Category Archives: Will Murphy

02/21/2015
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Brother William, Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats, Kyle Schwarber, Rocket "88", WFHB, WFIU, Will Murphy, William Morris

Hot Air

War!

War was declared against Winter last night by the People of South Central Indiana.

The Allies struck first, with Commander-in-Chief Big Mike ordering several divisions to attack a Winter front that had been slowly advancing from the west. Reports from the field indicate Allied forces marched through the ominous, dark gray clouds “as if they weren’t even there.”

Homefront observers, though, report Winter’s forces dumped up to a half a foot of snow on an already battle-scarred landscape. Winter terrorists had staged several dastardly attacks of snow and frigid cold in the previous months, leading up to yesterday’s declaration of war.

Winter

Dictator Old Man Winter

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The Commander-in-Chief has issued a statement assuring South Central Indiana that the threat of Winter will be short-lived. “Our brave men, women, and children can expect to lay down their snow shovels and mittens within weeks, if not days,” Big Mike said early this morning on his white house’s lawn.

Meanwhile, the Allies have called up reserves including the 4th Mechanized Snowplow Battalion and have begun to stockpile road salt.

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The Brother With The Grooves

Whatever you do these days, start listening to Brother William on WFIU’s Friday edition of Just You and Me. The show, formerly hosted by ‘FIU legend Joe Bourne, has been an oasis of good tunes for years. Bourne spun rock, pop, and soul classics until his retirement to New Albany at the end of 2014.

I’d thought Bourne was tops but, honestly, Bro. W. can match him disc for disc. Known to the square world as William Morris, attorney at law, Brother William digs deep in his record library for fabulous hits from the old R&B labels like Stax, Atlantic, Hi, and Chess. He throws in gospel and straight blues for seasoning and his hour-and-a-half whooshes by.

Stax Record

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It’s a good thing WFIU ops. director Will Murphy snagged Brother William because the Indiana University-sponsored public radio station had been glaringly white for far too long. Last I checked, there were two or three dark-skinned folks who claimed Bloomington as home. Not only that, music lovers (like me) get a little tired of hearing only Motown when DJs want to strut their soul chops.

Motown was fine for what it was — a sepia Tin Pan Alley-esque factory for very talented songwriters, albeit their end products were a tad too polished and excessively palatable, created for a crossover audience. The Supremes were Vegas; I want something more gritty.

Give me Big Joe Turner, Betty Everett, the Impressions, some barrelhouse piano, and a lot of jumped-up blues and I’ll listen, religiously. Speaking of that, I’ll take some Mahalia as well.

Brother William gives it all and more.

BTW: B.W. still spins on community radio WFHB. He mans the board for his regular Tuesday Afternoon Mix 2 as well as Jazz Menagerie. If you’re not listening, you’re nowhere.

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Kyle’s Kudos

Following up on Thursday’s Kyle Schwarber follow-up, the former Indiana University slugger has been named baseball’s number 19 prospect in Baseball Ameirca’s Top 100, released this week. The Chicago Cubs’ first round selection in last June’s amateur draft (no. 4 overall), Schwarber hurt the feelings of a lot of pitchers in his first pro season.

Schwarber’s bat makes him special. He was a catcher for the Hoosiers but his efforts behind the plate leave a lot to be desired for the big league game. The Cubs tried moving him over to left field last summer but he damaged his own team with an outfielder’s glove on his hand almost as much as he did the other team with the lumber in his mitts. The Cubs say he’ll stick at catcher from now on.

Schwarber

Schwarber Last August With The Daytona Cubs

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The Ohio native is aware he’s got plenty of work to do to bring his catching skills up to par. He told attendees at last month Cubs Fan Convention that he’d learned to catch only by watching Major League games on television. He continued:

As it turns out I was doing a lot of things wrong. Luckily, I got a crash course when I was at Kane County how to catch. You know what, it totally flipped right there. It made sense. I got it. So then I went to instructs and we kind of slowed it down and made sure I got it. It was really fun. I love catching. You have to like the position to be there and if you don’t like it, you’re not going to have success back there.

So, the attitude’s top-notch, too. Stay tuned for more on Schwarber as news develops.

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Rocket “88”

Some folks consider this the first real rock ‘n’ roll song ever recorded. Its standard blues bass line reveals the black roots of what became a white art form.

