An "Unplanned Take Dose"

A friend forwarded me this - obviously an English story mechanically translated into a foreign language then mechanically translated back. The result is accidental dada poetry, made finer by the celebrity subject matter:

Lindsay Lohan‘’s incommunicative has revealed that her famous girl was dating Heath Ledger when he died.

Dina claimed that the ‘Mean Girls’ grapheme and the ‘Dark Knight’ grapheme were in a relation at the instance of his unplanned take dose in Jan 2008.

In a leaked sound call between Dina and her ex-husband, she has said that playwright never genuinely recovered after the Joker actor’s death.




“Lindsay was dating Heath when he died. I don”t undergo if you undergo that, but I undergo ”cause I would modify her soured and they were friends very, rattling close, ok?” The Sun quoted Dina as informing archangel in the sound tape.

In the conversation, which was transcribed in 2008, Dina attributes some of Lindsay’’s individualized problems to Heath’’s passing.

She also feared her girl haw modify up feat the aforementioned artefact cod to ingest and medication take addictions.

“When she’’s inebriate or takes an Adderall with it she module do something same Heath Ledger did in a ordinal without thinking. His modification f***ed her up,” the Sun quoted her as locution on the phone.

Blowing in the Wind

After Katrina, New Orleanians were castigated as a bunch of slackjaws who didn't know enough to get out of the way of a hurricane coming straight at them. It was as if hurricanes are just like warm fronts and rain bands, and that once set in motion, they'll go in the predicted direction until they run out of United States and do whatever they do in the Atlantic. But hurricanes aren't that predictable, as Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Mild Breeze Ida illustrated yesterday. Despite predictions of 70 percent chance of rain all day, it barely sprinkled.

What critics also failed to account for is the cost of dealing with a storm. Hurricane Gustav was small "D" devastating to the region last year because the mass evacuation meant a whole city went on a forced vacation and people had to spend money earmarked for such frivolities as bills and groceries on evacuation. When they returned, they came back to businesses that had gone a week without cash flow and struggled to make payroll. Gustav sent a shiver through the South Louisiana economy that took a few months to work off last year, and even Ida's weak miss affected a lot of lives as many working parents suddenly had to figure out what to do with their children yesterday when many schools pre-emptively closed.

Bottom line: As always, what seems simple is rarely simple.

A Simple Question

Friday night at the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans, hip-hop group the Knux played on one of the side stages. Unfortunately, the rains earlier in the day created a 10-foot-wide mud mote around the stage that fans had to brave to see the band. That and the rapidly cooling night kept the crowd down, but it didn't stop the hype man for the Knux from trying desperately to get a "KNUX! KNUX! KNUX!" chant going. When it didn't work, he badgered the crowd and tried again, then repeated the process until I walked away, tired of being yelled at. I feel for the group because Krispy and Al are from here, but because they got their act together out of town, they have little following here. Still, what's more likely to move a crowd - a hype man yelling at the audience, or playing something funky?

On Rob Walker's Territory

Rob Walker's NO Notes chronicles all things "St. James Infirmary." I'm going to let Rob breakdown Clint Maedgen's re-write of the lyrics to SJI in the new version by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in this version; I can wrangle the referential end of things. I've admired the Hall's efforts to remain true to traditional jazz without being bound to antiquity. The recent New Orleans Preseration, Vol. 1 sounds perfectly true to the Hall tradition, and it's not until you stop and think about it that you realize that the vocalists are 40-ish and under, and that this incarnation has expanded the repertoire to include R&B, Mardi Gras Indian music and more. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the Hall chose to do video for "St. James Infirmary" in imitation of the Fleischer brothers' cartoons from the 1920s and '30s.

In the spirit of conflating time frames, the cartoon includes members from at least three generations of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (that I recognize) - Sweet Emma Barrett on piano, John Brunious on trumpet, and Ben Jaffe and Maedgen from the current band on tuba and vocals respectively. I don't recognize the drummer's caricature, and in a salute to the song's remixer, Philly DJ King Britt is included on the turntables. Though they provide the music, the video's narrative follows two characters from the New Orleans Bingo! Show, a theatrical concert/game founded by Maedgen that came into the Hall family when he started singing with the group. In the cartoon, Ronnie Numbers and Mr. the Turk are on the run from the cops - who isn't in cartoons? - in pursue of lost love, and visit the decrepit Pontchartrain Park amusement park - one that no longer exists in any form, much less the half-broken down one depicted. Cartoon logic explains a lot of what happens, but when the cartoon's finished, a lot of subtle transformations have happened. In the animated world, real people alive and dead met fictional characters to play a new version of a traditional jazz song that's heard not as it was played but as it was remixed to illustrate a version of the city that never was. Few things capture the spirit of play that is central to New Orleans better than that.

Trading Down

I can understand how a band name like Starfucker happens (it seems so cool and underground when no one's paying attention), and I can understand how such a band finds a following (fans get to feel cool and subversive talking about one of their favorite bands), and I understand how such a band decides it needs a name change (they can't say it on the radio or in the paper). But how does someone go from that to Pyramid? Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune were taken?

No Escape

There's nothing quite like the right wing vitriol that accompanies Christian, white middle-aged males discovering that other voices count too. Any diminution of the remarkably wide sphere of influence they're used to is greeted as if it were part of a plot to dig a big hole and bury them all alive. Unfortunately, there's also no escape from that hostility, most of it directed toward President Obama. Today in my Google alert for Christmas music - an obsession - I found that the War Cry of the Wounded Conservative naturally extends to discussions of Christmas music.

Press Release Gold

This was accompanied by the message from the publicist: "Your audience might love this story" - "might" being the operative word.

Do Near-Death Experiences Alter the Brain?

Author Says It Definitely Changed Him Forever



Woodland Hills, CA, September 29, 2009 – After he drank a cobra venom cocktail to simulate death, Jamshid Hosseini knew his worldview was forever transformed, but he also believes his brain was physically altered – rewired into something different.


The experience led him to create a spiritual “roadmap to bliss” that he and co-author Dave Cunningham detail in their critically acclaimed self-help book, Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace (O-Books, John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.).


“Why did my whole life and direction change after that? I know that my near-death experience gave me peek at the eternal Oneness,” Hosseini said, “but I also feel that my brain actually changed. I’ve been doing a lot of study on this.”


So has Dr. Willoughby Britton, Research Associate in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University Medical School. She studied the brainwaves of people who have had near-death experiences and found evidence their brainwave patterns differ from those who haven’t had a brush with death. The near-death patients showed a distinct spike in activity in the left temporal lobe.


The brain’s left temporal lobe has been linked to feelings of peace and tranquility. Dr. Britton said the temporal lobe is sometimes called the God module, the part of the brain that connects with the transcendent.


During a spiritual quest that included studies of Baha’i Faith, Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, Hosseini followed a monk in India who asked a select few disciples to drink a concoction of tea, honey and milk laced with cobra venom. The idea was that experiencing near-death would free one of our most primal fear.


For Hosseini, at least, it worked. His life, philosophy, and perhaps even his brain were changed forever. Cunningham, an award-winning journalist, novelist and screenwriter, spent over a year interviewing Hosseini and researching how his new look on life – born of a near-death epiphany – was supported by current thought in the fields of science, philosophy and religion.


Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace is not aligned with any particular religion, and its precepts don’t clash with any of the world’s major faiths. The book includes a roundtable discussion between Hosseini, a scientist, a philosopher and a theologian.


During his worldwide journey, Jamshid “Jim” Hosseini lived on a hill overlooking a king’s palace in Iran, was beaten by Muslims for practicing the Baha’i Faith, begged for food in India, and labored for a monk in Katmandu. He took counsel from the famous Rajneesh in Pune and built his own successful business in California.