perfidy

Symptoms to look out for:

• You're a cab driver
• You work in Beverly Hills, CA
• You get a fare to Chapel Hill, NC
• You decide to take it

Witness:

Cabbie says he was stiffed on $8,200

Fri Mar 30, 9:19 PM ET

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - A taxi driver told police he was stiffed on an $8,200 cross-country fare by a female passenger he shuttled from Beverly Hills, Calif. to North Carolina.

The meter in Levon Mikayelyan's taxi cab hit the staggering fare after a 2,600-mile journey that ended at a Holiday Inn in Chapel Hill. Mikayelyan said the rider's family paid him only $800, Chapel Hill police spokeswoman Jane Cousins said Friday.

"We do get reports of people who are not able to pay cab drivers, but certainly not with this amount," Cousins said.
{...}

So Cousins is saying not all cabbies are this stupid? Good - it's been my general experience that they're not, though they can be a thieving lot, depending on the city you're in.

They're often apparent refugees of Austin Powers' least favorite group:

Carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know. Smell like cabbage. Small hands.

But they're not often this stupid.

Holy Latent Homosexuality Batman! I forget where I got this. Maybe Rocket Jones. Maybe Llama Butchers. Maybe somebody else altogether. But regardless, it is awe inspiring.

Go see Joker's Boner, and many other horrifying comics.

Minnesota has already had its turn in the barrel, and it's far enough in the past (Aug 2006) that simply appending this item to it would consign the appendage to obscurity, and spare the Gopher State the additional ridicule that it so richly deserves.

So, Minnesota gets to be our first multi-part state smackdown recipient, all for a single news story from today:

Minn. lawmaker lobbies for Tilt-A-Whirl

Fri Mar 30, 5:38 AM ET

ST. PAUL - State Rep. Patti Fritz, DFL-Faribault, has introduced a bill designating the Tilt-A-Whirl the official amusement ride in Minnesota.

Fritz said she's taking up the cause of 52 kindergarten students from her district who say it deserves special attention because it was invented in their town.

"I represent children too," Fritz said, adding, "Minnesotans like to have fun, and it's a fun thing to do."

The Tilt-A-Whirl is a platform-type ride consisting of seven freely spinning cars holding up to four riders apiece.

Herbert Sellner invented it in 1926 and the first one debuted at the Minnesota State Fair a year later. Sellner Manufacturing in Faribault still makes it.

Minnesota already has a state muffin (blueberry), a state gemstone (the Lake Superior agate), a state drink (milk), a state butterfly (monarch) and seven other official symbols.

Sorry - it's short, so I just included it all. Well, that, plus it's a Yahoo story, so it'll eventually disappear from the web on its own if I don't snatch it. Can't have the Ministry archives filled with dead links, now can we? Of course, the story itself is a bit short on important details, such as surprise vomiting attacks suffered by tilt-a-whirlers and indirectly by those to their left and right.

Another thought occurs to me, now that I've gone to all the trouble to lift that entire news story - we could just start another semi-regular series here at the Ministry, one devoted to ridiculing individual legislators also richly in need of such ridicule. The potential downside, of course, is that given the size of the list of valid editorial targets, we're woefully understaffed for such an enterprise.

Ohio, place of my birth. I love Ohio, really. I miss it, but not enough to go back on more than a temporary basis. Despite its virtues, Ohio is nevertheless easy to ridicule. It had a bad time there for a bit, and hasn't really recovered. So let's not make it any easier:

• Ohio: Pretty Much Over The Top In Suck
• Ohio - Almost As Thrilling As It Sounds
• The buckeye isn't the only thing with one eye
• It's more than just "hello" in Japanese.
• With an omnipotent universal supreme being of undetermined gender which may or may not exist, all things are technically possible!
• With God, all things except keeping our state motto are possible
• Safe for undergraduates since 1972
• At Least We're Not Michigan
• Ohio - The Fascinating Meat In a Indiana-Pennsylvania Sandwich
• Redefining "Average" for a new millennium
• We didn't know he'd grow up to be Marilyn Manson
• Stupid is the New Smart
• Hey, At Least Our Cows Are Sane
• Ohio - Shoddily Made Buckle of The Rust Belt
• Gateway to Hoosier Land
• Where the not-quite East meets the almost-Midwest
• We ruined it for everyone
• You Don't Have To Be Southern To Be a Frightening Hillbilly
• We know all about illegal immigrants. Ask us about Parma
• New Ohio! This next one will be dynamite, huge. You’ll see
• The Thingamabob State
• The Real Birthplace of Aviation, not those Lamers in NC
• Come on, the River Hasn't caught fire in almost a half Century
• The outstretched eastward facing phallus of the Midwest
• Rocky beaches, no riptide
• We have the worst medium-sized cities in the country
• Surf the North Coast!
• You'd think the home of Rock and Roll would be more… exciting
• We were prosperous, once
• You say "White Bread" like it's a bad thing
• Can you believe we almost fought a war to get Toledo?
• Best fucking Roller Coasters in the universe, baby
• I'll show you a Buckeye, Mister!
• No. That's not a satanic symbol. They're just stars for each of the 13 colonies!
• Ohio: Where one of your dad's friends lives
• We're actually quite lame, but you smell what I'm stepping in here
• Birthplace of seven Presidents, one of whom didn't even suck
• Go Indians... and take the Browns with you!
• Drew Carey doesn't even live here anymore
• Three yards and a cloud of dust
• Ohio, birthplace of the Drunkest, Fattest, Short-termiest, and Most Corrupt Presidents
• Rubber capital of the world. Like the tires, you pervert
• Ohio Thanks You For Your Pity
• Birthplace of the Hot Dog
• The Taft family started out fat and went downhill from there
• Birthplace of Three of the Five Greatest American Generals
• With God, All Things Are Possible -- and a little hush money to the governor doesn't hurt, either
• Don't Judge Us by Cleveland
• Hey, just stick with it. If plate tectonics holds up, someday we'll be in New Zealand
• Ohio: lots of nice, and largely dull, people.
• Tourism just hasn't been the same since 'WKRP in Cincinnati' was cancelled
• Don't Judge Us Until You See Indiana
• Tell West Virginia to move back to West Virginia
• A Good State
• Ohio: a Mohawk term meaning 'filthy, yet stupid'
• As Close to A Palindrome as You'll Get in This Country
• A million miles of boring
• The "Holy God This Is Boring" State
• Mayo Goes On Everything
• We almost killed Lake Erie once, and if it even looks at us funny, we’ll do it again
• Hey France, want it back?
• We're easy to spell
• Proud of Marilyn Manson, Marge Schott and Jerry Springer
• Home of the World Collegiate Cow Tipping Championships
• The old Northwest
• Cleveland's not as bad as it used to be
• We know the rules to euchre
• Soda? We say pop here, fucko.
• Screw this "Lake Effect Snow" Crap
• Ohio: Fat Ass Country
• Where people from Newark or Detroit can find a better life
• The Alabama of the North
• Ohio Escape Velocity higher than that of Jupiter
• German Humor, Appalachian Neatness
• The dropped Infinitive State
• Your broadcasters sound like us
• Tin Soldiers and Nixon's coming, We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• Kiss your wife where it stinks: visit Ohio!
• More colleges per capita than any other state, as if that makes a difference
• Ohio: helping the gay small-business owner find somewhere else to live since
  1803
• George Washington's Back Forty
• Why they keep shootin at our presidents?
• Home of the Cleveland steamer
• North West Virginia
• Just passin' through!

My favorite rock album of 2006 was by the New England collective The Beatings, whose sweet-tart invocation of the greats of Boston's postpunk history (The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma) on Holding Onto Hand Grenades struck me as much more than just attribute to their influences.

In the wake of the release of that album, Beatings guitarist E.R. (aka the improbably named Eldridge Rodriguez) kept going, writing and recording his own stuff under his own name, finally releasing in late February of this year an album of his own, This Conspiracy Against Us.

Many of the songs on Rodriguez' album could fit comfortably on a Beatings record, but where the band as a whole tended toward tense, rigorous arrangements featuring loud and layered guitars, Rodriguez alone is much more relaxed, at times a little more acoustic, and in a welcome way, weirder. He's still comfortably within the basic genre definition of "indie rock" or "postpunk" or whatever, but he sounds like he's having a ball.

What do I mean by "weirder?" Well, for example, although the Beatings have a nice way with a hook, I can't imagine a Beatings song featuring hand claps, 'sha-la-la' backing vocals, or a cheerleader chorus bleating "a-c-t-i-o-n, action, action, we want action" underneath the big hook. But there they are, the female chorus on "You Get What You Want," adding a winsome dimension to what's already a hooky modern rock song.

And I can't imagine, well, anybody with the courage to write a Bowie song and record it in a Bowie voice like Rodriguez does on "Black History Month." Yet, there it is in the middle of what, by rights, ought to be a mildly interesting set of songs by one member of a not-famous-quite-yet rock quartet. This Conspiracy Against Us is full of songs like this, quirky enough to stand out, but strong and restrained enough not to just be irritating, cutesy or precious.

This Conspiracy Against Us probably isn't going to win any awards, and probably isn't (such a crime!) going to break huge and move a million units at retail. But Eldridge Rodriguez has made a very impressive, accomplished and most of all interesting debut album, and that's good news for the future.

Dateline: Detroit "Police Say Gay Man Not Fatally Beaten"

Odd headline, I think you'll agree. Several interpretations seemed possible.

He was beaten, but not fatally.
He was beaten, but was somehow happy about it, and not dead.
He died, but not of a beating.

I had to read the story to find that it was the third. There's fifteen minutes of my life (1 minute reading, 14 minutes pontificating) I'll never see again.

DETROIT (AP) - An elderly man whose death became a cause for gay rights advocates died of natural causes, not from being beaten, authorities said Wednesday.

According to family members, before his death, Andrew Anthos told them a story about how he'd been injured, and the story, as told by the family, included indications it was a hate crime. Serious charges, well worthy of investigation and punishment, if true. But it turns out the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office looked into matters, found that Anthos fell, determined how & why he fell, and in any event couldn't find evidence that anything about the story as related by the family was true.