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04/30/2014
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Adam Silver, Annie Corrigan, Capital Punishment, Donald Sterling, NBA, NPR, Racism, Sarah Palin, Thomas Piketty, Wealth & Privilege, Will Murphy

Hot Air

Sterling Trey-dux

Talk about mixed emotions. My immediate reaction to the NBA’s lifetime exile of Donald Sterling was one of elation.

Yesterday, league commissioner Adam Silver symbolically drew his forefinger across his throat and thus the fate of the racist, reptilian owner of the LA Clippers was sealed. Goodbye, Donnie boy. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

Silver/Sterling

Silver To Sterling: Beat It

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Then again, Sterling — although a loathsome warthog — was done in by being secretly tape recorded in his own home (apparently). If so, we’ve got official sanctions coming down now due to the growing culture of surveillance and for the crime of thought. I don’t like any of that one bit.

And, in the end, isn’t that life? Nothing is pure and we take what we can get even if it stinks to high heaven.

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Better Than NPR

Hah! We beat the pants and skirts off the national news gang at NPR.

Yep, only this morning did NPR discover Thomas Piketty. The Pencil, in case you didn’t know, told you about the French economist and latest rage in the bookselling world, Friday.

Hmm. I wonder if NPR reporters and producers are regularly scanning The Pencil for leads. If not, they ought to.

Anyway, I insist WFIU’s Will Murphy and Annie Corrigan begin using the following tagline each morning:

The news every morning on Bloomington’s NPR station, WFIU. Second only to The Electron Pencil.

It’s only fair, no?

Murphy

Murphy: Golly, I wish I Could Work For The Pencil

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Real Death Sentences

We haven’t talked much about capital punishment in recent years. There’ve been far more important issues like Miley Cyrus’s tongue, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, death panels, guns, gays and, natch, god.

But the State of Oklahoma whacked a guy last night. The job was far sloppier than any performed by the dedicated professionals of the Chicago Outfit over the years. Using a new “cocktail” of dope, OK executioners attempted to send one Clayton Lockett to what they considered his just deserts. Rather than play his part according to script, Lockett instead twitched and spasmed and agonized for some three quarters of an hour before, behind a closed curtain, prison officials dispatched him properly.

Lockett, of course, was dark-skinned; as you know, white people rarely commit capital crimes. His icing was so botched that Oklahoma authorities decided to deny themselves the pleasure of another execution, scheduled for this afternoon, to make sure they can do it without forcing innocents to watch a man die while flailing about.

We can’t have that.

Weird, isn’t it? Just 20 years or so ago, capital punishment was one of the biggest controversies in this holy land. Now? Hell, we kill guys so routinely that executions only make news when the job is pooched.

Just a little info about the Guv of the great state o’Oklahama. As you know, it’s the governor who’s the final arbiter in the process of any state-sanctioned offing. Yesterday, it was Mary Fallin, the Republican boss of the state, who gave the thumbs down. Republicans traditionally have been gung ho for cap. pun. while Dems most often call for all criminals to be allowed to freely rape and murder your daughters.

At least that’s the way I read many GOP arguments for the ultimate time-out.

Fallin

Fallin

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Fallin is a real piece of work, even more remarkable than, say, Sarah Palin. While Palin generally talks as though she’s under the combined influence of PCP and psychosis, at least she quit her job as Alaska governor years ago. Fallin, meanwhile, still steers the ship of OK.

Gov. F. just this month signed into law a bill she championed, banning OK cities from instituting minimum wage standards higher than the federal gov’t’s. See, she doesn’t want her state’s cities to get all liberal like Barack Osama Stalin Obama. And, besides, minimum wage earners, in her fairy tale world, don’t need raises.

Wait, as they say on TV, there’s more.  Late last year, Fallin issued an order cutting off all spousal benefits for National Guard members, lest those who are gay might insist their sexually sick and criminal partners get same.

Neat, huh?

Happy killing, Mary.

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08/16/2013
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An Army at Dawn, Bohemian Rhapsody, Janis Starcs, Liberation Trilogy, Metropolitan Opera, Parking Meters, Pew Research Center, Queen, Rick Atkinson, WFHB, WFIU, Will Murphy, World War II

Your Daily Hot Air

Peace

Yesterday was the anniversary of the end of World War II.

