BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH I received my site last wednesday. It’s a semi-arid town in the department of Paraguari, and its got 75 houses in it. The land has that flat, sun-seared look to it that you see driving down the interstates at the end of summer, when all the grass has turned tan-copper but the trees still are green. It’s basically one long road, very Spaghetti-Western-looking. The people there were incredibly nice and gung-ho when I met them. I was there for five days, and visited probably a third of the houses in the area. The main issues that […]
RAWK TAWK: Q&A With Glenn Mercer Of The Feelies
BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Feelies are one of those inscrutable but beloved band’s bands whose influence far exceeds their royalty statements and, as a consequence, the period on the last sentence in their bio keeps turning into a comma. Borne of the suburban garages of North Haledon, New Jersey, they released Crazy Rhythms in 1980 to massive acclaim and minimal sales and then promptly split off into a myriad of minor side projects, only to resurface again in 1986 with the altogether wonderful The Good Earth, produced by Peter Buck, guitarist for REM, whose early sound is deeply indebted to […]
TONITE: The Animal Collective Movie Comes To Town
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: At turns disturbing, confusing, disgusting, hilarious, mesmerizing and stone cold beatific, Oddsac is perhaps best explained by clarifying what it is not: it is neither a rock documentary nor a concert film, nor is it the kind of film you would see at the cineplex. There are no stars, no car chases, no dreamy romantic interests who meet cute and live happily ever after. In fact, there is no plot, no linear narrative arc. Instead, there is a series of hallucinatory vignettes: a girl attempting in vain to stanch the flow of black […]
WITHDRAWAL: Highly Respected Philly-Based Drug Abuse Expert To Leave Obama Drug Czar Post
INQUIRER: A. Thomas McLellan, the former Penn professor whose appointment last year as the top federal official on addiction treatment was widely seen as signaling a dramatic shift in drug policy, is planning to resign. “There’s no deep dark secret here – I’m just ill-suited to government work,” McLellan said in an interview with the newsletter Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Weekly. McLellan, the deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is known as a straight-talking, get-it-done kind of scientist. “I guess I could be called a ready, fire, aim kind of guy,” McLellan, 62, said in […]
THE FUTURE OF COPYRIGHT: The End Of Privacy?
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION: We’re not easily shocked by entertainment industry overreaching; unfortunately, it’s par for the course. But we were taken aback by the wish list the industry submitted in response to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator’s request for comments on the forthcoming “Joint Strategic Plan” for intellectual property enforcement. The comments submitted by various organizations provide a kind of window into how these organizations view both intellectual property and the public interest. Consider the following […] The entertainment industry thinks consumers should voluntarily install software that constantly scans our computers and identifies (and perhaps deletes) files found to be […]
Pentagon Predicts Massive Oil Shortages In 2015
THE GUARDIAN: The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact. The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel. “By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says […]
SPORTO: The State Of Our Union
BY MIKE WOLVERTON SPORTS GUY The Union had the edge in last night’s road game in Toronto until a double-flail in the 34th minute. Captain Danny Califf was red-carded, probably the silliest red card I’ve ever seen. He sent a soft backpass to goalie Chris Seitz, then tried to prevent the Toronto forward from pressuring the keeper by raising an arm to block him off. The Toronto player (de Guzman) flopped to the ground and out came the red card. The foul was elbowish (I just made that word up), and it was lazy. But there was no force behind […]
This Is What It Will Look Like When The Aliens Come
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: A large meteor blazed across the midwestern U.S. sky Wednesday night. Igniting over Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri around 10:15 p.m., local time, the fireball briefly turned night to green-tinged day and unleashed a sonic boom heard for hundreds of miles around. Based on video of the fireball, astronomer Mark Hammergren thinks the meteoroid—the space rock that causes the meteor, or fireball—may have been up to six feet (1.8 meters) wide and weighed roughly a thousand pounds (453 kilograms) or more. MORE RELATED: A hundred years after a mysterious and massive explosion struck Russia, experts are warning that […]
SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: Piggie Of The Week
Fat, Republican and fuck-the-little-guy is no way to go through four years as governor of New Jersey, son.
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
TMI: Library Of Congress To Archive Twitter
HUFFINGTON POST: The US Library of Congress announced a major new acquisition: it will be obtaining all public tweets dating back to March 2006. Appropriately, the library spilled the news on Twitter via the official Library of Congress account (@LibraryCongress). The tweet read, “Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.” The Library of Congress directed users to its blog, which explained, “important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two […]
Flash Mobs All Fun & Games Until Someone Gets Hurt
INQUIRER: A victim of Philadelphia’s March 20 flash mob, Anna Taylor was referred to in media reports only as the 27-year-old woman injured on South Street. Little was known or said about her. That will change Wednesday night, as people gather in a Frenchtown, N.J., restaurant for a benefit for Taylor, an uninsured waitress who faces $7,000 in medical and dental bills after being punched in the face by a youth still being sought by Philadelphia police. Taylor, who is separated and lives in Chalfont with a son, 9, and a daughter, 3, said she has thought a great deal […]
CONTEST: Win All The Liars Albums
Post post-punk, new New Wave, neo-No Wave — take your pick, all or any are suitable starting points for wrapping your head around the Liars’ 2001 epileptic dance party of a debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top: CB radio vocals, guitars like a chain saw falling down a flight of stairs, gonad-vibrating bass, shitastic synth squiggles and a springloaded snare drum splatter. Nine years and four albums later, the new Sisterworld continues to up the ante. Led by 6-foot-6-inch Aussie ex-pat Angus Andrew, the Liars are part and parcel of a posse […]