HOW ABOUT YOU SHUT UP AND RECORD MUSIC ON YOUR AUDIO FILES

I was thinking to myself, why I don't I listen to many podcasts? (Besides Due For A Win, but I'm an Atlantic City aficionado and there aren't many place anywhere to discuss a gambling town on the Jersey shore in a permanent state of decay and rebirth.) Am I too old--i.e., the same reason I don't watch Youtube videos for (say) movie reviews? (Who has time for that? And of course the young have time for that.) And then I decided--podcasts are basically narrowcasted AM talk radio, and I was never into AM talk radio.

Clearly this was the right thought to log into Blogger with for the first time in 2 and a half years.

I FEEL HAPPY, I FEEL HAPPY

Yessss remembered to update before the year ended! My lifestyle limits my ability to much of any old timey, typing-into-a-white-text-box active blogging (as opposed to passive Tumblr-style reblogging) but I do want to stick to a rigorous once a year posting schedule. What do I remember about 2014...

#CancelColbert was kind of dumb.

#Gamergate was pretty dumb, but possibly not worse than Hitler. (#godwingate)

I seem to remember a consistent theme in a lot of older Hong Kong films was that the cops and the gangsters were essentially competing armed gangs. American cops are increasingly becoming an armed gang, answerable to no one. Had a fantasy that all indictments that involved a police officer--you know, in a criminal way, where a cop assaults or kills someone--be handled by some sort of completely independent prosecutorial entity. Maybe a federal thing? Eh, but that creates its own problems.

Snowpiercer, man. POLAR BEAAARRRRRR

Let's all be prosperous in 2015.

GIRD THY LOINS BEFORE CLICKING THIS LINK: Riddick is the manliest film possible.

(Just put a cup on, that's as good as modern girding gets.)

WELL, THERE'S AT LEAST ONE DECENT OUTCOME FROM THE DEATH OF GOOGLE READER:

I've switched to Feedly, and it's a nicer app at least in terms of presentation than Reader is, at least on my Nexus 7. It actually looks a bit like the Google+ app, so, ummm, IRONY, or something.

What I will switch to once Google determines Blogger to be unprofitable is yet to be determined.

AND WHEN THEY GOOGLE "WELLS FARGO":

I hope they see this story:

Wells Fargo Typo Victim Dies in Court - Page 2 - News - Los Angeles - LA Weekly

MORE E STREET EPHEMERA:

From April, 2009:

The Armadillo World Headquarters, the first real road trip I ever took with the E Street Band. We got in a motor home and drove from New Jersey to Austin, Texas. I remember we got out in the parking lot of the Armadillo, and they were cleaning up from the night before. There was nothing but Dixie Beer and paper cups on the floor. We played that night, packed house, and I remember during a song, Bruce turned around and kind of faced me. Then he turned back around, and as he turned around, somebody tossed a cowboy hat from out in the middle of the audience. They threw a cowboy hat, and the thing landed on the head of his guitar. And he looked at it, looked at the audience, took the cowboy hat, and put it on his head. It was just one of those moments. If you had to do it in a movie, you'd have to try like 40 times to get it. So there you have it, the Armadillo.

File under "things found when googling for The Professor Roy Bittan." (Also file under "browser tabs finally closed.")

THE BALLAD OF CHILD ACTRESS Q:

Ugh yes this:

Okay, look, the Onion tweet nor the outrage isn't that hard to understand. But I can explain quickly.

1) It's clear the intent was straight irony, because it *should* be true that Quvenzhané Wallis is so clearly adorable that saying otherwise is a joke, like saying, "Man, that Al Gore needs to start caring about the enviroment." 2) Sadly, the author clearly didn't realize that in our sexist and racist environment, the adorableness of Quvenzhané Wallis is, in fact, controversial and a lot of people actually do deride her. 3) The joke was made assuming one context that wasn't true, and upon realizing this, it was retracted and apologized for. End of story. This isn't hard to understand. We've all said things we thought were clear irony only to find out otherwise. It happens.

(Timely reporting as ever here at the Blogistan celebrity news desk.)

THE OPERATIC BAR BAND GENRE:

A subgenre that occurred to me when I was thinking to myself that The Hold Steady plays in the Springsteen genre, and then wondering well what would one call the Springsteen genre?

(This has been a draft here in Blogger for weeks that I am only now offering up to take its place in the rich tapestry of Internet public opinionz. Again--in a E Street mood.)

DEPT. OF FOUND INTERNET OBJECTS, ASBURY PARK DIVISION:

Interview from 1985 with early E Streeter Suki Lahav. She's probably best known for the violin part on Jungleland. Yes--I am on a Springsteen kick. (Also clearing out an open tab.)

HOW NOW YELLER EUROCRAT:

Wrestling was dropped from the Olympics because it didn't have friends in the right places. That's it. End of line, as the Master Control Program would say. And this: "FILA didn't think its sport was at risk, so it waged virtually no campaign to save itself." Wrestling--perhaps THE sport that harkens back to the ancient Olympic times, when the Greeks famously wrassled sans any clothing--should never, even have to justify itself to anyone, and definitely not to a pack of loathsome IOC aristocrats. What bullshit.

...you can also see this as the expression of the IOC's anti-Americanism, as we have the all-time medal count in wrestling and the last two sports cut--baseball and softball--were also American as spam musubi, but that's more of a reach, in my opinion.

DEPT. OF E-MAIL MAILING LIST TITLES THAT WILL CONVINCE ME TO NOT DELETE THEM UNREAD:

It's the Bacevich article that makes the More Flan/Less Ayn argument. By the way, AmConMag, you need a tablet version in the Play store, yo.

...there's an AmCon Center For Public Transportation? I am soooo out of the loop.

FEDERATED STATES OF MICROBLOGORRHEA:

And if I do fail at my fake blogging resolution this year, you can always catch me on Tumblr. Microblogging! Which means, in 2013, a bloglike social stream with a network of people you don't know on Facebook (but wish you did.)