V-J Day

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I just happen to be reading the first book in historian Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn. It tells the story of Murrica’s first WWII ground action, the invasion of North Africa, nearly a year after entering the war at the invitation of Japan and Germany (Italy was handling the catering.) Imagine, it took just shy of twelve months for American soldiers to see action after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Oh sure, there’d been some monumental sea clashes, including Midway, during that time, but as for huge numbers of US Army men facing off against the enemy, it wasn’t until November 8, 1942 that Operation TORCH, the Algeria-Morocco landings, commenced. Throughout that year, Russia and the American military brass lobbied hard for an immediate Western Europe invasion. President Roosevelt and the British nixed that idea for fear a premature Allied D-Day would be crushed and, subsequently, the war might drag on for a decade or two.

Apparently, FDR and Churchill were right. The Russians (at a cost of some 20 million human beings) wore down the Nazis on the Eastern Front so that when the D-Date actually arrived in June, 1944, Germany was sufficiently softened up for the taking.

Anyway, Emperor Hirohito announced on August 15, 1945, three months after the Nazis had given up the ghost, that Japan was finished fighting. It wasn’t of course; sporadic violence took place here and there between the Japanese and the Americans and Russians. You know people.

MacArthur/Hirohito

Douglas MacArthur & Hirohito In September, 1945

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That’s 68 years ago, for the mathematically challenged among you (and, believe me, I’m not being superior here; I had to use my laptop calculator to figure it out). So, nearly three quarters of a century has passed since humankind’s most cardinal sin finally was stopped. The US was drafting 18 year olds in 1945 so, conceivably, the youngest kid who saw action in Okinawa would be 86 years old today (again with the calculator). Suffice it to say there aren’t all that many souls left to whom the words Dirty Jap weren’t always a forbidden ethnic slur.

Still, many people in the corner of the world that was ravaged by Imperial Japan find themselves getting a little testy when the subject comes up. The Pew Research Center yesterday released results of a poll that shows significant percentages of folks in places like Korea and Indonesia want Japan to apologize even more than it already has. Remember, Japan is now ruled by the sons and grandsons and even great-grandsons of the bellicose ultra-nationalists who’d pushed that country into war. No matter, scads of people want some dramatic mea culpa-ing.

Here are results of the Pew poll:

Pew/Japan Atone

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If I was Japan, I’d say, Sure, man, Great Gramps was a jerk. I can’t believe he was such an asshole. And, trust me, we’d never do crazy crap like that again. C’mon over for a visit. We’ll give you some discounts at restaurants and really posh hotels if you’d lost your Great Gramps or Grandma when my ancestors were having their psychotic spell.

In fact, I’d stage a daily atonement ritual in Tokyo, complete with the flags of victim nations and honored guests from those lands, just to show bygones can be bygones.

I mean, how can it hurt?

Just the way we Murricans couldn’t do anybody any harm by staging daily atonement rituals in Washington, DC for slavery and the Native American holocaust. Sometimes all people want is a simple acknowledgment that you’ve treated them like dirt.

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All Bloomington, Some Of The Time

Fish/Dome

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◗ Meters. Made.

We’re five days into the Great Parking Meter Era here in B-town. Most of the nearly 1500 meters scheduled to be installed in the central business district this summer were activated Monday.

The city says it’s raking in $5000 a day already. And this is without the expanded crew of ticket-writers actually writing parking tickets just yet. All those Day-Glo yellow-green-vested scribblers you’ve seen darting between parked cars are only writing out warning citations until the end of next week.

Courthouse Square business owners, who’d feared the collapse of Western Civilization once the meters went online, are fairly surprised to find that their busy-ness so far hasn’t fallen off.

Go to WFHB’s podcast of its Thursday, August 15, 2013, newscast for my story on downtown businesses and the new meters.

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◗ Evacuate Bloomington!

I ran into good old Will Murphy at the East Side Kroger Wednesday night. The former General Manager at our town’s WFHB and Ft. Wayne’s NPR station, is now the Operations czar at Bloomington’s NPR outlet, WFIU.

As such, poor old Will Murphy has established himself as an acclaimed town baddie. I told him I’ve been hearing he is Hitler. He said he’s heard he is Satan. In any case, he’s Public Enemy Numbers 1 through ten, inclusive, here.

