Some Monday odds and ends.

The Good: As we were leaving San Francisco last week, we met this lovely woman, Amanda. Amanda is a ballet dancer and had just come from a successful audition. Amanda's husband, Jose, is a Navy corpsman serving in Afghanistan. When I meet young people like Amanda, it makes me think this country's going to be all right.

I've posted before about how the two cultures, the arts and the military, seem to be growing farther and farther apart, but here's a young family where these two live both to the fullest. Hoo-uh.

The Bad: This is Carly Fiorina, John McCain's senior economic advisor. I caught her on TV this morning laying out McCain's well-considered, nuanced economic plan. Are you ready?

Cut taxes. That's right, it's the George W. Bush Patented Panacea for All Ills Economic.

Budget surplus? Cut. Budget deficit? Cut. High gas prices? Cut. People being laid off? Just cut the capital gains tax. That oughtta fix things right up.

And Ms. Fiorina knows a thing or two about being canned. Hewlett-Packard let her go after some of her ideas resulted in a few thousand people being laid off and, the ultimate sin for any CEO, lower stock prices. The poor woman, after her failure, was forced to walk away with a paltry 21 million in severance.

This is the woman John McCain sent out to sell an old sack of bullshit as premium fertilizer. I wish her luck.

The Ugly. I saw this bumper sticker on a van with Florida tags today. The van was being driven by an angry old man who cut a guy off, nearly causing an accident. When the aggrieved driver honked, the old man gave him the finger and then proceeded, as Florida law demands, to drive in the left lane with his blinker on. No, I am not making that up. What an asshole.

As a side note, I'm writing an article about tattoo removal and I'm looking for stories. Anyone?

Friday cookie update.

Good grief, Columbus.

Sue, the woman in fits of unbridled glee over last week's gi-normous cookie, sent in this photo from Ohio, showing just what a deficient state Ohio is, cookie-wise.

Another reason to flee the Buckeye State.

How people live there is a mystery.

Welcome to The Rock.

On a fog-shrouded Tuesday morning, Jenny and I boarded a ferry for Alcatraz. A crooked judge gave us a Valentine (a short bit in con speak), and we expected to be free and back in San Francisco by lunch.

This was our first view of the prison. That is what's left of the warden's house. Yeah, cry me a river, Warden.

The long walk up to the cellblock was equally welcoming.

Finally, we looked up at the Graybar Hotel, a vacation stop for guests like Capone, Machine Gun Kelly and Robert "Birdman" Stroud. Here's a typical guest suite.

Note the sumptuous in-room work space, the comfy bed and, hidden discreetly behind the mattress, the private bathroom facilities.

This is C-D Street with access to the community library on your left. I looked for Safe and Sound, but it had apparently been checked out by some guy named Creepy Karpis. I guess he wanted a good thriller to take to the beach.

It was overdue.

This is Broadway, looking west toward Times Square. Beneath the clock is the hotel's restaurant, where the last meal served included steamed wheat and scrambled eggs.

This is the yard, where men played ball and bridge and occasionally shanked a rat, just to keep things honest.

The screws' entrance.

As we leave, the guards wave good-bye and hope to see us again, real soon.

Exhausted, Jenny and I take a nap.

San Francisco - Day 3

Ignoring a cold I'd picked up in evil San Francisco, we rented a car and drove north,

through Marin County and up into Napa, then followed the navigator through winding back roads to the coast, where we, like Balboa, discovered the Pacific.

It was a great trip.

Take a good look at that map up there. See how windy the coastal road looks? Well, that isn't half of it. I wore my arms out while Jenny got the view. That's what husbands are for.

To end the day, we got on the cable car. Got off at the bottom of Lombard on Columbus and walked, yes walked, up Lombard and were rewarded with this view.

Next, The Planet goes to prison!

We interrupt this travelogue for an important message from our sponsor.

Twelve Cents Shy will be appearing at Papa Mojo's, the fabulous Cajun venue for good food and good music this Saturday night.

Papa Mojo's is Mel Melton's new hot spot in Durham. Mel is a consummate Cajun chef and one hell of a hot harp player, the front man of the Wicked Mojos for years and one of my favorite bands anywhere.

The last time I saw Mel play, I was at the Cape Fear Crime Festival, happy to be there, but sorry I was going to miss Mel's CD party that Saturday in Hillsborough. As I was tooling toward the beach I looked up and saw on a bar's marquee, Mel Melton and the Wicked Mojos!

That night I went to hear a set of wicked blues with my friends, The Mr. and Mrs. Dusty Rhoades.

More on Mr. Rhoades later as I hear he's got some news.

If you're in town, please come out and hear the band. We would love to play Mel's place again and the more people who show up, the more likely he is to ask us back.

