Washington Post Confirms Felt Was 'Deep Throat'

Washington Post Confirms Felt Was 'Deep Throat'



Eleven years after his death, and still Nixon fascinates us like no other politician.

If only Hunter Thompson had lived four more months...

Mark Felt: thanks.

Lawmaker Wants Lower Soldier Drinking Age

Lawmaker Wants Lower Soldier Drinking Age



Only in Wisconsin:

One Wisconsin lawmaker figures if the U.S. military trusts 19-year-olds with a $10 million tank, then the state should trust them with a beer.



State Rep. Mark Pettis, a Republican who served in the Navy, is pushing a bill that would drop the drinking age to 19 for Wisconsin soldiers — but only if the federal government agrees it will not yank an estimated $50 million a year in highway aid.



A federal law ties federal highway dollars to compliance by the states with the required drinking age of 21.

Not a bad start, but there's lots of ways to serve one's country so why limit it to just troops? And how does one rationalize excluding the 18 year old adults?



Still this is the first I've heard anyone in elected office addressing this - and sorry to say it's not a member of my team.



Politics

AIPAC Scandal Goes Bigtime

AIPAC Scandal Goes Bigtime

A Virginia grand jury is now examining the evidence in the case, which involved receipt of classified defense information from Larry Franklin, a Pentagon official, and its transfer to the representative of a foreign country, Naor Gilon, of the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Read through the whole thing, imagine it's twenty years ago, and substitute "Soviet Union" every place it says "Israel."

SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

Aurora Watch



AURORA WATCH: An ongoing geomagnetic storm could spark auroras tonight bright enough to see with the unaided eye from, e.g., Canada and northern-tier US states such as Maine and Wisconsin and Washington. Dim "photographic auroras" (visible to the camera, but not to the eye) could descend to even lower latitudes. Visit spaceweather.com for updates.



THE MOON AND MARS: On Tuesday morning, May 31st, the Moon and Mars will have a beautiful close encounter in the early morning sky. To see them, look east about an hour before dawn. Mars, nestled close to the Moon, is almost twice as bright as a first magnitude star.

Tale of the tape

Tale of the tape

Worth the Salon ad:

"'The romance comes not only from the emotion expressed by a series of songs, but also from the sheer effort that it takes to plan and execute a mix. 'The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient,' writes Dean Wareham of Luna. 'It might be a desire to go to bed, or to share ideas. The message of the tape might be: I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you. Or, maybe: I love me. I am a tasteful person who listens to tasty things. This tape tells you all about me.'"

Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth has a new book out about mix tapes...

Oddly enough I am writing this from the library. Bad timing: The week the new laptop arrives coincides with a massive, system-wide outage from my ISP.

The Man Can't Bust Our Music (?)

The Man Can't Bust Our Music (?)



That was the tag line of a classically bad CBS Records ad campaign of the late `60s, which also included "The Revolutionaries Are On CBS." Now, as a major fan of the Clash, who were on, uh, CBS, I've always been fascinated by the contradiction of multinational corportations marketing anti-corporate rhetoric. Or, as Strummer and Jones put it more succinctly, "turning rebellion into money."



I'm reminded of all this by the story of Radio Free Ohio, a "pirate" radio station that turned out to be bogus - it was a completely legal marketing ploy by the real owners of the frequency - Clear Channel Communication, the largest radio corporation in the country. Thus setting a new Olympic cynicism record.

Smallest Farm Update

Smallest Farm Update

Despite the recent acquisition of the new laptop, I still get outside sometimes. And not just because of the free wireless internet downtown.

Planting on The Smallest Farm has been delayed due to a combination of the involuntary relocation, wet weather and, yes, the computer transition. But the pole bean teepee went in last weekend and today the bulk of the acreage was sown with shady wildflower seeds. I'm still filling spots in, transplanting volunteers from last year's garden spot. (After starting my gardening life in 1994 and staying in the same spot four years, I have never since had a garden in the same space two consecutive years.)

I'll have to hit the farmers markets for tomatoes and peppers this year. There's just one decent sunny spot on the new farm and I love growing polebeans too much to skip them. As in the 2001 garden, the Narrowest Farm in Iowa. 20 feet long, nine inches wide. Just one long pole bean fence on the edge of a parking lot.

Memorial Day is pretty late for me. Last time I planted Memorial Day was 1996; a combination of wet cold weather and getting married. But that turned out OK (the 1996 garden, not the marriage).

Iowa