Why? Simple. Murphy cancelled the station’s live Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons last month. The news turned local opera lovers into, well, opera singers. The moaning and gnashing of teeth could be heard all the way in the uppermost office suites of the WFIU World Headquarters Tower.

Godzilla

Will Murphy Destroying Bloomington’s Cultural Institutions

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With this town being the locale of one of the country’s more renowned music schools, things like opera mean a lot to certain segments of the citizenry. So much so that anybody who dares to mess with radio listener habits does so at his own peril.

Janis Starcs, a big mover and shaker on WFIU’s Community Advisory Board, came into the Book Corner the other day carrying a violin case. I told him I didn’t know he played the violin; he said he didn’t. So I asked what was in the case. “None of your business,” Starcs replied in a clipped tone. Speaking of clips, Starcs also wore a handsome pair of bandoliers, filled with shiny cartridges, natch.

Will Murphy

Marked Man

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“Where ya headed?” I asked.

“To the Advisory Board meeting,” he said.

Next thing you know, WFIU’s men-behing-the-curtain are hanging plain old Will Murphy out to dry at the behest of the Adv. Bd. The Met cancellation has been reversed.

Now, the opera lovers and opera singers of B-town’ll have to dig deep for the dough that Murphy’d hoped his schedule change would generate in the coming years. We’ll see.

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Bohemian Rhapsody

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08/13/2013
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Barack Obama, Chad Carrothers, Eric Holder, Heaven Is For Real, Jimo Borjigin, Louie Gohmert, Near-Death Experience, Proof of Heaven, Psychedelic Furs, WFHB, Will Murphy

Your Daily Hot Air

Some Credit For BHO, Please

Don’t get me wrong, I know as well as you do that there are lunatics on the Left.

I know, I know, all I do is rail against the Right Wingnuts here. That’s because they scare the bejesus out of me more than Left Wingnuts do. They, the Rightists, are better organized and have gotten themselves elected to public offices all over this holy land. Their wingnuttiness is far more dangerous than the rantings of kids who tie bandannas around their faces and run around city streets playing cowboys and Indians with the cops whenever a political party holds a convention or the G-8 has a big meeting.

Louie Gohmert is a member of the United States Congress. Need I offer more evidence of the Right’s immediate menace?

Gohmert

Louie Gohmert Makes Our Laws

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Anyway, here’s a personal message to my lefty fringe-ists: How about a little love for Barack Obama after his Justice Minister, Eric Holder, announced new guidelines for federal prosecutions yesterday? Holder said the fact that our prison pop. has grown 800 percent (I repeat, eight hundred goddamned percent!) since the mid-1980s is whacked out. The United States is the most incarceration-happy nation on Earth. And most of the people doing real time here have dark skin.

Not only that, many of our state and local prisons have been taken over by for-profit companies. No chance anything can go wrong under that kind of a set-up, right?

Holder said this to the American Bar Association yesterday in San Francisco: “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.”

Holder

Not So Fast, Sez Holder

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Wow. It’s about damned time.

My guys on the Far Far Left usually call Barack Obama a fascist. The Far Far Right usually sez BHO is either Hitler or Stalin, depending on which side of the bed they got out of that morning. They’re both saying the same thing, only in different languages.

Well, now the Right lunocracy will have ample fodder to accuse the Obama admin. of setting all its psycho-criminal black brethren free to wreak a reign of terror on our white streets. That’ll be their deranged reaction.

The Left lunocracy will have no reaction because the Holder/Obama statement does’t fit in with their carefully concocted depiction of the Prez as the second coming of Big Brother.

Agit-Prop

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Near Death, Far From Reality

If I believed in a being who one day decided to create an entire Universe in six days and then had to take a nap on the seventh, presumably because his lightning-shooting finger was all worn out, I’d thank him. [And that being would be a him, right? Anything that mighty would have to have a penis, I guess.]

I’d thank the Big Daddy-o in the Sky because researchers have found that mice — you read right, mice! — experience brain events similar those in humans which have caused the fairy tale believers among us to imagine we can visit heaven when we’re on the brink of death.