Snapshots from the edge - Day 2: Welcome to Oakland

This is my nephew's radio, or lack thereof. He assures me it took six months of leaving the car, unlocked, in a civic-iffy spot, before the local skateboarders copped it, and it's proaby unfair of me to start my post about Oakland with a cheap joke about crime.

But hey, if you're here, you know that cheap jokes are what the Planet's all about.

I live in Durham, a town maliciously maligned by its white bread neighbors, and here I am heaping bad PR on a beautiful spot. I should be ashamed.

Again, regular readers will recognize that I am not.



This is my nephew, Kenny. He gave us the grand tour of Oakland and neighboring Berkeley and we were joyful tourists. We had brunch at his restaurant, T-Rex (plug plug)and then went on to the Oakland Museum to see the exhibit, The Birth of the Cool.



And it was indeed coolness to a degree rarely achieved by any museum, anywhere. But back to Oakland. Here they can put their politics on a marquee, politics that those of us in North Carolina can only whisper. Gasp.

As usual, I met some people.


This is Ellen and Lynnette. Lynette has books in her head that she wants to shake free, so she asked me, me of the 3 year block, for advice. Probably not a good idea. Ellen has written a cookbook she sells out of her B&B. Her B&B is close to the Shakespeare Festival, so it has to be good.


This young lady was waiting for a BART train and I had to take her picture. Her name is Ref Wiggum, and she's a Bay City Roller Girl. I took this picture for Riva Derci, our own Tai-Cheetah. Hoo-uh.


Finally, the day ended at John's Grill, back in San Francisco. John's is best known as the favorite spot of Dashiell Hammett, a guy you might have heard of who wrote a book you might have read.

So it all comes full circle.

And that, my friend, is cool.

Snapshots from the edge - Day 1

Jenny and I had an interesting trip. We missed two planes, caught a standby in Chicago, and our luggage went on a brief tour before joining us later in our hotel. All in all, not awful, considering the tragic state of air travel. It reminds us that the words travel and travail have the same origin.

The first thing we discovered was the wisdom of Twain 's observation that the coldest winter he'd ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. The high was 51. The low was 50. Today is the first day of June. Where are we, on the moon?

We spent much of the day yesterday in North Beach, walking from Washington Square up Columbus. For all those Americans freaked out about Mexicans, they should take a stroll through this neighborhood. In the space of 6 or 7 blocks, we heard Italian, Mandarin, Vietnamese and a babel of tourist languages. Lou Dobbs' head would explode.

We ended our walk at the intersection of Columbus and Broadway at City Lights Books where by turning in one spot you not only see Ferlinghetti's famous independent book store but


the place where Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity in 1961 and where

Mort Sahl made reading the paper and riffing on the headlines hip.

Lenny Bruce once said he was going to change all the papers within six blocks of Sahl's hotel so that Mort would begin his act with, "How about that Hindenbergh?"

We had lunch in Chinatown in a little place that was pleasantly loud with women and children and I had a great bowl of noodle soup. Jenny ordered a BLT and asked if it came with mayonnaise and the waitress smiled and pointed to the menu. It did come with mayonnaise. This is America, after all.

(But why Jenny ordered a BLT in Chinatown is a mystery.)

This is the window of the place where an indoor sign proclaimed "The Magic of Cakes!" Notice the T-Rex.

Now that's a cake. Tomorrow, we'll see some of the people we're meeting. A little late in the trip I thought it would be nice to have some of their faces. It's a shame I'm too late to show you Claire and Tracy, two girls from Ireland on a two-month adventure in America. They were beautiful and those accents will make any American boy melt.

Bob and Carol from Kansas City (I was tempted to introduce us as Ted and Alice, but thought better of it) who hesitantly opened the topic of politics and, once they found we were kindred souls, jumped in with both left feet.

I also missed Debra and Steve at Blues and Biscuits, the folks from Huntington Beach we met at dinner, and John at the Beat Museum.

A guy whose named I missed played a recording of Jack Kerouac reading one of my favorite pieces, October in the Railroad Earth over Steve Allen's meandering jazz piano. As I was listening, I was surprised to hear the same rhythms I hear in Chandler and it blew me away. I'd never put those two writers together, but there it was. The words were different but the melody was very much the same. It made me appreciate the cultural cultural stew we all swim in with a new ear. What a treat.

I'm seeing connections all over the damn place. More tomorrow.

Walking off the edge of the continent.

Jenny and I are off to San Francisco. I'll post photos of our adventures.

And on my other right, completely opaque humor.

