Saturday, 30 April 2011

The Twilight Singers - On The Corner (Letterman 4/26/11)

lou_reuters lou charbonneau

REUTERS - Makeshift morgues in #Syria city Deraa hold 83 corpses, including women and children, killed in army attack -- rights campaigner

Breaking: Army finds Bradley Manning "competent to stand trial."

Contradictions in the Bible

It's Alright

Over 50 political accounts deleted in Facebook purge

Terrorists discover uses for Twitter

The Chaser's Royal Wedding | The Consummation

PennyRed Laurie Penny

Royal Wedding,austerity, unemployment, inner city riots. It's the 1980s again. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Inside Syria's torture chambers: 'This regime is brutal but also stupid'

Music Fan Porn: Band Memorabilia That We Wish We Owned

Record label EMI published the results today of a charity auction it held earlier this month to raise money for tsunami relief funds in Japan. There was plenty of interesting material to be had, although it was, of course, all well out of our price range – but if you happened to have a spare $10k sitting around, you could have snapped up signed copies of David Bowie’s full back catalog, while $6,744 would have gotten you Billy Corgan’s handmade “Zero” t-shirt. The news got us thinking about other band paraphernalia we’d love to get our hands on – read on to see our selection, and let us know what you’d like on your mantelpiece.

Super Furry Animals’ blue rave tank
It was clear from the moment they first emerged from Wales in the mid-’90s that Super Furry Animals were a bit… different. Even so, they raised plenty of eyebrows with their chosen method of traveling to festivals around the time their first album was released: a bright blue tank. Apparently they convinced their record company to buy the tank instead of giving them an advance but hadn’t counted on how expensive it would be to run, and eventually had to trade it in for more practical transportation options. Amusingly, they sold it to Don Henley, who’s still driving it around his ranch in California.

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Christopher Hitchens: When the King Saved God

The title page of the New Testament in the first edition of the King James Bible, published by Robert Barker (“Printer to the King’s most Excellent Maiestie”) in 1611.
After she was elected the first female governor of Texas, in 1924, and got herself promptly embroiled in an argument about whether Spanish should be used in Lone Star schools, it is possible that Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson did not say, “If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas.” I still rather hope that she did. But then, verification of quotations and sources is a tricky and sensitive thing. Abraham Lincoln lay dying in a room full of educated and literate men, in the age of the wireless telegraph, and not far from the offices of several newspapers, and we still do not know for sure, at the moment when his great pulse ceased to beat, whether his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, said, “Now he belongs to the ages” or “Now he belongs to the angels.”
Such questions of authenticity become even more fraught when they involve the word itself becoming flesh; the fulfillment of prophecy; the witnessing of miracles; the detection of the finger of God. Guesswork and approximation will not do: the resurrection cannot be half true or questionably attested. For the first 1,500 years of the Christian epoch, this problem of “authority,” in both senses of that term, was solved by having the divine mandate wrapped up in languages that the majority of the congregation could not understand, and by having it presented to them by a special caste or class who alone possessed the mystery of celestial decoding.
Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James” version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. “The powers that be,” it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, “are ordained of God.” This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: “When I was a child, I spake as a child”; “Eat, drink, and be merry”; “From strength to strength”; “Grind the faces of the poor”; “salt of the earth”; “Our Father, which art in heaven.” It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose...