I’ve been a far, distant compass lately, I know — letting Brad work his fingers to sticks on the daily entries (while Seb gets fat and wealthy, as ever, from our SadNo, GmbH currency manipulations and inter-embassy dealings).

It’s the music and other things, for me. I’ll talk about politics and the music.

Like most of us here, I’m human, and there are times when normal human beings might go gamely to look at Powerline or MichelleMalkin.com (or any of those places) and want to smash out the leering evil with a baseball bat. The last time I felt this way was when my sister was almost blown up in London. I’ve taken a brief vacation from the WingNet because anger is ugly, and there’s only so much of that stuff that you can wade through without needing a periodic bio-chem shower. One starts to become just as bad, in a way. And I’m a notional Quaker: Wanting to crush skulls is a prime signal for a timeout and a hard think.

And also, I think things have changed lately, and that we might not fully appreciate the tectonic switcharound that’s happened since August. The right is seeming increasingly desperate, grabbing onto casuistries about France and about the football-bomber, building wind-fragile new card-houses to explain the runup to Iraq, twisting and torting into Moebius ribbons on Cheney’s secret gulags and a dozen other emergent issues.

One starts, almost, to feel sorry for them, honestly.

…Before wanting to throw them a dozen anvils and drop Willy Pete depth charges in the water. So I’ve laid low, and my posts lately haven’t been very good in my reckon. I think I have a couple-few more days of turpitude left in me. Or maybe you haven’t noticed because Brad’s been so good lately.

But music: Amanda Panda and I squabble in public sometimes, but I went out to the garage today and found Big Boys* albums, and lived in Austin, today, while the albums were playing. Randy ‘Biscuit’ Turner, the singer, died a couple of months ago, so soon ago that he hasn’t become a ghost yet, but still just a startling absence. I entreat you, beg you, put a finger on your nose-tip and whisper of ancient codexes to you, to filesteal these songs (in order), and listen to them (in order), for pleasure and gain:

Fun Fun Fun
Fight Back
Sound on Sound

Good Texans, flaming queer on the mic, losers and punko-mohawkos on strings & riddim. They were loved, loved, loved in Austin. A good treasure to hold and keep, these songs and others.

[bisy backson]

*A person didn’t do this Wikipedia entry, but a person might have done other ones on hardcore at some point, themes from which are taken up here. I don’t know what’s happened to those other entries since, besides that people keep changing stuff in them — like rearranging the furniture and adding weird slipcovers and curtains and things — but it’s great to win bets by pulling up the Wiki and being like, Aha! See: It says so right here! (A person also, as it happens, did most of the hardcore entries in the collector-scumworthy Volume Guide. Editor Henry Weld sometimes argues with me in print, but that’s only because he’s 100% wrong, etc. [I’m hunting for a way to get out of this parenthetical gracefully. …Look, a monkey!])