Fine? Why Fine?

Ben

So last night I drove into the city to meet Chrissy after she was done teaching her class and we went and saw Ben Lee at Irving Plaza. It's funny/sad, we used to go to so many shows a few years ago, but now it's such a big event that we both actually took today off. I can't seem to find the article online now, but Chrissy's favorite local columnist wrote a piece a while back about the difference between going to a show in your 20s and going to a show in your 30s that would have provided me with a quote or two to move this post along. Anyway, while we weren't the oldest people last night, the crowed definitely skewed towards the mid-20s range.

But Ben Lee, yes, good solid Aussie kid. We first heard of him when he teamed up with Ben Folds and Ben Kweller to form The Bens (duh) a few years ago. At the time Chrissy thought she was going to get into Kweller's solo stuff but it didn't really happen and it wasn't until recently that Chrissy really got into Ben Lee and became moderately obsessed, checking in on his website regularly, including his blog and he just started doing podcasts too. So when tickets went on sale for the Irving Plaza show for $10 (+ the always nebulous finance charges) it was a done deal.

Ben put on a great show splitting the set between the full band and just him and his guitar. He covered "Brick" by "the other Ben." Thankfully, no one threw a bottle at him. His rapport with the audience was spontaneous and came with an ease and--aww hell who am I kidding as great as Ben Lee was the real story of the night is that for the first five songs or so we were standing next to this guy! The f'in' MILF Guy from American Pie!!!

You can listen to Ben Lee songs over on his myspace page. Check him out.

A Delirious 10th Inning

(Via Fark.) Some maniac with a lot of time on his hands has reproduced the bottom of the 10th of Game 6 on the old RBI Baseball game. He uses the actual call from the game and I have to admit I got a little nervous then completely jacked up during Mookie's at-bat.

And in lieu of any actual real thoughts on the first week of this season for the Mets let me just say that my buddy put it perfectly the other day when he said, "I just hope David Wright is 'taking full advantage' of being young and playing in New York." 

Iron Mike

Totten calls out Hezbollah.

I know you’re still monitoring my Web site. At least you kept monitoring me long after the two of us stopped talking – if that’s the right word. One of my colleagues said you told him I’m blacklisted because of what I wrote about you in the LA Weekly. You won’t give me quotes anymore. You won’t give him quotes anymore either because he’s tainted by his association with me.

What do you people expect?

What Was That?

I've never heard of these guys but this headline is fantastic.

Mastodon LP Tackles Self-Cannibalism, One-Eyed Sasquatch

No Better Time Than Now

I'm with Lead & Gold on the Flight 93 movie "controversy."

Memories fade. People move on. If we don't honor the heroes of Flight 93 now, are we sure Hollywood will do it in 2016?

After all, how many people remember Wake Island? In 1942 it was a rallying cry alongside "Remember Pearl Harbor". But thiry years afterward it was all but forgotten. Is that what we want to happen with 9/11?

H

Kevin Smith is up to Part 5 of his blog-recounting of his friend and co-star Jason Mewes's battle with heroin and other drugs. Start at the beginning.

Since the gossip sites have seen fit to print only the portion of the Jason Mewes story I told at UPenn (that portion being what said sites seem to feel is the only interesting aspect of Mewes’ life), I figured why not put the whole tale of Jason’s battle with drug addiction into print here, where folks can get a better idea of who Jason truly is and maybe why he fell victim to heroin abuse in the first place. I’m thinking it’s gonna be at least a four-parter, and I’m hoping to wrap it up by April 6th, the day Mewes celebrates his “Sober Birthday”, when Jay will mark his third straight year of living completely drug and alcohol free.

Australian for Funny

In my mind Tim Blair will always be among the Founding Fathers of the blogosphere. He's still one of the best. He's still relentlessly going after Margo and still rips off Styenian one-liners, like "Dr Pitte’s car insurance just quadrupled." 

Future Reads

Did an hour's worth of browsing at Barnes & Noble (not Borders) the other day and saw a few books that looked good but will have to wait until I can find some more free time.

Infamous Scribblers by Eric Burns: If you read enough American history you realize that the partisan nastiness of the blogosphere really isn't anything new. The technology is obviously different but the things written by partisans about Hamilton and Adams (two of the Founders I've recently read biographies of) are just as obnoxious and vehement as anything said about our current lot of politicians. From the publisher:

Infamous Scribblers is a perceptive and witty exploration of the most volatile period in the history of the American press. News correspondent and renonwned media historian Eric Burns tells of Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Sam Adams-the leading journalists among the Founding Fathers; of George Washington and John Adams, the leading disdainers of journalists; and Thomas Jefferson, the leading manipulator of journalists. These men and the writers who abused and praised them in print (there was, at the time, no job description of "journalist") included the incendiary James Franklin, Ben's brother and one of the first muckrakers; the high minded Thomas Paine; the hatchet man James Callender, and a rebellious crowd of propagandists, pamphleteers, and publishers. It was Washington who gave this book its title. He once wrote of his dismay at being "buffited in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers."

The journalism of the era was often partisan, fabricated, overheated, scandalous, sensationalistic and sometimes stirring, brilliant, and indispensable. Despite its flaws-even because of some of them-the participants hashed out publicly the issues that would lead America to declare its independence and, after the war, to determine what sort of nation it would be.

Sounds like a timely book to me. Another book that looked worth picking up in the near future is The Twins Platoon written by a veteran of the Vietnam platoon of the title. I couldn't believe what I was reading as I read the back of the book.

In the evening of June 28, 1967, 150 young Americans were sworn into the Marine Corps as part of the pre-game ceremonies of a Minnesota Twins baseball game. Before the end of the fourth inning these volunteers were being hustled on to buses, on their way to boot camp. It was a journey that would take them from a boyhood of baseball in the American heartland to manhood on the killing fields of Vietnam. Christy Sauro was one of the Twins Platoon, and in this book he tells what it was likeâ€"from the pomp and ceremony of induction to the all-too-real initiation by fire that would shortly follow: in mere months, he and most of the Twins Platoon were on the ground in Vietnam and promptly faced with some of the toughest fighting of the war, the Siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, including the brutal Battle for Hue. From baseball to boot camp to brutal combat, his is a firsthand story of American life being lived at the limitsâ€"and changed forever.

Was this a program that had at all the ballparks then? I think I need to read this one.