Tay Zonday Rains on Reporter's Questions
In an interview with MSP Magazine published in January, Tay Zonday, the deep-voiced singer whose "Chocolate Rain" became a YouTube sensation, challenges every premise of the reporter questioning him.
Q: Let's talk about the art. What percentage of your success do you attribute to the William Hung factor?
A: I don't really follow William Hung. But the blunt question is, "Do I suck, and do people laugh at me because of it?" I don't know. How does any artist know that? Why would any artist worry about that? Would you worry about that?
Review: A World of Thieves by James Carlos Blake
To get into the spirit of Pulp Guns, a game product I'm testing, I went looking for current crime novels that could've been pulps -- hard-boiled stories of murder and mayhem set in the '30s and '40s. I came pretty close in A World of Thieves, a 2002 novel by James Carlos Blake that follows a family of armed robbers across Louisiana and Texas in 1928.
Blake's novel tells the tale of Sonny LaSalle, an 18-year-old amateur boxer from New Orleans who graduates with top grades and should know better than to join uncles Buck and Russell robbing banks. He doesn't, though, and quickly ends up in Angola Prison Farm, a notorious penitentiary bordered by the Mississippi River that's guarded almost entirely by inmates. Sonny accidentally killed a cop in a Baton Rouge jail brawl -- the son of "John Bones," the state's most feared and hard-assed lawman. Bones does not take the news well.
The 296-page novel details LaSalle's extrication from prison and a subsequent crime spree across the two states as Bones relentlessly hunts him down. Blake's criminals are unapolegetic about their livelihood, making the jump from card sharps to con men to armed robbers to bank robbers. Sonny's uncles believe he's foolish for not using his education to better himself.
"We figured you'd end up doing your thieving with law books or account ledgers. Like that."
I wasn't sure if they were joking. They looked serious as preachers.
"World's full of thieves," Buck said, "but the ones to make the most money is the legal kind."
That's about as introspective as the book gets. Blake emphasizes carnage over character, leaving me dubious at one point about an act the LaSalles commit without hesitation or remorse. I didn't think they had it in them. They're in crime for money and thrills, killing only in the act of escaping jobs gone bad (another reviewer charitably describes this as "unintentional murder"). The whole novel's bloody and oversexed, with one particularly cringe-inducing crime of passion that leaves Buck nicknaming a part of his anatomy "Mr. Stump."
I loved the period details in the book: grimy hellish Texas boomtowns, Pierce-Arrow roadsters and Gladstone bags, revolvers, guns and pistols of wide make and utility. As a Texas native, I've been to several of the places in the book back when they still had a little frontier left in them. Blake covers the territory well.
A World of Thieves is crisply told, perhaps too spare in detail when it comes to the heads of its protagonists. I didn't see the ending coming -- a single-paragraph chapter that hits at the speed of a bullet.
Clinton Led Obama Among Black Voters
People who think that Geraldine Ferraro is right, and Barack Obama is the frontrunner in the Democratic race because of his race, have forgotten that Hillary Clinton led among black voters six months ago:
Sen. Hillary Clinton's lead over Sen. Barack Obama, her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, is growing among African-American voters who are registered Democrats, and particularly among black women, a poll said Wednesday.
Among black registered Democrats overall, Clinton had a 57 percent to 33 percent lead over Obama.
That's up from 53 percent for Clinton and 36 percent for Obama in a poll carried out in April.
Clinton had the support of black voters and lost it.
Adam Rogers Failed His Wisdom Check
I've read a lot of tributes to Gary Gygax, the late Dungeons & Dragons cocreator who inspired me to spend my teen years with 20-sided dice, graph paper and painted metal half-orc prestidigitators. Although I mock myself as a former dungeon master -- and not the cool kind -- I disliked Wired editor Adam Rogers' tribute to Gygax in today's New York Times.
Decades after his own adolescence, Rogers still feels defensive about playing D&D:
Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax's creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play -- two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game -- so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.
