Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

Thinking about my friends in Nag’s Head, old Earl is heading that way. This little curl of a storm came around one afternoon we were there but didn’t have much to offer; I imagine things’ll be a bit different tomorrow out there.

Alright, Outer Banks, hold on to your undies, this could get weird! But remember…the sun will come up tomorrow…bet yer bottom dollar on tomorrow…dee dee dee…

I love this Springsteen tune from “Nebraska.”

New hero: Buzz Bissinger. Okay, not a hero–I barely know anything about him but he wrote “Friday Night Lights,” the book, not the tv show. Whatever. Apparently Tony LaRussa and Al Pujols went to Beck’s thing this weekend? Not cool! So Buzz has been letting it rip on his twitter thingee:

I wrote FNL not God. And every time there is a sale I don’t point to the heavens. I point to my pocketbook. Called honesty, Albert.

News flash to Albert: God doesn’t care about your home runs or your race for the Triple Crown. He has a lot on the plate right now.

Pro baseball players the least sophisticated of all pro athletes. More to right than Mussolini. Think a yarmulke is rain gear for midgets.

I will take on any right winger any day of the week. Bunch of smug self-satisfied bullies who don’t believe a fucking word they say.

Beck is an Elmer Gantry snake oil former drunk and addict con man who doesn’t believe a single fucking word of what he says. All for $$$

It goes on and on. I love this guy/nutball.

When I woke up Sunday morn and happened upon local Fox News’ airing of the Fox News Sunday program (tv was left on that channel from the Bears game the night before?) I saw a portion of the interview with Glenn Beck. Poor Mike Wallace’s son Chris was interviewing him, and I say “poor Mike Wallace” because look at what he hath spawned…but anyway, Mike’s son asked questions and Beck gave answers that spun around into little balls of nonsensical twine and then shot out again, like when he asked him whether he was losing his eyesight:

Beck goes into some long, incomprehensible word goulash recitation where he says, he realized “I’m not seeing something because I have eyes.” Essentially, at some point a doctor told him he might at some point go blind, and he laughed and said, “My mom told me that when I ran with a stick.”

Um, no, Glenn. Your mom said that if you masturbated too much you would go blind. Get it right. But really, the only thing that really struck me from the “interview” was when Beck said he was one of those guys who boozed it up heavy way back when and then at some point he stopped and replaced that addicts’ thirst the way that so many do, with some kind of extreme religious conversion. Just like our favorite ex-president, perhaps?

It used to be “never trust anyone over 30,” until that stopped being useful, so now my new motto is “never trust an ex-boozehound who filled that void with excessive Jesus.” Seriously!

A sangria, a Stella, a Trumer Pils and a…mystery draft. I was drinking the Trumer. Dunlays on the Square, summertime good times, all the time!

Well, no great Lollapalooza recap here, not like years past, only some last-minute half day Sunday coverage this time. It was difficult to be at home knowing it was going on, not because I was missing any great band that I loved (I wasn’t) but because it’s always a good time no matter what. Alas, I couldn’t stay away, and so on Sunday afternoon after the rain stopped an executive decision was made and we were there. This is some of what I saw:

“Are you hearing this shit? What year are we in?!?” Haha, I love that video. Here’s Andrew from Wolfmother. Derivative, yes, but also lots of fun, what can you do?

The National are a band I am slowly coming around to but I’m still not sure about the live show. Maybe I wasn’t sitting still long enough to feel the slow build. But I like their latest album a bit.

Win from Arcade Fire (yes, on the video screen). Really, the main reason I wanted to go. And my only real complaint was that the sound kinda sucked. Turn it up! We moved around a bit and it got better but…not sure why the headlining band sounded quieter than every other band I heard.

Also saw Erykah Badu and Cypress Hill briefly, skipped Soundgarden completely and don’t regret it.

Hit Miller’s Pub afterward for some mozzarella sticks and some nice icy cold water. Glad to not have the three-day stink on me today, but there’s still a stench thanks to the ridiculous heat. I have never–never!–complained about the weather, most especially the heat in our all-too-brief summers, but man, I am really sick of the 90s. Really. I’m hot and tired of it. The End.

Look at the positives: football season is nearly upon us.

In other positive news, Prop 8 was declared unconstitutional despite the president’s undeclared support, Kagan the alleged liberal was confirmed, and that mosque is going to be built right on top of the rubble of the World Trade Center so that the towers cannot be rebuilt. Or, that’s what they told me at the Tea Party.

What else could we do? A weekend in Denver and two Cubs games that defined their entire history, plus a whirlwind of biking, music and science.

Beautiful Coors Field, home of the Rockies, where 17 years of history has been piling up (actually 15 at Coors, 2 at Mile High). Included in that history is, of course, a World Series appearance in 2007 (they lost).

And now…more history. Yes, we were there. What a debacle, almost comical. Shattered records and pure incompetence. But Saturday’s game was worse, if you can imagine. When Derrek Lee tied the game up with a dinger in the 8th we thought redemption was at hand but of course it wasn’t as the Rockies won it with a walk-off homer in the 9th, sending half the stadium into a frenzy (the place was filled with Cubs fans). We were in right field for this game and full of hope when that ball sailed right over our heads.

So here we have a microcosm of  Cubdom: one utter shellacking and another heartbreaking soul-crusher. They followed it up with another near-miss Sunday, but we were long gone by then. As a nice bookend to it all, last night the Cubs suffered an 18-1 dismantling at home against the Brewers. Ah, football, save me now.

