In the “makes me drool” department, the Library of Congress has recently digitized 10,000 public domain recordings from old 78s. So far I’ve listened to “Temptation Rag,” “Little David, Play on Yo’ Harp,” and “I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls.”
They sound good, although I’m surprised at the level of hiss. I’m not an audio engineer, but I think it could be filtered out. There’s an online tutorial detailing how they made the recordings, but it doesn’t touch on the software side too much.
As the Washington Post’s Comic Riffs blog shares, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson contributed a painting to a benefit organized by Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson.
It’s popular to deem Watterson a recluse, but I think it’s far stranger to submit to the publicity machine than opt out.
Jonathan Chait of the New Republic has a great rejoinder to the common claim that the rich pay all of our taxes while 47% of the population freeloads. Long story short, federal income tax isn’t the only tax and the percentage of taxes paid largely aligns with percentage of income.
Yesterday, I read a South Bend Tribune profile of a prospective mayoral candidate. Bill Davis, a Republican no less, bears a history that has his thrown out of middle school for attacking a teacher, has spent time in prison for assault, and runs his campaign from a local flophouse where “communication at times has been difficult, if the minutes on their prepaid cell phone run out, because squirrels keep chewing through the phone line leading into their room.”
Naturally, he took nearly 40 percent of the vote in a 2008 race for St. Joseph County Commissioner.
Update: Now I feel bad—it seems he’s suffered a heart attack.
But I don’t mind being called [angry]. I just don’t think it means anything. How can you have lived through the last ten years in American culture and not be? How can you not look at what happened on Wall Street, at this gamesmanship that was the mortgage bubble, that was just selling crap and calling it gold? Or watch a city school system suffer for twenty, twenty-five years? Isn’t anger the appropriate response? What is the appropriate response? Ennui? Alienation? Buying into the great-man theory of history—that if we only elect the right guy? This stuff is systemic. This is how an empire is eaten from within.
Guernica magazine shares an excellent Bill Moyers–interview of David Simon, creator of The Wire. Simon argues that the veneer used to hide our crumbling civil society no longer holds.