It’s a beautiful Saturday morning on Freedom Plaza. Colorful signs, banners and tents fill the square as dedicated campers emerge from sleeping bags and prepare for another day advocating for change. I sit at our “base camp” with a group of social workers from Tulane University. Many have come to know us as the “Mardi Gras crowd.”

This is my first protest, but that’s not the case for many participating in October2011. We have met activists from places like Florida, Wisconsin, California Arizona, and New York. As more activist groups form in cities nationwide, we begin uniting through one single word: Occupy. Full story »

Let’s listen to a song first.

Full story »

Bert Jansch, guitarist extraordinaire, died two days ago, the same day as Steve Jobs. While both changed my life in positive ways, I’d have to say that Jansch’s influence was better. And I say that even as I sit here tappping away on my MacBook, charging up my iPod. Jobs gave me more interesting tools to live my life. Jansch gave it a bit more meaning than it would otherwise have had.

Jansch was in the forefront of the great British folk revival of the 1960s. This has been admirably described in Colin Harper’s excellent biography of Jansch, Dazzling Stranger. Full story »

Check this one out.

Topeka, Kansas City Council Considers Decriminalizing Domestic Violence To Save Money
Faced with their worst budget crises since the Great Depression, states and cities have resorted to increasingly desperate measures to cut costs. State and local governments have laid off teachers, slashed Medicaid funding, and even started unpaving roads and turning off streetlights.

But perhaps the most shocking idea to save money is being debated right now by the City Council of Topeka, Kansas. The city could repeal an ordinance banning domestic violence because some say the cost of prosecuting those cases is just too high: Full story »

Hank Williams, Jr. said some stupid shit. Because, you know, he’s not exactly a rocket surgeon or a model of progressive, pro-human ideals. I can’t imagine that this comes as much a surprise to anyone. Now ESPN has done what they pretty much had to and kicked Hank to the curb. Read all about it.

Two quick thoughts.

First, that Monday Night Football intro sequence was getting tired. Five years ago, in fact. Full story »

It was the damnedest thing. I was watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, the one about Sean Penn and Haiti, and watching the guy talk on camera without even realizing who he was.

But more about that shortly.

I may as well just get into this, and tell you to watch the video. Then I will explain further:

Full story »

Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, S&R ran a five-part series on Lord John Reith, the iconic architect of modern broadcasting in the UK. The series, authored by the University of Colorado’s Dr. Michael Tracey, one of the world’s most distinguished media critics and analysts, explored the complex and controversial Reith, who managed to be at once a visionary, progressive champion of the common Englander and a difficult, even despicable individual in his personal life.

While these essays nominally address a history that’s decades old, the issues raised are startlingly contemporary, as here in the US the same kinds of battles are being waged across the same class lines today. Full story »

According to the BBC, astronomers observing the pulsar at the core of the Crab Nebula have observed gamma rays with energies far in excess of what current stellar models expect. The BBC wrote

[Dr. Nepomuk Otte and his colleagues] spotted gamma rays with energies of far more than 100 GeV, and there were further hints that there may be teraelectronvolt rays; that puts them nearly on a par with particle energies at the Large Hadron Collider.

If you recall, back when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was about to be powered up in 2008 there was a great deal of fear expressed by non-scientists that the LHC could result in the creation of black holes that might eat the Earth, or that the LHC might create theoretical “strangelets” that might eat the Earth. Regardless of the theory, everyone agreed that they were afraid that it meant the end of the world. Full story »

Hope and excitement filled the room today as our group of nine Tulane students, staff and faculty members made final preparations for October2011. We are two days away. Our ultimate mission: change.

We are on the brink of what reporters have begun to call “American Autumn.” With Taking Back Wall Street now three weeks strong and local rallies sprouting up in cities nationwide, we cannot help but wonder what this could mean for our weekend in Washington, D.C. Whatever it is, we are ready. Full story »

Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist is a man who has way too much power over the Republican Party. He’s been able to demand that Republicans sign his “No New Taxes” pledge, backed by the threat of political consequences if the pledge is broken, and only six Republicans have refused to do sign on it. According to Politico, Virginia Representative Frank Wolf ripped into Norquist on the House floor in a speech yesterday.

Good for Congressman Wolf. More Republicans need to stand up to Norquist, who has long publicly advocated cutting taxes so deeply that the government would cease to function at all. Norquist’s extremism, especially given the public’s (misplaced) concern about the national debt, serves only the fat cats who have already grown fantastically rich on the backs of the lower and middle classes. Full story »

Last week I found myself in a doctor’s waiting room for a few minutes, and the staff had the TV tuned to one of those daily Dr. Phil/Maury/Jerry/Montel type freak circuses where the host knows everything and fixes all human problems in 30 minutes. I tried to read my book and ignore it, but you know how hard it is not to look at a trainwreck. I was sort of doing okay up until I heard the host use a term that has griped me for years: “lie detector.” Yes, somebody is lying. We’ll find out who right after these messages.

[sigh]

I’d have thought we’d have this polygraph nonsense well behind us by now. Full story »

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to do triathlons to stay fit. But like Goldilocks learned about beds and porridge, triathlons come in all different shapes and sizes. There are short, fun triathlons (sprints,) medium triathlons, and long triathlons (Ironmen). Ironmen involve 2.4 miles of swimming and 112 miles of biking, followed by a marathon. They are a sufficiently serious cardiac endeavor, 12 hours or more of exertion, that most triathletes only do one a year. They also require lots of specialized gear, nutrition, etc. Over time, my wife and I gravitated to Ironmen. Our event occurs in November, and at this point we have been training for almost ten months and are tired of it. I woke up with this in my head.

(Apologies to real musicians and poets.)

Old Ironman Blues
by Thirteen Hour Willie

My friends want to party
They call me from town
I can’t go meet them
In bed at sundown Full story »