The rest of the weekend looked like this… The moon guided us to the Ghetto Shack food stand, where the cheeseburgers calmed our boozy stomachs.

Downtown Denver in all its glory.

And what’s a weekend of drinking and revelry without some science? Here we have two cans of Old Style, one Krausened and one not. Naturally, we conducted a taste test and concluded that 3 out of 4 participants prefer their Old Style Krausened. Um, like we didn’t know that.

Here’s old Reverend Deadeye doing his thing. I can’t remember the name of this bar…Paris-something? Anyway, the Rev belted out his sermons with conviction and healed our wounds. It all happened so fast, we were in and out in a blur, thanks again, D-town, for a good time as always.

Look, I don’t like churches any more than the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I’m against anyone building them, even when I know the b.s that’s going on inside of them. I just choose not to go in them. It’s real easy. This whole mosque-that-is-not-even-that-close-to-Ground Zero-business is ridiculous. Only really really stupid people could get worked up about–what? Huh?

“There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.”

Newt Gingrich. Ah. Yeah, that guy. Whadda dick. What’s with these right-wing nuts thinking they know what New Yorkers want? Ground Zero is not Republican-owned territory, despite what George Bush tried to do with the megaphone act. It’s a place where people from all different countries, backgrounds, religions and beliefs died. End of story.

I like what Joe Klein wrote about Newt yesterday:

Newt Gingrich is clearly running for President. How do I know? He gets dumb and angry when running for office.

Possibly. Or maybe he’s always that way and we’re just not paying attention to him all the time. It’s a good idea, though, to ignore goofs like him. Build the damn mosque, who gives a shit? Jesus Christ!

Map via Matt Yglesias’ blog.

Andrew Sullivan on “The Unwinnable War:

When one weighs the extra terror risk from remaining in Afghanistan, the absurdity of our chief alleged ally actually backing the enemy, the impossibility of an effective counter-insurgency when the government itself is corrupt and part of the problem, the brutality of the enemy in intimidating the populace in ways no civilized occupying force can counter, the passage of ten years in which any real chance at success was squandered … the logic for withdrawal to the more minimalist strategy originally favored by Obama after the election and championed by Biden thereafter seems overwhelming.

When will the president have the balls to say so?

End the war.

Ken Buck, the Colorado Tea Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, thinks birthers are dumbasses:

“Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on the camera,” Buck said to the worker while laughing. “God, what am I supposed to do?”

Haha! You better start acting crazier, Mr. Buck, or you’re gonna lose your people!

It was obvious long ago (for example, on February 26, 2010) that the GOP was going to do whatever it could to sabotage Obama’s presidency. Or, it was not going to participate in any useful way in trying to fix what Bush (and they) broke in the eight years previous. So while I appreciate Howard Dean’s sentiment here, I’m wondering where he and every other progressive has been for the past year or so.

After the year and a half this country has just been through, it is pretty obvious that the right-wing has no intention of cooperating with anyone, and that they will do anything to regain power, just as they were willing to do anything to hold on to it. The only reasonable approach is to stand up to them as you would any group of bullies. Call them out for what they do- or don’t do as the case may be.

You think? Add to this the fact, no matter what, history will lose seats for the Democrats in the mid-term elections. It’s damn-near guaranteed. It happens regardless of the success or failure of the party in power. It’s always cool to vote out the people in! So…why the ball-less approach? What’s to lose?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I can’t say that I watch this show, or any cable news show, with any regularity or really at all, but I’ve certainly seen it. And Rachel Maddow appears to be the most sensible person there is on any of the three mostly terrible networks. This segment, most importantly, kicks ass, and I highly recommend it. If only to put the myth of the Fox News ratings juggernaut into perspective.

UPDATE:

President Obama may want to watch this. Over-reacting to such a small, lunatic segment of America’s right-wing is not going to accomplish much of anything. It really is easy to ignore these folks, I do it all the time. By the way, when I say “President Obama,” what I really mean is “the White House.” I truly don’t believe that Obama himself cares so much about these things but it is obvious that there is a staff mentality that is keeping close watch on these dummies. Why, I have no idea.

Hello, old Booze Cabinet, how are you? Yep, I figured as much. Well you know how it gets around here in summer. Yeah. So anyway, here’s what I’ve seen lately:

Sunset in the Smokies

Treehouse at Buffestalo

Elvis’ car in Pigeon Forge, TN

Chicago from above

And more bridges crossed, this one near Louisville, I believe. More to come…

In the midst of serious summer madness, having set my feet on the ground in Virginia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, and now gearing up for a drive that will lead to the deepest corner of Tennessee. Dollywood, here we come! Add in a trip to Colorado at the end of this month and another to San Francisco in October and we’ll have criss-crossed the country. And there’s even a bachelor party in Vegas that I simply cannot make, which is probably a good idea anyway. Man, oh man…

And so I’ve seen a lot of animals over the course of these journeys, from dolphins and monster jellyfish to crabs and deer and tons of bugs, but then last night at home I hear a scratching in the backyard and look out to see this critter climbing over my fence. He was huge! Bigger than our cats, like a medium-sized dog, and we stared each other down until he finally climbed back into the neighbor’s yard. This is Chicago, buddy! What are you doing? Get outta here!