Stuff to do: Tentacle Boy at 400 Bar
According to their Myspace page, Tentacle Boy’s gig at the 400 Bar tonight (sharing the bill are New Ocean, Nobot, and Combat Astronomy) is “OUR FIRST SHOW.” Here’s wishing them the best…
It’s an 18+ show, the music starts at 8, and tickets are $5. Address/tix here.
Below: Tentacle Boy’s music vid for “Nobody”
Molecast audio: David Schultz says Super Tuesday may slow Clinton and McCain
In this week’s Molecast Campaign ‘08 discussion with David Schultz, we focus on Super Tuesday. In looking over polling data and demographic trends, Schultz takes exception to the pundits’ chorus that has increasingly portrayed Hillary Clinton and John McCain as solid frontrunners heading into February 5.
He’s struck instead by how thin the public appeal of some of the remaining candidates appears to be. “We’re moving down the line with a series of choices in Clinton, Romney, and McCain who don’t really have a lot of support among independents, Democrats, or Republicans,” Schultz notes. “If you just asked, would you prefer any of these three or an unnamed candidate?, the unnamed candidate would probably win. For a year where ‘change’ seems to be the buzzword, we’re producing an awful lot of candidates who don’t seem appetizing to a large percentage of the American population.”
Molecast audio: David Schultz looks ahead to the Super Tuesday states (14:06)
Below the jump: excerpts of Schultz’s remarks
Audio Barack Obama Campaign 08 David Schultz Hillary Clinton John McCain Mitt Romney Molecast News Politics Phyllis Stein’s Review of Trailers
I saw the original Funny Games and I HATED it. A split pea green movie about a family vacation taken down by two sadistic, menacing, sociopathic teenage torturers, this was not the movie to see on a date, with a friend, a loved one, alone, or ever again. It wasn’t that it was so scary or effective, but that it was seriously bent, brutal, excessive, and in love with itself. Now the shot by shot remake by the original’s German director Michael Haneke is gaining buzz from star power with Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt, and I can’t emphasize enough how much I will not be going to see this movie.
I also probably won’t go see Bonneville, though not because it looks so god awful but because a movie about middle-aged women is bound to be in the theaters for about eight minutes. Starring two people (Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates) and one alien (Joan Allen), Bonneville is about three friends who take a road trip to deliver the ashes of Lange’s dead husband to California. The trailer makes a gauzy picture of friendship, self-discovery, and other such drivel, but there is something to say for Kathy Bates doing anything on screen. She makes drivel sing.
Tech note: We’re playing catch up today…
Hardware troubles–specifically, a modem that has since gone to a better place–kept us from updating the site for a couple of hours this morning. And a lunchtime appointment out of the office means we won’t have time to finish our day’s posting (including this week’s Campaign ‘08 Molecast interview with David Schultz) until a little later than usual this afternoon.
See you around 1:30-2:00 with more stuff.
Campaign ‘08: The Rapping Pizza sings the praises of the Bush and Clinton dynasties
This is brilliant:
Bush for four years and Clinton for eight,
Then Bush for eight and that was just great,
So if Hillary serves for another eight years,
That’s how many years? That’s 32 years!
Video: Google Street View 2.0 will be even more powerful and versatile
Via Valleywag, and one of the hotter YouTube clips of the week.
BTM: When does it make sense to just walk away from an onerous mortgage?
On Tuesday Alex Stenback at Behind the Mortgage published a series of posts on a subject that the lending industry would prefer we not discuss: deciding when to cut your losses and default on a mortgage that has become unaffordable and/or exceeds the present value of the home itself.
- Stenback started by quoting blogger Paul Kedrosky: “Yes, people used to be much more nervous about defaulting. But so what? If a loan no longer meets your requirements, or if it’s crushing you financially, or if your circumstances have changed, there is no need to go leaping off bridges about it. The world has changed and the consequences of loan defaults & loan renegotiations are no longer need be as dire as they once were… It’s about time individuals caught up with countries and companies. Both have always had more flexibility with respect to loan defaults/renegotiation than individuals have.”