My sons are approaching the years where peer pressure is huge, and one of the things I try to teach them is that you don't have to apologize for liking something because other people think it's uncool. The safest posture as a teen is to rag on everything. When I raised the possibility that liking [insert hobby here] didn't make you a nerd, and in point of fact the people who mock it are themselves the true nerds, the near-teens in the car retreated into their happy place. And one of them called me a nerd. I suspect this is one of the things you have to learn for yourself.
Rogers needs to attach a high-minded purpose to playing a game he liked, as if sending your ninth level elven fighter thief through the Fortress of Badabaskor wasn't an accomplishment unless it was a learning experience. When he suggests that "the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order," it reminds me of journalists like Bob Costas who wax poetic on the deeper meaning of baseball, lest they be taken for rubes who just like to see grown men play with their balls.
Great Political Blog: Washington Wire
If you're looking for a political blog that isn't just a bunch of bloviating and spin, the Wall Street Journal runs the excellent Washington Wire out of DC.
As the news broke yesterday of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer paying for sex during a DC trip, Washington Wire compiled a history of sex scandals in the nation's capitol that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.
My favorite:
1976 -- Rep. Wayne L. Hayes, an Ohio Democrat and chairman of the House Administration Committee, resigned after a scandal broke involving his giving a raise to his mistress, secretary Elizabeth Ray. She later told reporters "I can't type. I can't file. I can't even answer the phone.”
She must have been good at taking dictation.
FBI File: Giuseppe Zangara's Attempt to Kill FDR
While doing some fact-checking for Pulp Guns, a set of pulp-novel sourcebooks for the GURPS roleplaying game, I found the FBI file on Giuseppe Zangara's failed attempt to assassinate Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
After Roosevelt spoke at a Miami park on Feb. 15, 1933, Zangara fired several shots with a cheap .32-caliber pistol as he was perched on a wobbly bench. He missed the president-elect but hit others, including Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who died from his wounds 19 days later.
Zangara, a 32-year-old Italian bricklayer with mental health problems driven by chronic abdominal pain, was caught and immediately confessed. He told police, "I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists." The FBI file contains a transcript of his interview by Dade County Sheriff Dan Hardie (pictured here with Zangara), which includes this exchange:
Hardie: Where did you buy pistol?
Zangara: In a store.
Hardie: What store -- where?
Zangara: On Miami avenue.
Hardie: What kind of store?
Zangara: Loan [unreadable]
Hardie: Money to loan?
Zangara: Yes.
...
Hardie: In the store where you bought the pistol -- was he a Jew?
Zangara: Yes.
Hardie: Did you tell him why you bought the pistol?
Zangara: No.
Hardie: Did he ask you why you bought it?
Zangara: No, he got the money. That's all he wanted.
Hardie: How much did you pay for it?
Zangara: Eight dollars, he said and I gave it to him.
The transcript doesn't explain the motivation for Sheriff Hardie's "was he a Jew?" question, stark prejudice that stands out in the 75-year-old document. American anti-Jewish sentiment was growing in the 1930s, led by figures as prominent as automaker Henry Ford and broadcaster Father Coughlin. I guess Hardie thought the Jews might be working with the I-talians, since there's nothing secret banking cabals want more than killing all capitalists.
Today, of course, Americans don't ensure the safety of our homeland with dogged vigilance against a worldwide conspiracy of Jews. Such suspicions are laughable and hateful.
We have a better question: Was he a Muslim?
Loading Ad Javascript with PHP
I serve ads on the Drudge Retort using Blogads, a great ad broker that occasionally has trouble serving the ads. When this happens, pages on the Retort load more slowly because they can't fetch a Javascript program and CSS stylesheet required by Blogads.
I decided to fix this problem by writing Cache Remote File, a PHP script that performs three functions:
- Save a cached copy of a remote file
- Display the cached copy for 10 minutes before requesting the file again
- Display the cached copy when the remote server is offline or slow
The script will give up trying to load the remote file after three seconds, which keeps it from hanging when the remote server is having difficulties. It can be customized to load any URL of any content type and requires PHP 4 or higher with cURL support. I've released it under the GPL. Let me know if you have any problems with it or can improve the script.
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