You can really hear the bass on this version

Video is a little bit ahead of the audio in this concert version of Ian Dury's Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, but the incredible bass line is much more audible than in other versions. And yes, the sax player does his double sax solo.



Re: the bass line: the raised third in the chorus is a little bit jarring, and it's not the way I'd have played it. But it does hit you -- can't argue with that. Punk jazz rock at it's best.

Ted Cruz blows up objections to "Stand Your Ground"...

...with an inconvenient truth.

"That's that hard part again!"

This cartoon reminds me of Obamacare.



Jerry's Uncle Paco has a high opinion of his own performance and just has to stop now and again to explain why he's having trouble with the hard parts. Jerry is smiling delightedly the entire time because he loves Paco and patiently supports him even though his friend, well, sucks.

Go on over to Dailykos or other places where they love big government and you can read all kinds of love pieces about how fabulous Obamacare is. Like this one. Even though a majority of Americans think it's a train wreck and now have hard evidence to support their belief.

This will be a fun day for Sebelius in Washington DC. My advice to her is to start crying at a strategic point so she appears to be human. My advice to Republicans is to throw water on her like Dorothy does to the witch in Wizard of Oz.

But seriously, doesn't it seem like Sebelius and company are whistling past the graveyard here? From another article:

A component of the online system that has been working relatively well experienced an outage Sunday. The federal data services hub, a conduit for verifying the personal information of people applying for benefits under the law, went down in a failure that was blamed on an outside contractor, Terremark.

"Today, Terremark had a network failure that is impacting a number of their clients, including healthcare.gov," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said. "Secretary Sebelius spoke with the CEO of Verizon this afternoon to discuss the situation and they committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible."

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, of which Terremark is a part, said: "Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue. It will fixed as quickly as possible."

There's the new line. "We've identified the problem and it will be fixed as soon as possible." Sounds an awful lot like Paco's "That's that hard part again." Someone from CGI is going to write a book about this debacle, and none of it will be a surprise any more than this little factoid revealing the affirmative action/cronyism behind the website development.

"Weirdo!"

I love this Verizon commercial.



I don't know what is more pathetic. Darth Vader dog or 3-year old Princess Leia with metal brassiere attached to Jabba dad.

What a best-selling book by a conservative looks like

LOL. Don't be ridiculous.

No, I mean this:

Number one on Amazon under the category, uh, yeah: books. Take a closer look at it here.

Why, you may ask, is Charles Krauthammer an actual Pulitzer Prize winner rather than merely a self-promoting nominee? Why is his book number one under "books" rather than number 60 under "category/sub-category/sub-sub-category/an even lower category/no, even lower/is the temperature rising?/how deep are we now, exactly/oh, God, please, let's go back up now while we still can/"?

The answer is almost certainly because liberal psychiatrist-turned-conservative columnist Krauthammer is a genuinely thoughtful man, but more importantly, an intellectually honest one, to the core. If you disagree with him, be prepared to bring your A argument game, because you can be sure that what you may want to contest is something he's already tested and re-tested himself a hundred times before, not merely the first impulse that may have come to his mind before being slapped on a page.

For any who may be reading this before 9:00 PM CDT/ 10:00 PM EDT tonight, October the 25th, Bret Baier will be hosting an hour-long interview with Krauthammer on your local Fox news station. Oh - did you know he's been in a wheelchair for 32 years? But you won't hear him whining about that.

If you miss that interview, console yourself with this instead.

So which of these architects built Healthcare.gov?

Or did they team up on it and build it together?



Dang masons.

Bird with the broken wing

Trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier

There is so much Cleveland in this; I love it already. The part around 2 minutes in where he's riding the motorbike on the bridge is the part they filmed a block from my house which I blogged about earlier. Here's a still I lifted: