Only thing that would’ve made it better would have been calling in some fire support from a battery of R11s

Thanx to Golfblogger

Having worked as a roadie, stagehand, and finally a Sound&Light Guy all the way through college, I kinda know something about cover bands. They fall into: Bad, Really Bad, Pathetic, and the rare Mediocre. The Holy Grail is ‘Decent’.

But these guys (although Decent) win just for this:

Southern Governor at a live concert at Target, Winchester VA

Target. That’s Big Time compared to “Mike and Chris Unplugged at the Centre Mall“.

Taken this morning in Joshua Tree. I wish I was able to take it a few minutes earlier – it reminded me so much of the night skies when the Kuwaiti oil wells were blown up.

GL: Hi, I made a movie called Star Wars.

Critics: Where are the blacks?

GL: ?

Critics: No wait – you have James Earl Jones – no wait – just his voice. And he’d a Bad Guy. What’re you, some kind of racist?

GL: But Star War is a metaphor for the Viet Nam War! The rebels are the g–damn Viet Cong!

Critics: Ooooh! Inside baseball. Nice. But you still have no blacks (or Latinos) in it. Richard Pryor isn’t going to like it.

GL: Richard Pryor is a comedian. And I was going to have Toshirō Mifune play Obi Wan Kenobi…

Critics: Too inside baseball. And it’s stereotyping. In addition to being racist.

GL: (sigh) Okay – here’s Star Wars 2. The Empire Strikes Back. It has Billy Dee Williams playing Lando Calrissian. And there are African-Americans in the floating city.

Critics: Oh, now you’re doing the “token black” thing, plus stereotyping, and typecasting?? And you’re still only using James Earl Jones’ voice and not Jones himself?

GL: “Luke, I am your father”….. ?

[Long Clueless Silence]

Critics: Spike Lee is gonna have a fit.

GL: Spike Who?

Critics: You racist bastard.

GL: Then you’re really going to hate Jar Jar Binks.

[Cue 2012...]

GL: Hi, I’ve made a movie called Red Tails. It’s about the Tuskagee Airmen.

Critics: But is it a “green” movie? We looove “green” movies!

GL: It’s very patriotic, very jingoistic, very old-fashioned, corny, just exactly like Flying Leathernecks, only this one was held up for release from 1942 when it was shot.

Critics: Flying What?

GL: Flying Leathernecks? John Wayne?

[silence]

GL: It’s “retro”. Like Pearl Harbor was.

Critics: Oh. Well, where’s the evil industrialists? Y’know – like the Koch brothers?

GL: It’s an all black movie, fer crissakes. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all black action pictures ever made!

Critics: But where’s the drowning polar bear cub?

GL: It’s got Cuba Gooding in it.

Critics: You couldn’t work in Captain Planet instead? Your kind are good at that computer-generated thingie-stuff.

GL: You racist bastards.

I could complain. I could. I sat inside for an hour and watched my family – and the accursed dog – build a snowman and frolic in the giantness of winter. Just sat inside by the big window, with the crutches propped on the couch next to me and coffee in a travel mug with a pink cupcake logo because it’s the only one we have that closes completely, which makes it the only one we have that I can safely gimp around with. I could complain. My knee medication has made me sick, and I so I feel like I need to put my brain and my innards back in my body, as they are both working very hard at forcing their way out. It’s to the garbage with that bucket of pills. I could complain. In short, this whole thing has turned me into what I would call a walking cliche, if only I could walk. I’m an easy and flat character in a movie. A silhouette of sadness in front of a contemplative soundtrack. The world going on about its business around me as I gaze out a window in a moment in which my inner strength has finally given out after a stalwart defense. The laughter of the children and the slow-motion snow coming down like a million playing cards bleached white and dropped from an airplane, highlighting my sudden uselessness, but only highlighting it to me. And the audience, of course, but I have no audience. I could complain.

Good thing I’m not, though, right? And I know, there are people missing whole legs and who are shot through with cancer and who just heard about a car accident, with fatalities, on a highway nearby and they haven’t heard from their wife who took the kids out to a park somewhere down that highway earlier. I know. I know. But for a moment, I could complain.

Yeah, you could. And you should.

I had a Chief Corpsman (3 tours Vietnam) tell me after treating my smashed thumb “If you can bitch about it, you ain’t that bad off”. Thought that was kind of harsh until ten years later, when I woke up on a litter on a tarmac during a Frankfurt winter, wondering between the morphine clouds if I’d ever get a hard-on again, never mind walk. When you’re bad off you just don’t have the energy to bitch. Saying “thanks” to the Landstuhl surgeon who kinda gives you the verdict by telling you you’re going back to CONUS, or to the airmen sliding you into the rack on the Medevac flight just seems to be a lot easier.

I work with Fleet Marine corpsmen now. Some wounded Marines, they tell me, kept on joking right up until the moment they died.

‘They are opaque, they are completely airtight, and the liners are pretty darn good,’ said Lew Bryson, managing editor of Whisky Advocate magazine. ‘It is not going to be affecting the flavor. The problem you run into is who is going to bang out 12 ounces in an evening?’

And since we’re on a things-are-going-to-hell-in-a-Mayan-handbasket ($25 at Pier One) binge:

Elin Nordegren: I Demolished My $12 MILLION Mansion

No word if a 9-iron was used.

I’m talking about the pasta-making machine. I’ve got a hankering for making ramen noodles and ravioli.

Then again, perhaps twelve months is too long a wait. I’ll see what’s in the coconut-fulla-change…

They always seem to do it right.

…it does rain in central Arizona.