"It's tricky to rock a rhyme, today on Turner Classic Movies"

This is what the TCM announcer just said between movies.

It seems to me like the focus for the all-night Senate thing has been on "ending the war", but in my opinion they should be really up-front about the fact that Republicans have an explicit policy to call filibuster on everything and prevent any Democratic legislation from passing without 60 votes.

That's such a threat to Democracy in the first place, to use the filibuster like that. It affects everything else the Senate could hope to do, like passing bills that were part of the House's 100-day agenda and passed easily there, but can't get out of the Senate because of the Republicans.

They need to make it loud and clear and simple, "The Republicans are trying to block ANYthing we are doing, including ending the war and making prescription drugs more affordable etc, and if they want to filibuster these bills they need to stand up on the floor and do it."

If I understand what happened last night correctly, it's not really a filibuster, it's just some kind of procedural thing to enforce debate, but they're still going to do (or have already done, I'm not sure) the "cloture vote" which needs 60 votes to allow an up-or-down vote on the bill. It's confusing.

Couldn't have said it better myself

Spielberg

A couple of amusing tidbits from TCM's Spielberg documentary last night:

- George Lucas visited the set of "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" and was convinced it would be far more successful than his own "Star Wars". He offered to trade points with Spielberg, so Spielberg has a 2.5 percent share of "Star Wars" and Lucas has 2.5 percent of "CE3K". Obviously both these people are so rich they probably can't tell the difference, but that's still a pretty good swap for Spielberg!

- On the failure of 1941, Spielberg thinks it might have been due to the high level of violence and noise in the battle sequences. He describes seeing the audiences watching the film, holding their ears because of all the gunfire and explosions. Spielberg said that it wasn't to do with the sound editing or effects, he just "blew too much stuff up". This from the producer of "Transformers".

Holy Virgin on Fire vs Drunken Evil Dead

Here's "A Spot of Kung Fu", track 3: "Holy Virgin on Fire vs Drunken Evil Dead"



Jeff

A Spot of Kung Fu: Fall in love again

Here's the second track from my 1999 album, "A Spot of Kung Fu". This one's called "Fall in love again", and it's a simple little romantic ditty with the vocals pitched way down to make them sound more soulful.

Even now this is one of my favorite tracks from this period, I like the sincerity of the lyrics and I dig the guitar solo, in spite of the wacky feedback.

Enjoy!

Surreally Divine

Testing out a little widget for publishing songs. This is the first track off "A Spot of Kung Fu", my first album, recorded and mixed in my bedroom in NYC in 1999.

Jeff

Saw "Transformers". Once again, I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, Michael Bay would deliver something that is at least entertaining action, if it has no other redeeming qualities. Once again I was disappointed.

Viewers come out of Michael Bay movies looking stunned and numb, because their senses have been assaulted so mercilessly, so loudly, and with so little respite, for the last two and a half hours. The movie is loud, chaotic, nonsense. The robot designs are so overly-complicated it makes it difficult to tell what's going on in any given scene. The comic relief scenes seemed like they were written by a six-year-old.

I give them props for getting Peter Cullen to voice Optimus Prime, but that's about it. Beyond that, Michael Bay makes another big bunch of cinematic nothing that might as well not even exist.