For your "pure pleasure"

I have to confess that I have just discovered this stuff, and I cannot stop laughing. These dudes are called Legion of Rock Stars and they have taken the annoying habit of "headphone soloists" (remember Eddie Murphy's "Roxanne" performance in 48 Hours?") and turned it loose on the hits we know and love. They do this via a process they call "pure pleasure". Their website briefly describes the process:

LEGION OF ROCK STARS has freed themselves from the shackles of practicing, instead perfecting a performance technique known as the Pure Pleasure Process.

Pure Pleasure.

While listening to songs on headphones equipped with 30dB sound blockers to blot out the outside world, the band plays and sing their hearts out, all while unable to hear themselves.

Brilliant. Here's the Legion's cover of the Police in their most over-the-top video. Sure leaves Sting looking like a complete ass. Well, he was lip-syncing anyway.


Here's Journey getting owned and Neil Diamond deservedly, you'll hopefully agree. Plus I think Guns & Roses's tour bus just got shorter,.

Here's the first one I happened upon. Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman is a song I've always loved, but I died laughing anyway. The piano part especially.

I don't know... YMMV, let me know what you think. I live for this kind of humor. Deep, deep parody and self-deprecation. Thank you, Mr. Crazed Poodle, for inventing the internets.

As regards "maturing as a person"

This was posted by my bro-in-law on his Facebook page. Very fny, imho.

If you ever receive an e-mail/message/text/etc. from me saying that I'm stranded in Europe and need your financial assistance because I've lost my important documents – I don't want you to help me EVEN if you find out it's legit and not a scam. The only way I'll learn anything from that situation and mature as a person...

Sister Mary Martha on Twilight

My opinion is that the Twilight books are as much the occasion for over-analysis as the "Lost" series. So two insights I've recently found are refreshing. The first is Sr. Mary Martha's "To Hell in a Handcart" post, for both content:

It's still about romance, isn't it? And isn't romance, in novels, all about sexual tension? And then on top of that the guy is a vampire, which is an evil thing that lives forever by drinking the blood of others. Unless he stays out too late and the sun turns him to dust.

At least he has a curfew.

At least he can't loll around on the beach.

Whatever.

There is just no "upside" to reading "Twilight" that I can see. It really isn't just a fun fantasy book, as I imagine Harry Potter to be. It's a creepy temptation. A teen titillation.

...and context:

I am not one to run around with my hair on fire, crying out that the youth of today are going to hell in a handcart. They may be doing just that, but that is the nature of youth of every generation. Each generation has it's own handcart, is all. We still have to get them out of it.
...
That's why I think I'm going to have to read it. Ugh. Because the other thing they like to do, is be critical of whatever everyone else likes. They love nothing more than to think something is "stupid". I think I can light that fuse. Once you poke a hole in the story, they descend on it like vultures, tearing it apart. And once they think it's stupid, we've won.

The other insight is the comment from Katie O on the same page:

There's been a quote circulating on the internet lately that says, "Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength, and doing what is right in the face of adversity, Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend."

Indeed.

Donohue weighs in on Oliver Stone's new Hitler love

From yesterday's release.

Let's try putting Oliver Stone "in context." Here is man who has played fast and loose with history for years: he is a master at bleeding drama into a documentary, merging fact with fiction—and then selling it as if it were historically accurate. Anyone who thinks Hitler has been a scapegoat is obviously less interested in seeing Hitler through his own eyes than he is in offering an exculpatory thesis. Moreover, his unwillingness to condemn Ahmadinejad, and his love for Chavez, are hardly surprising given his mindset.

There are anti-Semites on the right, but these days the biggest threat to Jews comes from the left, Oliver Stone being among them.

Radical-in-Chief

It's his dream, it's his nightmare. Stanley Kurtz has been watching the snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor for some time, and now he has announced his new book, Radical-in-Chief. Here's the text from the press release.

Part biography, part history, part detective story, RADICAL-IN-CHIEF reveals the carefully hidden tale of Barack Obama’s political past. Stanley Kurtz, who’s research helped inject the Bill Ayers and ACORN issues into the 2008 presidential campaign, presents the results of more than two years of digging into President Obama’s radical political world. The book is filled with previously unknown information about the president’s past, tied together by a bold argument about what Obama’s deepest political convictions really are.

RADICAL-IN-CHIEF marshals a wide array of never-before-seen evidence to establish that the president of the United States is indeed a socialist. Tracing an unbroken thread of socialist activities and political partnerships, from Obama’s youth through his community organizing days and beyond, the book confirms that the president’s harshest critics have been right about his socialism all along.

