hamilton, Neher, and Linnemeier facing off for the Dems and Turnbull running unopposed in the Republican race. This promises to be a fun election, what with it being the first real contested campaign in better than a decade. Neher has outgoing Mayor Mark Kruzan’s backing while Hamilton claims former mayors Tomilea Allison and John Fernandez as allies. Hamilton also is amassing an all-star cast of Indiana University Maurer School of Law profs on his endorsement roster as well as former legislators Lee Hamilton and Baron Hill and even singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer. Neher counters with current statehouse figures Shelli Yoder and Matt Pierce.

[Correction: Isabel Piedmont-Smith correctly points out that Shelli Yoder is not a “statehouse figure.” Yoder is a member of the Monroe County Council. Mea culpa. And thanks, Isabel.]

Both Turnbull’s and Linnemeier’s candidacies appear quixotic at this time.

Storm’s got plenty of questions to throw at the quartet but he’s still aching for listener input. Go to the show’s Facebook page for more info. And tune in, for pity’s sake, Tuesday at 6pm on WFHB, 91.3 FM. It promises to be an hour of real democracy — fitting since we like to call ourselves one.

Big Questions

And, hey, don’t forget I’m doing a Q&A thing with the four candidates myself. Yup. Even now the boys are contemplating deep questions like What was the first album you ever bought with your own money? and Do you do your own taxes?

Now that’s democracy, kids.

My profiles of the candidates will appear in next month’s Ryder magazine. If that doesn’t get you voting, hell, I have no idea what will.

Who Loves The Sun?

I do. Even today, when it’s a goddamned bone-chilling 11º at 10 in the morning.

This recent spate of frigidity has turned me off even from checking the NOAA site for the 10-day forecast. I figure Why depress myself?

That’s why, when I overhead someone say it was going to be 50 degrees come Tuesday, I started feeling that old hint of optimism. Winter, folks, just may end one day. You heard it here first.

 

Hot, Heliocentric Air

A Joke?

The interwebs went all blazooey yesterday after folks learned that Capt. Janeway is narrating some documentary movie about how the sun really revolves around the Earth.

If you don’t know who Capt. Janeway is, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never seen a single episode of Star Trek: Voyager and I know who Capt. Janeway is.

From Star Trek: Voyager

ZZZZ…, Oops, Sorry, I Fell Asleep

Anyway, Raw Story, Happy Nice Time People, Jezebel, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and scads of others are gurgling in dismay that the movie, The Principle, due out later this spring, sez, essentially, that Galileo (as well as, presumably, Copernicus) were wrong. (BTW: the link directly to the left is to the producer’s website, galileowaswrong.com, but when I tried to access it at about 10 last night, it’d had been swamped and was unavailable for viewing. IDK how successful you’ll be in getting on it.)

Galileo

Wrong?

As you know, it’s pretty well established that we take a year-long merry-go-round ride around our big brother Sol. Anybody who says it’s the other way around is either a lunatic or trying to pull our collective leg.

I’m shying away from the latter explanation for this upcoming film-thing. The producer, some jimoke named Robert Sungenis, has already made a name for himself as a Holocaust denier. He has publicly “reasoned” that the number of Jews in Europe in 1939 was the same as the number after WWII, ergo the whole Final Solution scare story is a pack of lies.

Sun

Our Satellite?

So how did he get actress Kate Mulgrew (Capt. J.) and — get this — noted physicists Michio Kaku and Lawrence Krauss to participate in his movie? The K boys are pretty much the most renowned scientists of our day, up there in the Q-rating heaven with Bill Nye, Stephen Hawking, and Neil de Grasse Tyson.

Scifi geeks are flummoxed because, in conflating a weekly TV drama with reality, they’d been operating under the impression that Captain Kate Janeway Mulgrew was a knowledgeable scientist. I’m weirded-out by Kaku and Krauss’s participation.

I’ve gotta assume they were somehow buffaloed into appearing in the movie.

This whole thing stinks and if this news tidbit had come out on April 1st I’d understand, but A. Fool’s D. was a week ago.

I await further developments.

Who Loves The Sun

Great, great song from the Velvet Underground and the High Fidelity film soundtrack.

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