The Muppets: Gateway drug to all good things

I was trying to remember what the first time was that I heard the Beatles. The first album of theirs that I ever listened to was a vintage copy of the White Album that our youth pastor lent me. It started a three year period of intense Beatlemania that culminated in the trip to see Paul on the “Flowers in the Dirt” tour (that’s the one Esta alludes to here).

But that’s not time I ever heard their songs. That would have to be on the Muppets, when Dr. Teeth and Janice covered “With a Little Help From My Friends” and the acoustic cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by Sgt. Floyd Pepper (on the Lynda Carter episode). That’s what I’ll be remembering today.

Apolo-blog

Esta as usual writes a thought provoking piece this morning. I too have felt like I’ve been writing at the surface lately. It’s too easy to point to things that someone else has written, at least at the end of the semester. Well, I hope I can write some more significant things soon– right now it’s just really hard to concentrate.

Walking and Falling

I feel really good this morning. I should know better than to resist Lisa — she told me hopping on the treadmill would be just the thing to raise my energy and she was right. Funny thing happened while I was on the machine, though–just as I was wrapping up my walk, it stopped dead. I checked the plug, the switch, the safety, the wall fuse–nothing. After about half an hour and a panicking call from Lisa later (she’s really addicted to our machine), I finally realized that the fuse on the treadmill had blown. Fun, fun, fun…

Now playing

Currently playing song: “Well Well Well” by John Lennon on Plastic Ono Band. Good old John. I can always count on him to do some primal screaming for me when I can’t.

Winning past the mud

Busy this morning, but I couldn’t resist following up on an earlier entry about my friend Greg and his work on Cathy Woolard’s Atlanta campaign. He just IM’d me to say she won the runoff. Unfortunately, no thanks to Andrew Young, who weighed in at the eleventh hour with a lovely letter to the editor (sorry, timebombed link) in which he made thinly veiled accusations of the openly gay candidate’s campaign hurting “our communities, our children, and our senior citizens.”

Chilling net access to fight terrorism?

Ok, so it’s unlikely that this is a purposeful move to disenfranchise Somalis who want to communicate their plight with the rest of the world. But this is still one of the scarier headlines I’ve seen lately: US shuts down Somalia internet, says the BBC: “Somalia’s only internet company and a key telecoms business have been forced to close because the United States suspects them of terrorist links.”

Biting the feeding hand

This is one of the braver statements [WSJ, subscription required] that I’ve seen from Steve Jobs recently: “We’re baffled that a settlement imposed against Microsoft for breaking the law should allow, even encourage, them to unfairly make inroads into education — one of the few markets left where they don’t have monopoly power.”