RADICAL-IN-CHIEF also exposes the truth about community organizers–the socialist beliefs they hold and hide, and how they trained and groomed a president. Obama’s community organizer colleagues had a strategy for slowly and stealthily turning the United States into a socialist nation. The Obama administration is carrying out that strategy today.

This book will forever change our national debate about who Barack Obama is.

One look at this, and we know it's gonna be hot! Click to pre-order on Amazon.

"The day I stop is the day you change"

Pretty funny

Or should I say pretty & funny?

Oliver Stone on "Jew domination" and putting Hitler in the correct context

Move over, Mel Gibson. Here comes Oliver Stone to warn us about the Jews and put Hitler "in context".

"The Jewish domination of the media," responded Stone. "There's a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has fucked up United States foreign policy for years."

H/T to my buddy Jonathan Carpenter who sent me the link in an email.

Crackerlist

Well, hat tip to AB's Big J for this great link on I Own the World which showcases the melanin deficit of the Journolisters. I think the dude is continuing to add to the images as more of the 400 are discovered, judging from the comments. There is one person of color near the bottom. The line at the top puts it best: "THIS LATTE PARTY SURE LOOKS EXCLUSIONARY, IT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE AMERICA. IT LOOKS MORE LIKE THE UPPER WEST SIDE OF MANHATTAN."

UPDATE: Here's a text list from American Thinker.

The following 64 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv.

1. Ezra Klein
2. Dave Weigel
3. Matthew Yglesias
4. David Dayen
5. Spencer Ackerman
6. Jeffrey Toobin
7. Eric Alterman
8. Paul Krugman
9. John Judis
10. Eve Fairbanks
11. Mike Allen
12. Ben Smith
13. Lisa Lerer
14. Joe Klein
15. Brad DeLong
16. Chris Hayes
17. Matt Duss
18. Jonathan Chait
19. Jesse Singal
20. Michael Cohen
21. Isaac Chotiner
22. Katha Pollitt
23. Alyssa Rosenberg
24. Rick Perlstein
25. Alex Rossmiller
26. Ed Kilgore
27. Walter Shapiro
28. Noam Scheiber
29. Michael Tomasky
30. Rich Yesels
31. Tim Fernholz
32. Dana Goldstein
33. Jonathan Cohn
34. Scott Winship
35. David Roberts
36. Luke Mitchell
37. John Blevins
38. Moira Whelan
39. Henry Farrell
40. Josh Bearman
41. Alec McGillis
42. Greg Anrig
43. Adele Stan
44. Steven Teles
45. Harold Pollack
46. Adam Serwer
47. Ryan Donmoyer
48. Seth Michaels
49. Kate Steadman
50. Laura Rozen
51. Jesse Taylor
52. Michael Hirsh
53. Daniel Davies
54. Jonathan Zasloff
55. Richard Kim
56. Thomas Schaller
57. Jared Bernstein
58. Holly Yeager
59. Joe Conason
60. David Greenberg
61. Todd Gitlin
62. Mark Schmitt
63. Kevin Drum
64. Sarah Spitz

Red Hot

I don't often feel compelled to post, but I want to post today about something I saw on "Meet the Press", NBC's entry into the Sunday morning major network Tower of Babel fest. Former Obama administration honcho Anita Dunn was on the round table...remember her? Her favorite political philosopher is Mao Tse Tung:

Anita got fired by the administration after that clip showed up on youtube. Still, Anita is apparently one of the very few people in the country whose insights into the political process are valuable enough to be included in NBC's round table. She certainly looked the part of Washington insider, with expensively cut and colored hair and pearl jewelry. She even managed not to stick her tongue out every 5 seconds, perhaps having dialed down on the psychotropic meds.

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Except the color of Anita's suit was notable ... it was solid RED. Anita was wearing a solid red suit. Anita, whose claim to fame is that she was fired for praising Mao, chose to pull out of her closet a SOLID RED SUIT to wear on national television. NBC apparently didn't have a problem with that. It's interesting, because in all my years of shopping for women's suits, I'd have had a really hard time finding one that was solid, fire-engine RED. And given the chance to wear one on TV, mere months after I had been excoriated for fetishizing Chairman Mao, I probably would have refrained from doing so ... unless I were a bottomless pit of seething, unadulterated, hostile, Mao-loving rage inside, that is.

That kind of rage leads to interesting places, as I'm sure any survivor of Mao's RED China could tell us.