SHOCKING: Book Claims Roswell UFO Crash Was Actually Saucer Sent By Stalin, Piloted By Nazi Mutants

BLOOMBERG: Citing interviews with a single unnamed former engineer from government contractor EG&G — now part of URS Corp. (URS) — Jacobsen purports to lift the veil on what really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and what happened to the wreckage when it got to Nevada. The craft, she writes, wasn’t an alien spaceship, as many have since theorized, nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. military alleged in its clumsy cover story. It was, according to Jacobsen, a Nazi-inspired Soviet spy plane with Cyrillic letters embossed on the hull, crewed by malformed adolescents, two of […]

INFINITE JEST: You Are Missing Almost Everything

[Artwork via BATTLEROYALEWITHCHEEZE] NPR/MONKEY SEE BLOG: The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers. Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot. […] Of […]

All-Star Cast To Perform Big Star’s Sister Lovers Live

Big Star’s third album, Third/Sister Lovers, has long been revered by artists and critics as one of the most influential albums ever produced. Written and recorded when the legendary 70s band was primarily a studio project consisting of Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens, the third album was never been performed in public with the original string and wind orchestrations. That changed in December 2010, when an all-star band unearthed the original scores, assembled an orchestra and performed Big Star’s Third at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, NC. Performers that night included Jody Stephens (Big Star), Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Mitch Easter (Let’s […]

SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: With Your Host AP Ticker

This week, AP discusses explains how West Philly High School student Brandon Ford got invited to sit with the First Lady for the State of The Union address, the Gosnell abortion horror show, and the Onion coming to town. Also, he explains why the U.S. will not be able to indict or extradite Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and pays tribute to his old pal Don Kirshner of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert fame.

WWMTD: What Would Mark Twain Do?

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.” Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work […]

SAY IT AIN’T MO: Velvet Underground Drummer Explains Why She Joined The Tea Party

RIVERFRONT TIMES: In April 2009, WALB-TV aired a story about a Tea Party rally in nearby Tifton, Georgia. About two-and-a-half minutes into the feature, one “Maureen Tucker, Tea Party Supporter” was quoted as saying, “I’m furious about the way we’re being led toward socialism. I’m furious about the incredible waste of money, when things that we really need and are important get dropped, because there’s no money left.” Eighteen months later, the news story somehow ended up posted on YouTube, and the blogosphere started buzzing. Could this actually be Moe Tucker [pictured, bottom left], former drummer for the Velvet Underground, […]

RIP: Solomon Burke, ‘The Bishop Of Soul,’ Dead At 70

CNN: Soul singer Solomon Burke has died at the age of 70 in the Netherlands, his Dutch representative said Sunday. Burke died of natural causes after arriving at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, his family said in a statement posted on Burke’s website. He was in town to perform for a sold-out show with the Dutch band De Dijk. “This is a time of great sorrow for our entire family. We truly appreciate all of the support and well wishes from his friends and fans. Although our hearts and lives will never be the same, his love, life and music will continue […]

R. CRUMB: ‘Minds Are Made To Be Blown’

ROBERT CRUMB: So, it’s early in the year 1966. I’m 22 years old and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve just broken up with my wife Dana. She went back to Cleveland and I stayed in New York. My big career as a commercial artist was just one more cardboard cut-out dream forgotten in the dust after many heavenly trips taken on LSD. I feel like I’m back in kindergarten, it’s all new to me… I’ve been stumbling around in a delirium since I took some weird psychedelic drug… the stuff came on like normal acid… the usual […]