To which a burly fellow leaned out of his rig and said, "I'm a big man, got a big truck, and what you do mean, 'compensating'"?
The O'Rollins Factor & r & If we had a nickel for Henry Rollins' every spit-flecked curse, we'd buy Black Flag's My War and use the change on a can of neutral-scent body spray and an existential crisis. If you were there, you know what we're talking about.
If you weren't, well, you missed a mostly left-slanted tirade from a beefy, well-thought-of performer who vehemently hates this war but loves our troops. His moral character is impeccable (having helped invent straight-edge) and he doesn't suffer from the Hollywood Liberal label. Muscles, austerity and a home in So Cal -- do we have a possible Governator slayer?
Bored of the Rings & r & Excuse us for not knowing our Minas Tirith from our Cirith Ungol, but during Saturday night's Lord of the Rings Symphony event at the Arena, half the time we didn't know what the hell that video screen was showing. Our guess is they were panning slowly across charcoal sketches of ... rocks and castles. Or maybe algae. Howard Shore condensed his movie music, polishing it beyond the finished product; the storyboards, in contrast, were created before the movies were filmed. They clashed, and the sketches lost.
Still, we're happy for the local-kid vocal soloists, and boy, those guys in the percussion section sure kept busy.
"I feel sorry for anybody who hasn't seen the movies, sitting through that," said one fellow as we exited into the cold and dark. Well, we saw the movies. All three of 'em. This felt longer.
Impossi-plausible & r & Time magazine recently listed its 100 best English-language novels since 1923, when Time a) began publishing and b) apparently thinks novelists did, too.
Matthew Baldwin has ferreted out & lt;a href="http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/lone_star_statements.php" & actual readers' comments & lt;/a & at amazon.com on some of those novels. They are not comforting. For example, here's one fellow expatiating on Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five:
"In the novel, they often speak of a planet called Tralfamadore, where he was displayed in a zoo.... I did not find the idea of aliens kidnapping a human and putting them in a zoo very plausible.... I also do not believe that a person has seven parents."
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