- Stenback’s second post examined the likely downside of rising default rates: “When the shooting is over, we will see lenders attempt to adjust their pricing and underwriting standards to account for the fact that if properly incented, borrowers will simply walk. This means higher rates, down payments, and tougher underwriting standards in the future.”
- The third post contains a reader-supplied link to a website for people considering mortgage defaults, YouWalkAway.com.
ArsTechnica: The state of the music industry 2008
If you follow news about the music industry, then you already know that the piecemeal drip-drip-drip of bad news is relentless. But coherent big-picture stories aren’t easy to come by. Last week Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica wrote the best analysis of music business trend lines I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s accompanied by interesting and accessible infographics. Highly recommended.
Excerpt:
“Don’t put all the blame on file-swapping… or chalk the problems up to an inability to ‘compete with free.’ Digital music sales soared in 2007, and in fact, the total number of ‘units’ moved during the year increased over 2006. eMusic, the number two music download service in the US behind iTunes, doubled its own projections for the Christmas season, pushed out 10 million tracks in the month of December, and added 50,000 new paying customers in the last six months.
“And all of this happened without the four major labels even offering DRM-free tracks online. Now that Sony BMG has finally capitulated, 2008 is poised to be the year digital goes so mainstream that even your parents use it.
“All that good news means that music is alive and well—but it doesn’t mean that things are rosy at the major labels. Let’s run the numbers from 2007, then do a case study on eMusic’s recent results to see just what kind of success can be had in the digital download world by competing with free.”
Dude Weather: Handling goldfish in the dark
Dude Weather: “I am not a rodent”
Twin Cities: Polls and police lawsuit in Morning Roundup… Video: Clinton rolls out new ads on the economy… Mortgage defaults: Know when to fold ‘em… Yesterday’s Molecast: Will Super Tuesday slow the Clinton and McCain trains?… Pop Media: Video: Google Street View 2.0… Phyllis Stein’s Review of Trailers discusses movies Phyllis won’t be seeing… Wow–such deals at Wal-Mart… Talk: We resurrect a thread from early in the beta: What’s the weirdest thing you ever bought or sold on eBay?
What’s wrong with this picture?
Via Consumerist: Has Wal-Mart got a deal for you! (And yes, this does mean you can get 4 for $20.)
This Day in Infamy: The execution of Private Slovik, 31 January 1945
From the Daily Mole’s partner site Axis of Evel Knievel, an award-winning blog devoted to atrocities, disasters, and portents of doom from the historical record:
By David Noon
American Private Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion on this date in 1945. He had abandoned the 109th Infantry Regimen, 28th Infantry Division in October 1944, just two months after arriving in France. Because of his record of petty criminality as a youth in Detroit, Slovik was originally declared unfit for military service in 1942. As the meat-grinder of war proceeded, however, his classification was changed and Eddie Slovik was declared fit for duty in 1944. Slovik was despondent during basic training and announced his intent to “run away” from his assignment, believing that he would spend at most a few months in prison. Instead, a nine-man jury convicted him of violating the 58th Article of War in November 1944 and sentenced him to death by firing squad.
Slovik appealed to General Dwight David Eisenhower for clemency but was denied two days before Christmas; desertion had become a problem among US soldiers, and the General was eager to set a deterrent example. Sixty-two years ago today, Eddie Slovik’s sentence was carried out near the French village of Ste Marie aux Mines. Of the 49 American deserters sentenced to die during the war, Slovik’s sentence was the only one not commuted. In addition to Pvt. Slovik, 21,048 American soldiers deserted their units during World War II.
Just before he was shot, Slovik was urged by one of his executioners “take it easy, Eddie. Try to make it easy on yourself — and on us.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Slovik responded. “I’m okay. They’re not shooting me for deserting the United Stated Army — thousands of guys have done that. They’re shooting me for bread I stole when I was 12 years old.”
