the 941

Coming soon to a battlefield near you: paratrooper dogs. Really. We’re not kidding, though we wish we were.

• Europeans may thrilled at the prospect of an Obama presidency, but the man himself isn’t giving much time to continental journalists.

• If they are lucky enough to still have a job, most Americans can’t afford a vacation, but Europeans are flocking to Florida.

• How will the American TV networks handle their Chinese overlords during the Olympics?

• The speculation on potential running mates for Barack Obama and John McCain continues unabated. Yes, Hillary and Mitt are still in the running.

• A Vermont librarian, all 4-foot, 10 inches of her, stood up for privacy against a large group of cops - and won.

• Want to spend a frightening afternoon on the computer. Sit down and do a search for: REX 84.

• It’s time: Send Karl Rove to jail.

• As if the bad press from the Jena 6 wasn’t bad enough, violent racism continues in Louisiana.

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The Caribbean Monk seal will soon be off the endangered species list, but only because it’s officially extinct.

• Don’t believe in God? Well, neither does this guy and he took out a billboard to prove it.

• Is Barack Obama an enlightened being?

• Is this the end of the Clinton era?

• Sign that John McCain is in trouble: Robert Novak is calling McCain talking points silly and stupid.

• McCain may be running on the ticket of the “family values” party, but what about the wife he so callously left behind?

• In the lighter side, here’s a look at some really strange festivals in Europe, including Greece’s phallus fest.

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The return of the wire hangers. Let it go, daughter dearest.

Knightley does Doolittle. Sigh. At least she’s not re-doing the Pixies album.

No comment, on any of this. Oh wait but, yeah, sorry.

Dan Rather? Really?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. [Breath]
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Clint vs. Spike: Round one

Spike vs. Clint: Counterpoint

Oh, Christ. No, really.

The headline made us giggle.

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I haven’t filled up my gas tank for weeks. Maybe in some insane way I believe that if I hold out for long enough, gas prices will drop by $2 a gallon.

Whatever the cause, my car lurched to a stop at the corner of Gulfstream Road and U.S. 41 last night, at 2 a.m. My friend Casey Anderson and I started walking north on the highway, gesturing wildly with our thumbs. A Sarasota Police officer slowed, made a face, and sped on through a yellow light.

We were ignored by many other cars. Suddenly a pickup heading south made a U-turn and pulled up. “You guys shouldn’t be walkin’ in the middle of the street,” he said. “People will think you’re crazy, or on drugs.”

“Thank you, sir,” we said. “That sounds perfectly logical.” And we hopped in.

We got to talking with the guy. He asked us where we were from, whether we believed in a Sept. 11 conspiracy. I don’t remember how it got to this point, but at one point the man remarked, “How can a stone cry out for joy unless it has some sort of consciousness?” (more…)

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• The British have sunk to a new low of political correctness by busting a teen for calling Scientology a cult.

•  If there’s a U.S. attack on Iran, the press will shoulder much of the blame.

• President Bush claims to be a great friend of Israel, but his grandfather was a friend of the Nazis.

• Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

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Especially if you’ve driven through North Central Florida or the panhandle, you’ve seen these billboards:

A while ago me and a friend, writer and current Baton Rouge Advocate photographer Casey Anderson, decided to come up with a few of our own. Our goal was a submission to McSweeney’s lists, but our list never quite got there. We revive the project here. Our ideas blow? Submit some of your own in the comments to this post.

Jesus is coming. Do you have an extra toothbrush? - God

Pervert. - God

Global warming, huh? How about a flood? - God

Come with me. She doesn’t love you anyway. - God

They’re demons, demons. Kill them all. - God

Did you like the cancer I sent you? - God.

Fat porn? C’mon. - God

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I was out on Lido Key Beach last Sunday with my friend Stephanie Garry, a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, in hopes that I could discern the secrets of her professionalism.

Instead, the insistent whine of a propeller drew our eyes to the sky. Some outraged airman was dragging a banner that read: “Atty Dan Bailey’s lies caused 21 yr old ‘pilot’ to ‘die’ – now Judge Logan tries to cover it up.”