You know the New York Times Book Review weekly bestseller lists have been sullied of late by fever dreams of people who had near death experiences and swear up and down that they went to the Good Place and even met the CEO of All Existence. Oddly, the NYTBR puts books like Heaven Is for Real and Proof of Heaven on its nonfiction lists, which strikes me as a tad presumptuous.

The ramblings of a pre-schooler and a neurosurgeon who phonied up his tale seem more fiction-y than not, no?

So, let’s take a stroll down reality lane. Scientists, led by the University of Michigan’s Jimo Borjigin, studied lab mice who were experiencing cardiac arrest. They found that the brains of the mice kicked into a sort of super-mouse state as they were dying. This enhanced cerebral activity may be analogous to that of near-death experiencers who claim that their imaginings were brilliantly realistic, so much so that what they thought they saw as they lay near mort seemed more real than reality.

Lab Mouse

I Saw God!

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“We found continued and heightened activity. Measurable conscious activity is much, much higher after the heart stops,” says Brojigan. She adds, “That really is consistent with what patients report…. The near-death experience is perhaps really the byproduct of the brain’s attempt to save itself.”

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WFHB’s New Boss Search

All the resumes are in at WFHB, Firehouse Radio. The deadline for those who wished to apply for the vacant GM position was Friday, last week. Now the WFHB board’s selection committee will hand pick a half dozen or so applicants for initial phone interviews, to be followed by personal interviews with three of them, and then — tada! — we’ll have a new Big Cheese at the station.

Here’s hoping the process doesn’t take as long as it did when Chad Carrothers eventually (and I do mean eventually) was tapped to replace Will Murphy a couple of years ago. That whole shebang took a good six months.

That’s crazy. What made it even more crazy was the fact that Carrothers was so head and shoulders superior to every other candidate that to dub anyone else GM would have been cause for scandal.

Wanna know a secret? One or two august members of the WFHB board think they’re running an operation as complicated and far-reaching as the United Nations.

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Heaven

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07/03/2013
2 Comments
Andrew Breitbart, Bestiality, Big Hollywood, Bob Greene, Doktor Zoom, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, Gene Wilder, John Nolte, NPR, Skittles, WFIU, Will Murphy, Wonkette

Your Daily Hot Air

Ghoulish Giving

NPR stations around this holy land probably do this, too, but I’m only familiar with the act as committed by Bloomington’s own WFIU.

That is, the really creepy begging on-air for you, the listener with a foot in the grave, to write the public radio station into your will.

A little promo runs every day on Morning Edition. Some somber-ish music plays in the background as the announcer tells us we can make “an investment in WFIU’s future” and leave behind a valuable legacy. The financial support page on WFIU’s website expands on the concept. It tells us that these are “Gifts that cost you nothing during your lifetime,” as if the station’s doing us a big favor. The page also gives us options for giving cash, stocks, real estate, or other personal property. It even shows us how to make that very last donation by signing over our life insurance or retirement plan benefits.

Undertaker

“But First, Let’s Sign Those Papers.”

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I know the ad is directed to us all in general, but I can’t help thinking about the poor souls who are pushing 85 or 90 and maybe have an electrical system that’s about to short out.

The station is saying, sans all the prettified verbiage, “Hey, when you’re dead, can we have your money?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, public broadcasting needs our support. The Loved One and I pitch a c-note over to WFIU every year, natch. And, yeah, the Republicans every once in a while threaten to cut off federal funding for NPR because, as we’re all well aware, public radio endorses forced sterilizations and compulsory abortions and works feverishly behind the scenes to convert all white children into homosexuals. Nevertheless, we continue to listen and want to help pay for Will Murphy‘s fleet of Maseratis.

(And, BTW, every time the Republicans threaten to cut off funds, public  radio and TV fundraising phones jump off the hook.)

Anyway, I dig that public broadcasting fundraisers must be creative. I mean Garrison Keillor’s not gonna pay himself for his valuable time. Still, this legacy business is really unseemly.

Look, my brother has made himself a nice, tidy pile over his lifetime and, don’t get me wrong, I’ve put the touch on him once or twice, or was it half a dozen times? — no matter — the point is, even I wouldn’t have the cagliones to say to him, “Hey, Joey baby, I was just thinking, wouldja mind filling out a nice round figure for me in your last will and testament and, oh yeah, I think I’d look awfully good behind the wheel of that Chrysler 300 of yours.”