In the last letter he ever wrote, Slovik mused to his wife that “Everything happens to me. I’ve never had a streak of luck in my life. The only luck I had in my life was when I married you. I knew it wouldn’t last because I was too happy. I knew they would not let me be happy.”
Antoinette Slovik had never actually been told that her husband was to be shot. The army insisted afterward that the young private should have told her himself. Riven with grief and anger, Antoinette struggled to clear her husband’s name until her own death in 1979. She asked seven American presidents — including Dwight Eisenhower — to issue her husband a pardon. All refused.
TC Morning Roundup: A thousand cuts
Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy of the Star Tribune delve into the case of the $157,400 staircase constructed at the 35W bridge collapse site and discover that, by the contractor’s own admission, MnDOT overseers paid the staircase builders for a number of expenses that should not have been reimbursed–including basic tools of the construction trade such as shovels, nail guns, and sledgehammers.
But there’s a more telling MnDOT story in today’s Strib that barely mentions the DOT by name. Lora Pabst reports that a gathering of the North Metro Mayors Association turned into a gripe-fest about the state’s chronic failure to adequately fund Minnesota’s transportation needs.
Pabst writes:
“Officials from each city can rattle off a list of projects that they had to finance because the state couldn’t come up with the funds:
• “In Maple Grove, it was $15 million for bridges that typically would have been a state expense.
• “In Blaine, it was $2.5 million for a bridge in the ongoing Highway 65 project that was originally supposed to cost the city $750,000.
• “In Champlin, it has been millions of dollars for upgrades along Hwy. 169 over the past five years.”
It becomes more and more clear that, however extensive MnDOT’s project management troubles may be, the more fundamental problem is that the agency has been chronically and woefully underfunded during the Pawlenty years–while the department’s management, for political reasons, has failed to blow the whistle on the extent of the problems.
Another funding crisis: Steve Berg has an important story in yesterday’s MinnPost concerning the city of Minneapolis’s police and fire department pension funds. A combination of high administrative and legal costs on one hand, and generous pension guarantees underwritten by the city on the other, mean that “the city faces a 200 percent increase in fund payments over the next two years,” Berg writes, “and a pension burden that mounts to $255.8 million over the next 20 years on these two funds alone.”
One fund that’s not wanting for cash: Tim Pawlenty’s campaign war chest.
Economy: Nobody can stop a recession, writes Mike Meyers, and it’s unclear whether steps like tax rebates and Fed rate cuts can delay one… From the LA Times: “Brushing aside concerns that it was doing the bidding of the securities markets, the Fed cited troubled financial conditions as its primary motivation in chopping its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point to 3% [yesterday] — just eight days after making an emergency reduction of three-quarters of a point.”… And Pat Doyle reports that the state’s troubles with its unemployment claims system are getting better thanks to the hiring of some additional personnel to fix the new computerized claim service…
Animal news: Shriners are huffing and puffing and threatening not to bring the circus to town if the Minneapolis City Council passes an ordinance banning elephant rides… A plan to ship the Como Zoo’s polar bears, Neil and Buzz, to the Buffalo Zoo while their space at Como is renovated has fallen through because Buffalo can’t afford to build a temporary space for them…
Learning from the mistakes of others: If you get drunk and crash your car and a good Samaritan stops to help, do not steal the Samaritan’s car and crash it, too.
Gossip Morning
- Britney Spears has been hospitalized again for psychiatric evaluation. Last night, her shrink called an ambulance. The ambulance was followed by her mother, beau, and a significant police escort. Spears is said to be suffering from a bipolar disorder. For more info, go here and here.
- Okay, so apparently it is totally true that Angelina Jolie is pregnant. So is 24’s Potato Face Mary Lynn Rajskub. And so is Ethan Hawke Ethan Hawke’s girlfriend, Uma Thurman’s former nanny. Small world!
- Page Six has more on Heath Ledger’s history of drug problems.
Dude Weather 1/31
Stuff to do: STS9 at First Ave
Electronic jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9 [Myspace] is a cult thing; chances are if you aren’t already a fan, you’re not going to be. But hey, decide for yourself–the clip below was shot at The Fillmore in Denver last Saturday night.