OK, I'm a liberal, and therefore, a target of the drunk who draws this strip, but I don't get this. I usually read Mallard Fillmore, understand what point he's trying to make and then go on to wonder when and where this cartoonist suffered his head wound, but this time I am completely flummoxed.

I take a back seat to no one when it comes to making sport of regional idioms, but the comedy here alludes me. Is it a liberal thing to go out for a coffee? If I drink coffee, as I do, does that mean I support health care run by insurance lampreys?

Really, this strip makes no sense. It's rarely, if ever, funny, but I can usually suss out whatever simplistic right wing talking point it's trying to make. This one, however, seems particularly obscure.

Does the use of an article mark one a Marxist? Does the omission make one slap a magnetic ribbon on the SUV and vote for the guy who pushes Creationism in schools?

Help me, friends. What the hell does this thing mean?

More Caca de Vaca from the Right Wing

I know I should just let these things go, but I've noticed that my tolerance for bullshit has hit an all-time low. Maybe it's the political season, maybe it's the war, or maybe it's just the fallout of 30 years of daily cow flop from assholes like Rush Limbaugh, a man who assumes everyone is as stupid as his listeners.

Recently, a man who should know better passed along one of the most virulent and obviously bone-headed canards of the war. He said that last year, more people were murdered in Detroit than soldiers killed in Iraq.

This gross and pointless apologia for the war has been around in different forms for quite a while. But they all have one thing in common - they assume you're an idiot.

It doesn't take more than a few minutes with Google to learn that last year, 418 people were murdered in Detroit and 899 soldiers were killed in Iraq.

That's right. But just being wrong isn't what gets under my skin. I'm wrong about a lot of things, just ask my wife. No, what chaps my hide, is the utter bullshit behind such a claim.

Even if the numbers were the same, we're talking about a difference between 150,000 soldiers vs 900,000 citizens. And no, we can't count Iraqi civilian deaths, and we can't talk about serious American casualties, which are in the tens of thousands. No, because then this completely bullshit comparison would be so odorous that not even Rush's listeners would be suckers enough to buy it.

But buy it they do, and they pass it along in emails and casual conversations, and they pass it along with a smug superiority, grasping at any reed, no matter how slender, that would make this war look OK and make their vote for Bush defensible.

Bullshit. It's what's for dinner.

And I'm not having any of it.

I don't know about you, but I need a cookie.

This is Sue with a cookie the size of a manhole cover. This makes me happy.

Hot Monkey Love.

A few weeks ago, I went up to Asheville. This used to be a colorful little college town, with happy stoners, crunchy new age mountain types, a little old money lured by the Grove Park Inn and tourists visiting the Biltmore or peeping the leaves.

This is where Zelda Fitzgerald burned to death in the Highland Mental Hospital and the city Thomas Wolfe called home, as in that place you can't go.


But in the past few years, Asheville has seen rising real estate prices, an influx of Republican-style money and the iffy influence of trustfundsters trolling for a little coed affection.


So how, you might ask, does hot monkey love, other than a cheap ploy to boost my Google hits, come into this? It's about the sock monkies, my friend.

One of the art galleries in Asheville had several on display among the more traditional forms of sculptures and watercolors and none of the monkies were quite as, uh, artistic as some of the examples you see here.

I don't mean to be a snob about this, but sock monkies are not art. Not in their natural state, they're not. If they were, my grandmother was a damn sock monkey Picasso.

No. We should not go down this road. Ou culture demands that we take a stand. Thomas Kincade is illuminated crap, Garrison Keillor can't sing and sock monkies are not art.

One must have standards.

My forgotten book.

Patti Abbott has asked a bunch of relatively irresponsible writers, myself included, to talk about a forgotten book, one you might have overlooked.

For me, that book is Cruddy, by the cartoonist Lynda Barry.

The story is Roberta Rohbeson's, a 16-year-old who writes a letter to Jesus and tells him to "Have a good summer and stay Crazy." The story takes place a few years after a motel massacre where Roberta has been found, covered in blood, wandering the desert.

This is a dark place Barry takes us to and based on this book alone, I would have Barry's children. Pick it up.

Hillary gets the cracker vote!

According to the exit polls, West Virginia's voters revealed that they are the most racist in the country. Fully 20% of the white voters reported that race was a factor, and they voted for Clinton 84-10 over Obama.

Yes, that's where I went to school. I'm so proud.

Bush makes the ultimate war sacrifice.

I think I'm on record saying that Americans haven't been asked to sacrifice anything for this war, but I now stand corrected. No less a man than our Commander in Chief has made a great sacrifice for the cause.

He's given up golf.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," Bush said.

And this morning, CNN spent a good eight minutes covering this important story.

Senator Clinton and her supporters.

Sunday, Frank Rich wrote a column called, Party Like it's 2008, that unequivocally says the Clinton race is toast.

Au contraire, the Clintonistas say. Rich, unlike the cowards Kristol and Brooks, allows comments on his column and here's one from Dan in Virginia Beach.

"Rich overlooked the growing resentment by "uneducated whites", or "low income whites",(read crackers), or people in general, at the lemming like hubris, viciousness and racist attacks by the Obama fanatics on Senator clinton and her supporters. Granted it isn't easy promoting a person with no resume, questionable ethics, shady unpatriotic associates, and a wife with an uncontrollable mouth."

I understand Hillary's supporters are angry. Just last year she was considered inevitable, just waiting for her coronation as our country's first female president. This was history, and many women thought it was about damn time.

Then this golden speaker from Illinois rose up and put the electoral kibosh to Hillary's ascension. Women (mostly) are angry. They feel cheated of their historic moment by an upstart, an inexperienced newcomer who hasn't waited his turn, who elbowed his way to the front of the line and is coasting to the nomination on little more than his charm and a shoeshine.

So we get this from observer, somewhere in the u.s., complete with ee cummings' disdain for capital letters:

"frank rich is another rush limbaugh any american serious about the country's future should have voted for hillary in the primaries she is smart, intelligent, pragmatic and the best bet for an america that is peaceful, prosperous and the true world leader"

In response, Hillary has tried everything, from her "as far as I know" moment on 60 Minutes, to kvetching long and hard about how unfair the media's been to her. No one, not her or her supporters have considered that maybe it was the way she ran her campaign that turned away voters, that maybe people are tired of the Rovian innuendo and slur she's tossed at Obama.

I don't know. I do think it's time for a woman to be president. Just not this woman. Hey, if Tina Fey were running, I'd vote for her in a skinny minute. But Hillary? Forgive me, but I just don't want another 4 to 8 years of the Clinton soap opera.

And we've already had 8 years of a president who felt entitled to the office. I want a change.

Now we have Hillary and her supporters warning Democrats that she should get the nomination because there are so many bigots who will never vote for a black man. Now, there's a forward-thinking, progressive argument for her vote.

I went to school in West Virginia and if any of my old friends are reading this today, I urge you to vote for Obama. Let's put an end to this, OK?

I'm tired.

Sitting in with the band.

Twelve Cents Shy isn't playing this weekend, but that doesn't mean your humble narrator will be staying home Saturday night.

Nope. I've been invited to sit in with The Monarchs, one of my fave bands. It should be a great night. If you're in the vicinity of Mebane, check out The Stumblin' Pig (no, that's not an ex-girlfriend) and as always, I'll buy you a beer.

Show starts about 9:30.

When you're running with the ball...

...and the opposing team is cheering, perhaps you're running the wrong way.

As Hillary garners more enthusiastic support from people like Richard Mellon Scaife, the bat-shit crazy right wing kajillionaire from Pittsburgh, she might give some thought as to why.

Rush, Fox News and Bill O'Reilly are doing what they can to spark Hillary's campaign against Obama and, forgive me for being suspicious, but I don't think they're doing it out of any love of country. And given their behavior during the 90's, they're certainly not doing it out of any new-found love of the Clintons.

A suggestion for bloggers everywhere.

Never search Google images for "dentist" or "teeth" before your next appointment.

Yesterday I bit into what I assumed was a safe lunch (Jamaican jerk tilapia) and broke a molar. So tomorrow at 8:00, I have an emergency appointment for extreme pain. Joy.

Other than that, the weekend was great. The gig went well, I slept all day Saturday and on Sunday, Molly and I canvassed a city precinct for Obama. Molly is 27 and this is the first time she's ever expressed any interest in politics. I'm not sure I'm being a responsible father by encouraging her. God knows politics has not been a healthy avocation of mine.

But tomorrow is primary day here in North Carolina. If you live here or in Indiana, please vote.

You know who to vote for. He's the guy who's not feeding you a big bowl of bullshit.

The beaver and the bottle of vodka.

What? It's in the news!

Twelve Cents Shy Live Tonight In Carrboro!

That's right, Twelve Cents Shy is playing at a place called Crawdaddy's in Carrboro tonight at 10:00.

Tim Collins, our guitar player, is out of town so Chris Berry, six-string virtuoso of the Piedmont Sheiks is stepping in. Jeff Learman, our keyboard player and apprentice diva, is also out of town, which is OK since I've heard Crawdaddy's is so small that Jeff would have to put his amp in the parking lot. We'll see.

A new lineup always shakes things loose, a good thing for the blues if you ask me. It should be fun. If you're in town, come on out and I'll buy you a beer.