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4 star:
* Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch (Carsie Blanton)
Funny song by and for liberal women
* One (Aimee Mann)
Great cover
* Fed Up (Earl St Clair)
had to steal this from youtube, from the great Australian show "Colin from Accounts"
* Plate Glass Apology (Apes of the State)

3 star:
* Lollipop (Charlie Curtis-Beard & EARCANDY)
* Rock Shit (Hush)
* On The Good Ship Lollipop (Shirley Temple)
* Not About You (Haiku Hands)
* End of Beginning (Djo)
* Things You Left Behind (The Nails)
* Daydreamin' (feat. Jill Scott) (Lupe Fiasco)
* Portions for Foxes (Rilo Kiley)
kinda sexy song Lynette put on a mix for us

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Speaking of Good Ship Lollipop:

Doing On the Good Ship Lollipop at Cincinnati ARC Christmas 1977

"Maybe this is part of a bigger plan! You know maybe the reason we didn't adopt another baby after Lily was because God wanted us available for Sammy..."
"Who is this God that denies us a baby, then gets a party girl pregnant, only to have her desert the baby so we can finally get one?"
"The same God that impregnated a virgin, set Moses down the river in a BASKET, and commanded Abraham to stab his own son! God ONLY does weird baby stuff."

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"Department of War". JFC. This is what happens when you get ruled by folks who learned history from The History Channel (i.e. during its endless WW2 specials.)

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"Well I'll tell you the funniest is that I'll go backstage before a show, and everyone's getting dressed and ready, and everything else, and, you know, no men any­where, and I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and there­fore I'm inspecting it... You know, the dresses. 'Is every­one okay?' You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that."

Cool deep dive into the various musical "modes"/scales as applied to a well known song...

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Sometimes my inbox feels like that art project with the robot arm desperately trying to sweep its own hydraulic fluid back in to keep functioning. The Catchiest Songs According to AI

Happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support....May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants-while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Yeah, we just watched the in-cinemas replay of Hamilton today :-D

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.

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I should think it would be the easiest thing in life to write a poem about a couch. I never see a couch but my heart moves to poetry. The very buttons must be full of echoes.

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I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture.

I just noticed that in certain fonts
';'
looks a bit like the Edvard Munch "Scream" painting guy from a FB post, from the original Star Trek episode "Charlie X"... the petulant overpowered teen erases the face of people who were laughing at him... sticks with a viewer!

This weekend we all went to see "Hamilton" - the filmed version, but on the big screen.

I found the book "Hamilton: The Revolution" (helps to have a big iPad; it was readable on my iPad mini, though, but the Mac Kindle client shows each page as a tiny thumbnail?) It was exactly what I was hoping for - some making of, the text itself, footnotes and references, some chat about where small liberties were taken from the historical record.

Man, such an amazing musical. You can really see the connection to Shakespeare when you read it on the page - especially when one character steps on another's line to finish the meter of the line.

The coolest find in the book was a deleted third Jefferson/Hamilton "rap battle" about whether to act on the Quakers attempt to end slavery in the USA. You can see the lyrics at Genius or hear a rough demo on youtube

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You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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November. It's a way of affirming the very American view that Benjamin Franklin offered in 1786, when someone asked him how the new Union was getting along: "We are, I think, in the right road of improvement, for we are making experiments."

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WASHINGTON: If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on. It outlives me when I'm gone. Like the Scripture says: "Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree And no one shall make them afraid." They'll be safe in the nation we've made. I want to sit under my own vine and fig tree. A moment alone in the shade. At home in this nation we've made. One last time.

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"My view is that Hamiltonians existed until Teddy Roosevelt," says Brooks. "Hamilton used limited but energetic government to create mobility, but after Roosevelt, the debate became big government versus small government, so the Hamilton tradition got caught cross-ways." Neither party has room for him now, [David] Brooks believes. Republicans have become allergic to government, and can't see what Hamilton saw: that government can let more people into the system, and help capitalism solve the structural problems it is facing. But Democrats balk at embracing somebody whose programs would create more opportunity for gifted upstarts at the expense of creating more misery for the people who can't excel.

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Alexander Hamilton [...] spent his life defending one idea above all: "the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country."

So, get ready to know about "Groypers" and other semi-obscure but absolutely hateful internet crap.

At this moment in time, it seems a lot more likely that this was a kind of intra-fascist gang war than this guy being a trans anti-fascist. cracked.com has a pretty good interview with Drew Carey. Cleveland Rocks!

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Heh. You might be able to test this for yourself ChatGPT Goes Completely Haywire If You Ask It to Show You a Seahorse Emoji. I got about the same result with "show me the seahorse emoji" and "is there actually a seahorse emoji or no?" - but when I said sure to "Do you want me to show you how it renders across different platforms (Apple, Google, Twitter, etc.)?" it righted the ship.

Thinking about the argument "well it's also probably an argument that there SHOULD be a seahorse emoji", though the idea that LLM points us to what should be rather than what is is kinda scary.

My current descriptor of ChatGPT et al is that it's a blender and remixer of commonsense. Crazily useful sometimes! But that blender makes some bizarre misinformation smoothies at other times. Saturday hit the Big E w/ Lynette and Kyle. Mostly it was a food tour, though we didn't go quite as crazy as we might have thought (things starting with - are just samples)

-cheese and jerky
cream puff
truffle parmesan poutine
-soups, dips
maple creamy
steak sandwich w cheese and peppers
cider slush
-salsas
smutty nose pumpkin beer
giant turkey leg
lemonade
canoli

(compare with me and Melissa and Liz in 2015)

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