I don’t want to get all Bob Greene-y on you here, but I don’t think this kind of ghoulishness would have flown even twenty years ago.

Greene

Yes, That Bob Greene

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[Big Mike Note: While I was googling pix for this post, I discovered that there’s a whole genre of erotica surrounding sexy babes and hearses. I have absolutely nothing to say that would make this addendum any funnier or snarkier. I just want you to know about it.]

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I Am Love The Walrus

As you know, without Wonkette, I would be blissfully unaware of every important development in this crazy, mixed up world. And, (h/t to Doktor Zoom of Wonkette) here’s what’s important to the lunatics employed by the thankfully dead Andrew Breitbart’s network of interwebs agit-prop sites: this holy land’s advertising industry and Hollywood are in cahoots to foist bestiality upon us.

Yup. As evidence, John Nolte of Big Hollywood last year cited a weird little commercial for Skittles in which a couple of hot tomatoes talk about their sizzling love for walruses who gobble the multi-colored candies.

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Indeed, nothing like pix of chix making out with walruses to entice Murricans to try animal sex.

OTOH: I have to wonder if bestiality really is on the rise. What else, after all could explain the existence of Breitbart bloggers better than the coupling of Homo Sapiens sapiens and Pan troglodytes?

Chimpanzee

Hey, Baby, How ‘Bout It?

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I Am In Love With A Sheep

Redux on this vid; I’m fairly certain I’ve run it before, but it’s always worth a reprise. This is the single funniest wordless double-take in the history of film. And it’s proof that Gene Wilder was a comic genius. Go ahead, laugh out loud, even if you are at work.

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08/01/2012
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ABC TV, Baron Hill, Bill McKibben, Cornel West, Environment, Global Warming, Global Weirding, Gore Vidal, Howard K. Smith, Martin Luther King, Revolution, Robot Apocalypse, Rolling Stone, Shelli Yoder, Snoop Dogg, Snoop Lion, Todd Young, WBOI, WFHB, Will Murphy, William F. Buckley, XKCD

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“[Martin Luther] King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living….” — Cornel West

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GORE VIDAL, 1925-2012

An unapologetic liberal. Of course, I don’t know why anyone should feel a need to apologize for being liberal.

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I had my political awakening in 1968, when I was 12 years old. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed, segregationist George Wallace ran for president, Vietnam was raging. Riots, protests, the Democratic convention in Chicago — all of it thrilled and horrified me.

Then, on a steamy Wednesday night in August as Chicago cops rioted, busting heads and bloodying protesters, reporters, delegates, and innocent passersby on Michigan Avenue in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley faced off on ABC TV. The moderator was Howard K. Smith.

Vidal was aggressively anti-war; Buckley aggressively pro-war. The two battled verbally until things seemed about to devolve into physical combat.

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Vidal: “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself.”

Buckley: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the god damned face and you’ll stay plastered.”

I watched this live. I took sides right then and there.

Vidal would not back down, even when threatened by a Tory, royalist, blue-blood, former captain of the Yale debate team. He merely smiled when Buckley called him a queer.

I only wish liberals were as tough today.

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CRISIS

If you read nothing else on the environment or the issue of climate change this summer, make sure you catch Bill McKibben‘s latest, terrifying piece in Rolling Stone.

Bill McKibben

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Folks, we’ve got problems. The crisis is not tomorrow; it’s today.

And if you happen to encounter someone who denies global warming, don’t even bother arguing with them. Just tell ’em to kiss your ass.

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MILLIONS OF CARS

Dig Tuesday’s XKCD: What If? post, imaged and linked below in Big Mike’s Playtime section.

This week’s physics theoretical asks, “What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last?”

The answers (spoiler alert!) are — 1) not much would happen (unless we consider the computers that control the world’s nuclear arsenals to be robots, then too much) and 2) indefinitely (unless, again, the above contingency holds, then, oh, 13 seconds).

But the fascinating thing I found was the author’s calculation that at any given moment in the United States, there are 10 million cars on the road.

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I might add that fully 75 percent of that number are snarled up at the Bypass construction zone at this very moment.

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CAMPAIGN GAMES

Shelli Yoder yesterday challenged Todd Young to a series of debates in each of the 13 Indiana counties that make up the 9th Congressional District.

Young’s camp pooh-poohed the whole idea. The Republican incumbent’s campaign boss, Trevor Foughty, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that the debate challenge is a publicity stunt.

Shelli Yoder & Todd Young

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Funny thing is, Young himself upset long-time 9th District rep Baron Hill in 2010 in part by, well, challenging the Dem to a series of debates.

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I’M A LION — GRRRROWWLLLL!

Will Murphy, former general manager of Bloomington’s WFHB and current honcho at Ft. Wayne’s WBOI, learned about Snoop Dogg’s transformation into Snoop Lion yesterday.

Or Maybe I’m A Soldier — Ten Hut!

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Murphy observed, “Not sure what to make of this.”

I set the radio man straight. “Nothing, Will. Absolutely nothing.”

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Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.

❏ I Love Charts — Life as seen through charts.

❏ XKCD — “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

XKCD: What If?

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❏ Skepchick — Women scientists look at the world and the universe.

❏ Indexed — All the answers in graph form, on index cards.

❏ I Fucking Love Science — A Facebook community of science geeks.

❏ Present and Correct — Fun, compelling, gorgeous and/or scary graphic designs and visual creations throughout the years and from all over the world.

❏ Flip Flop Fly Ball — Baseball as seen through infographics, haikus, song lyrics, and other odd communications devices.

Flip Flop Fly Ball

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❏ Mental Floss — Facts.

❏ Caps Off Please — Comics & fun.

❏ Sodaplay — Create your own models or play with other people’s models.

❏ Eat Sleep Draw — An endless stream of artwork submitted by an endless stream of people.

❏ Big Think — Tapping the brains of notable intellectuals for their opinions, predictions, and diagnoses.

❏ The Daily Puppy — So shoot me.

The Daily Puppy: Skeeter The Samoyed

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, games, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

◗ Monroe County Fairgrounds — Day 5, 2012 Monroe County Fair, Senior citizens day, Joe Edwards & Jan Masters Show; 1, 3:30 & 6pm — Royal Flush karaoke; 6pm — Clayton Anderson; 7:30pm — Three Bar J Rodeo; 7:30pm; Noon to 11pm

◗ Cafe Django — Tom Miller’s Last Show; 7:30pm

◗ Max’s Place — Open mic; 7:30pm

◗ Bear’s Place — Americana Jam: Chris Wolf, Danika Holmes, Suzette Weakly; 8pm

◗ The Player’s Pub — Sarah’s Swing Set; 8pm

◗ The Comedy Attic — Bloomington Comedy Festival, audience vote decides the funniest person in Bloomington; 8pm

◗ Boys & Girls Club of Bloomington — Contra dancing; 8pm

◗ The Bluebird — Dot Dot Dot; 9pm

◗ IU Kirkwood Observatory — Public viewing through main telescope, weather permitting; 10pm

Ongoing:

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Center — Exhibits:

  • “40 Years of Artists from Pygmalion’s”; opens Friday, August 3rd, through September 1st

◗ IU Art Museum — Exhibits:

  • Qiao Xiaoguang, “Urban Landscape: A Selection of Papercuts” ; through August 12th
  • “A Tribute to William Zimmerman,” wildlife artist; through September 9th
  • Willi Baumeister, “Baumeister in Print”; through September 9th
  • Annibale and Agostino Carracci, “The Bolognese School”; through September 16th
  • “Contemporary Explorations: Paintings by Contemporary Native American Artists”; through October 14th
  • David Hockney, “New Acquisitions”; through October 21st
  • Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Paragons of Filial Piety”; through fall semester 2012
  • Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, & Harry Callahan, “Intimate Models: Photographs of Husbands, Wives, and Lovers”; through December 31st
  • “French Printmaking in the Seventeenth Century”; through December 31st

◗ IU SoFA Grunwald Gallery — Exhibits: Bloomington Photography Club Annual Exhibition; through August 3rd

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery — “Ephemeral Ink: Selections of Tattoo Art from the Kinsey Institute Collection”; through September 21st

◗ IU Lilly Library — Exhibit, “Translating the Canon: Building Special Collections in the 21st Century”; through September 1st

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Closed for semester break, reopens Tuesday, August 21st

◗ Monroe County History Center — Exhibits:

  • “What Is Your Quilting Story?”; through July 31st
  • Photo exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th

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