• My stepson, Liam, has a bit of a tendency to speak too quickly and slur his words a little. As a consequence, when he says the name Barack Obama it sometimes sounds like he's saying "Black Obama." This drives me crazy.
  
  I worry that someone is gonna hear him and think that he really is saying "black Obama" and that he comes from a family full of racist scumbags.
  
  Of course, Barack Obama is black and there are plenty of good reasons to be proud to be black. Still, it sounds demeaning when a little white kid says something that sounds like "black Obama." Maybe I should teach him to start saying "President Obama."
  
  First, I suppose I'm gonna have to teach myself to start saying that.
  
  Or maybe we could split the difference and have everyone in the family go around referring to the outgoing President as "Whitey Bush" or "George W. Cracker" or something.



• This world is full of stupid people and a lot of them have money. And you can make a very comfortable living for yourself if you can come up with ways to separate stupid people from their money.
  
  I'm convinced that the guy who did this best was the guy who invented fingerless gloves.
  
  If you're an owner/wearer of fingerless gloves, let me take a moment to explain the whole glove concept to you. The whole friggin' point of gloves is to protect your hands. Most commonly, gloves are worn to protect your hands from the cold. The parts of the body that get cold the easiest are the extremities, and the fingers are the extremities of your hands. Therefore, fingerless gloves are like cars without wheels. Tables without legs. Liberals without latte.
  
  I hope we've cleared that up. Not that I begrudge the guy who owns the fingerless glove factory his ability to continue making money by selling dumb crap to dumb people.



• So the rock-n-roll world is all atwitter about the possibility ... likely one minute and unlikely the next ... that Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham will go on tour with some singer who's not Robert Plant.
  
  A lot of people are just about to pee themselves about it. The mantra is something like "It won't really be Led Zeppelin without Robert Plant!"
  
  I got news for ya, pal. With or without Plant, it WILL NOT be Led Zeppelin.
  
  Let's do the math, here, shall we?

  

  There can be no Led Zeppelin without John Bonham. Period, end of story. Jimmy Page once knew that. The presence or absence of Robert Plant is a moot point. Plant has been past his prime since the third album, anyway.
  
  Now, here's the part that some rock fans consider really blasphemous... Led Zeppelin wasn't all that great, anyway. They did two ... maybe three ... albums' worth of really outstanding material. And they did six or seven albums' worth of stuff that was mediocre to bad. The vast majority of the live Zeppelin I've heard has been OK at best. Jimmy Page's meandering, directionless hour-long solos are BORING. AS. HELL. And John Bonham was the only really impressive member of the group.
  
  So there. Zeppelin is over. Get over it. There are far too many superior bands out there on tour right now to worry about a bunch of aging fops.
  
  Sorry, but somebody had to say it and it might as well be me.

Labels: Humor, Music, Personal, Politics

Permalink -- Posted by Darrell at 10:19