They’re playing First Avenue tonight in an 18+ show; $20/advance; $25/door. Details/directions/tix.
Reel Geezers: Marcia and Lorenzo review There Will Be Blood
Phyllis Stein’s pals Marcia and Lorenzo, aka Reel Geezers, are fast becoming the Mole’s favorite film critics. Here they offer the best review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that we’ve heard or read.
Campaign ‘08: Super Tuesday polls
The site USA Election Polls has a handy rundown of current state-by-state poll standings for both parties–though of course none of them measure the impact of John Edwards’s and Rudy Giuliani’s dropping out–and here are some links to polling analysis pieces:
- “Super Tuesday Looks Close for Democrats,” LA Times
- “Is Romney Fighting the Last War?,” Time
- “In Campaign 2008, Pollsters Are Biggest Losers,” Wall Street Journal
City Hall: Mayor still has “full confidence” in police chief and civil rights director; Keefe’s attorney mum
This morning I phoned (and wrote) the office of Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak with two questions stemming from the recent controversies at the Minneapolis Police Department and the city’s Civil Rights Department:
- Does Police Chief Tim Dolan still have your full confidence?
- Does Civil Rights Department Director Michael Jordan still have your full confidence?
I received this reply, via email, from Jeremy Hansen in the mayor’s office (emphasis added):
“Mayor Rybak is in Washington, DC today, so I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to connect him with you. Nonetheless, the answers to your questions are:
“Does Police Chief Tim Dolan still have your full confidence? Yes.”
“Does Civil Rights Department Director Michael Jordan still have your full confidence? Yes.“
I also phoned Mark Larsen, the attorney and former federal prosecutor (he handled the Joe Biernat prosecution in 2003) who is representing Lt. Michael Keefe in the wake of accusations by MPD brass against Keefe that were made public last week. Practically every media person and City Hall watcher I’ve spoken to believes there will be a defamation lawsuit forthcoming from Keith, so I asked Larsen if he and his client were weighing the possibility.
His answer was not exactly a surprise: “I can’t comment on that.”
Mark Larsen Michael Jordan Michael Keefe Minneapolis Civil Rights Department MPD News RT Rybak Tim Dolan Say it ain’t so: Enzyte Bob was faking it the whole time
Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals–the company behind the “natural male enhancement” product Enzyte and all those faux-retro TV spots starring “Bob” and his suddenly-sexed-up ’50s hausfrau–is currently on trial for consumer fraud in US District Court, reports Consumerist. A former VP of the company told the judge that the company made up doctor endorsements, fabricated research and customer satisfaction survey results, and made a practice of repeatedly billing customers who ordered the product once.
From a Cincinnati Enquirer account:
“If customers complained, [VP James Teegarden] said, employees were instructed to ‘make it as difficult as possible’ for them to get their money back. In some cases, Teegarden said, [company founder Steve] Warshak required customers to produce a notarized statement from a doctor certifying Enzyte did not work. ‘He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,’ Teegarden said.”
Capitol roundtable asks: Are we better off now than we were seven years ago?
At the labor news site Workday Minnesota, Barb Kucera covers a pre-State of the Union roundtable gathering at the state capitol consisting of representatives from ACORN, Jobs Now, and other organizations that took the measure of declining standards of living.
Kucera summarizes the statistical snapshots they presented:
• In each of the past seven years, only 369,000 jobs were created nationally in the private sector, compared to 1.76 million jobs per year in the 1990s.
• The number of Americans in poverty rose from 31.6 million in 2001 to 36.5 million today.
• The number of Americans without health insurance grew from 38 million in 2001 to 47 million today.
• Median household income in the United States has dropped from $49,163 in 2001 to $48,023 today.
• The price of a gallon of gas has gone from $1.39 to $3.07 in the same period. • The national debt has nearly doubled, the trade deficit has doubled and consumer debt is now over $12 trillion.
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