hate the police

While unwisely avoiding sleep via looking up music videos, I decided to look up "hate the police", a song made popular by the legendary 80s hardcore punk band The Dicks, but i was made aware of through Mudhoney's 1989 classic (and recently re-issued) Superfuzz Bigmuff.

Mudhoney played at the Middle East (a wonderful 2 minute walk from my house) recently and tore it up well. The show has been on repeat in my head for days. "Hate the Police" in particular is a great song about a racist prick becoming a cop and how i would hate that. Actually, the wikipedia article for The Dicks has a great summation: "In the song Gary Floyd portrays a policeman who abuses his power by going after minorities and taking his anger out on civilians." With the beginning lines of "Mommy mommy mommy! / Look at your son / You might have loved me / but now I got a gun / you better stay out of my way / i think i've had a bad day" and the refrain "if you don't find justice, it'll find you"... the song just hits me in the gut every time i hear it.

I'm not looking to get into any debate about myself and cops. This song isn't about the nice ones, its a story about the bad ones who infringe on the rights of people through bigotry, bullying, etc.

In any case, I'm on youtube looking for video of the Dicks or Mudhoney playing the song live. I find Mudhoney at what looks like the Glastonbury Festival and i see this and laugh:



and laugh.

Its time for Amtrak

My friend, Jonathan Airport (merely his pseudonym, not his ideology, sounds better than Mr. Trainstation or Hauptbanhof; Mr. Conductor was already taken), was asked if an image of his on flickr of an Amtrak train could be used by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative "think" tank. Mr. Airport was afraid that it would be used in the foundation's continuing crusade for stupidity. Airport seemed to be correct.

The Heritage Foundation sucks and couldn't be more behind the times than now with our transportation energy crisis. They hate Amtrak and fail to see how funding might help our beleaguered intercity corridors in this country. They continue to attack Amtrak's performance when most of the factors which keep it from "performing" stem from underfunding and the fact that Amtrak's cross-country routes mostly run on the poorly-maintained tracks of private freight railroads where Amtrak trains are often forced to stop and fall behind schedule. Whereas in the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington DC, where Amtrak owns a good amount of track, things are fine. Ridership continues to increase and Amtrak serves about half the total market.

With high gas prices affecting airlines and drivers, Amtrak is continuing to look like the best option for corridor travel between cities. In terms of the ongoing fight against climate change, full trains going between cities like Boston - NYC - DC are much more preferable in terms of emissions and land-use impact than congested highways and short-hop airline flights.

These are things I'd tell you on a regular basis. I mainly wanted to have some background as I post these editorial cartoons:

Thing that would've been awesome to be at #1

Crystal Castles live. Doing their remix of the Klaxons' "Atlantis to Interzone".




Crystal Castles' own stuff is awesome as well and will be covered soon. I just needed the sensation of jumping up and down screaming "Aaaatlaaaantis to Interzoooooone"! whilst being blinded by strobes.