“That sounds like a story,” Stephanie announced. “You should get on it.”

We’re at the beach, I thought to myself. “What I want to know,” I said, “is why did they put the word ‘die’ in quotation marks?”

“Maybe it’s like a Terri Schiavo thing,” Stephanie said.

“Or maybe,” I said, “this quote-unquote ‘pilot’ never actually dies. Maybe every time he’s killed, he rises again, five hundred years later, to feed.”

“How do you know the pilot is a ‘he’?” seethed Stephanie, who interviewed Gloria Steinem last month.

“OK. Well maybe this person put ‘die’ in quotes because this person wants to emphasize that the mortal ego is a myth, and we’re all just fluctuations of the eternal energy of the universe from which these our current bodies have grown out.”

“And the ‘pilot,’” said Stephanie. “Was she actually just delusional? Someone who would sit in an office chair for four hours, holding an imaginary joystick, and then get up and pretend she was in Seattle?”

It was a grammar mystery, and there was a good chance that it belonged on the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. Stephanie plans to send in her photo.

Feel free to comment below with your own testimony of absurd quotation-mark usage. The winner gets [We can’t offer them anything illegal or magical. — Ed.]

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riends, countrymen: Of feta and crosses I sing.
I sing of honor and religion, and a special, special blessing, and many long processions and too much Greek dancing, and of 15,000 people who gathered in Tarpon on a late Sunday morning.
In Tarpon they watched as 59 brothers all dove together, for that special blessing, from His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, a coveted honor.
In Tarpon they watched as one man-child found the cross, the cross of wood and metal, cast into the Spring Bayou, for he was the Chosen, who deserved the Jesus blessing, and they knew he was a hero, because he found the cross faster, and declared him their victor.
And so I sing of victory, which looks something like this:

Dashing, ain’t he? Introducing 18-year-old Chris Kavouklis, senior at Tampa’s Jesuit High and retriever of the 2008 Epiphany cross.
I’ll spare you another round of dactylic epic verse — they’re as exhausting now as they were in high school Latin class! — to say in plain prose that this weekend, I hit the mother lode of quirky cultural events.

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For the second installment of my now-two-part series, Road Trip Concerts Featuring Bands Signed to Merge Records (catch episode one here), I visited Orlando with my wife, Rachel, to catch Spoon this past Friday. The concert, held at Club Firestone, was part of the Orlando Weekly’s Anti-Pop Music Festival 2007 and surely served as the event’s climax, even though the party continued all through Saturday night.

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After the house lights went down, the first voice we heard was that of a televangelist, a pudgy white woman, her image projected on elevated round panels set up on the concert stage. She stalked back and forth from behind a pulpit, whipping her homebound faithful into a frenzy. As the televised preistess hammered home her message, direct from God, The Arcade Fire walked onstage, and 3,600 fans promptly went ape-shit.

The band was playing the third in a three-night stretch of gigs at The Chicago Theatre, all of them sold out well in advance, and, maybe playing up to the ornate and elegant venue, the group went all-out with the visuals. The bright lines of the cover of Neon Bible were projected on a huge curtain in the background of the stage. Six neon bars rose from the front of the stage. And the instruments. No other band could possibly need as many to perform: A drum kit, a bass, guitars acoustic and electric, a French horn, a baritone, a hurdy gurdy, keyboards, a second drum kit, a freaking church organ.

The 10 members assumed their positions, although they didn’t remain fixed for very long. My wife Rachel and I had caught The Arcade Fire in concert before, at the 2005 Lollapalooza (oddly enough in this very same Chicago), and one of the joys of that hour was the constant movement. Band members dance like crazy, scream along to lead singer Win Butler even when there’s no mic nearby and toss instruments high above their heads, exuding on a nightly basis a passion, a commitment, a self-belief few rock bands — indie or otherwise — could ever summon once. See this band in action, and running a clip of a hyped-up televangelist as an intro suddenly makes a lot of sense.

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