Regardless of the circumstances, it's a shame he died - 72's not very old, really, and becomes less old to me in concept the longer I live.

The closing portion of the story, however, was even harder to parse than the obtuse headline:

Fedenis [his cousin] said she was shocked.

"I won't let this rest," Fedenis said. "I can't let this tarnish him. I don't want anyone to think it wasn't a hate crime."

"I won't let this rest"? What is she going to do, go hire a different medical examiner? Refuse to allow burial until she gets the outcome she seems to want? Stage a sit-in at the county morgue until they agree with her strangely-preferred explanation?

"I can't let this tarnish him"? What? He's dead - not only don't dead men wear plaid, they don't tarnish. And in what alternate universe is it better, from a dead person's perspective mind you, to have died from criminal actions rather than an accident? Is she concerned that all the other dead people won't respect him, once they find out he just fell down, instead of being beaten down? That because of concerns about his coordination, he'll always be one of the last guys picked for the dead-person basketball leagues we all hear so much about?

"I don't want anyone to think it wasn't a hate crime"? Not even if it wasn't? And what possible benefit is there, to Anthos or his family, for this to have been deemed a hate crime? None, near as I can tell.

Having already wasted a minute reading the story, I figured what the hell? and went back to read it again. Is it possible that the only benefit from this man's unfortunate death being classified as a hate crime would be the ability of "gay rights causes" to use his corpse as a cudgel? Shamefully, it seems the answer is yes.

The 20 Worst Lyrics Ever

In a codicil to my recent posts about the slow death of the major music labels, Daniel Gross of Slate points out that the compact disc, though bruised and somewhat diminished, is alive and well. Classical and boutique sales, as well as nontraditional distribution schemes, continue to thrive as they always have.

About this, I ain't surprised at all. One of the labels I worked for back in the day had made its reputation - and its fortune - in catering to the long tail. They pioneered nonmusic retail partnerships (like what Starbucks is doing now), direct-to-consumer internet sales, and grassroots marketing, and for a long time did fabulously at it. And in a micro-parable of how the industry now goes, only got into serious trouble when they tried to get too big too fast and found themselves caught flatfooted, too small to compete at the level of the majors and too big to effectively cater to the grassroots fanbase that was a big part of their cachet and bottom line. At the end of the day, or at least the end of my career, the Big Giant Album from a Faded Popstar lost money hand over fist with as many returned lots flooding back in as had gone out the door in the first place, and the little record of birthing room music that had sold twenty to forty copies a week for fifteen years continued to sell twenty to forty copies a week, week in and week out.

Guess which one's still in print?

It's not the compact disc that's dead - it's the entire major label system that lives and dies by selling millions of them at a time.

The Onion has a pretty good featurette on songs that work as stories. I don't know all their choices, but the ones I do know are top notch. A couple of my personal favorites, not on the list, are "Can You Fly" by Freedy Johnston, which is about a farmer and his son who find an angel lying bleeding in their field, "Wreck of the Old 97," which by now has transcended everything to become part of the American DNA, and "Poncho and Lefty" as written by Townes van Zandt.

That last one's just amazing. Let's look at the lyrics.

Livin' on the road my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron, and your breath is hard as kerosene
Weren't you mamma's only boy, her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said, goodbye, and sank into your dreams

Poncho was a bandit boy, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel
Poncho met his match, you know, on the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dyin' words, but that's the way it goes

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

Lefty he can't sing the blues, all night long like he used to
The dust that Poncho bit down south, ended up in Lefty's mouth
The day they lay poor Poncho low, Lefty split for Ohio
And where he got the bread to go, there ain't nobody knows

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

The poets tell how Poncho fell, and Lefty's livin' in cheap hotels
The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold, and so the story ends we're told
Poncho needs your prayers, it's true, but save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do, and now he's growin' old

All the Federales, say
They could have had him any day
They only let him run so long
Out of kindness I suppose

A few grey Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him go wrong
Out of kindness I suppose

The way I see it, the narrator of this song is some middle-aged guy who's seen it all, probably missing a finger or two. He's talking to some 22 year old punk he's known since he was a kid who thinks he's hot shit and is bragging about how he's gonna knock over the mail stage or something, he and this other guy you see, this real tough son of a bitch. And our narrator sighs, kicks back, and tells him all about how bulletproof Poncho thought he was, how badass Lefty thought he was riding with Poncho, and how he was there that day when they laid Poncho low, and saw Lefty piss himself behind a rock, then crawl out as the Feds closed in, snatch the moneybag, and light out for God only knows where. And down through the years, word has gotten back to Colorado how so and so saw Lefty one December in a bar in Cleveland, looking like shit and still waiting for the hammer to fall, with the money long drunk up and all the good parts of his life behind him. And then our narrator gets up, tosses a buck on the table, and leaves the punk kid to contemplate whether any deed is worth a life spent hiding out in Cleveland.

[cue Paul Hogan....] Now that's a knife.