The Medium Is the Message

Blessings on the Dixie Chicks
The music business is mean as hell. Women who make it in the music business, like the Chicks, amaze me. Either you fall into the gender trap the music business has set for you if you're a woman--Britney, Christina, Mariah, Kelly-- to be manipulated to the point you have no self-assurance or political feelings at all or you wither on the vine. Your social responsibility is to your imaged "I." The Dixie Chicks managed to buck the big-buck scumbag meisters of the music industry who were bound and determined through megabooker tour companies hooked into radio stations, like Clear Channel (owned by one of Georgie Porgie's boy toys--you know, an old drinking and bullshit buddy, now a big-bucks political fund contributor), tried to teach these babes a lesson, to send them back to the bedrooms and the kitchens where they feel most women except Lesbians belong. I'm proud to say I'm a Texan from the same part of that great state the lead singer of the Chicks is from. It's in our genes to fight your ass back when you try and ruin us--some of us are gifted with barbic pens enough to get our revenge--and the Chicks are gifted with barbic lyrics made more barbic by their music beds and they've gotten their revenge against these talentless, cold-hearted, lavishly rewarded asshole accountant-types who rule the music world. The Dixie Chicks worked hard to get to the top. They mostly had to create their own music domain by taking the money they made through their early successes and setting up a Dixie Chicks corporation, buying their own stage equipment and the 18-wheelers to haul the stuff around: the sets, the lighting, the amplifiers, cords, sound boards--and also a "musician plush" outfitted tour bus. They produced their own tours and they worked over 200 days a year touring the world. But when musicians are driven like they are, working that hard is a part of the fun of it.

It was great to see the Chicks hit #1 on the charts this week. Huzzahs to them from The Daily Growler. And thanks to them for giving a great big F U to Georgie Porgie and his Corporate Crusaders and their attempt to corral us all in commercial pens and fatten us up so we'll be ripe for robbery and slaughter.

Here's a quote from Marshall McLuhan for your digestion:

To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points, which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip . . . she knows that a "long-legged girl can go places." As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience.

No More Gossip
I haven't read one word anywhere about G.W. and Pickles splitting up. Must be a nasty rumor. Spread by Hillary and Howard Dean? Nah! I don't think those two have the moxie to do such a thing. They're too busy being rich and idolized to be concerned about G.W. and Pickles throwing down gauntlets at each other. Hillary could certainly give Pickles some advice; I guess because she's a woman who's gone through Slick Willie jilting her many a time she would take Pickles's side and refuse to make a political issue out of it; Howard Dean, who knows what the hell he would do with this hot potato? He's one of those doctors who married a doctor so they probably don't see each other enough to fight or compromise, but they must, you know, cheat on each other. You think Howard Dean has a mistress? How about Hillary and dudes? I love juicy gossip so I'm disappointed I haven't seen a follow up on Pickles moving into the Mayflower, to me, a very hot-item story.

Again a quote from Marshall McLuhan:

Phony implies that a thing so qualified has no more substance than a telephone talk with a supposititious friend. (McLuhan found this definition in an early-1900s New York newspaper and wrote about its meaning in Understanding Media published in 1964.)

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/phone.html

The above link is a well-done dissertation on The Telephone. Take a look at it. [Note, the above link may not work. The Daily Growler is not acquainted with enough html.] [The Daily Growler house pianist has sent us an email with a basic html. lesson; hell, some of us know a lot of html. but we can't link for shit on the blog.]

Al Queda in Canada
I guess you've read by now about the 20 some-odd (the figure changes with each newscast) natural-born Canadians the Canadian equal of the CIA, CSIS (sic)?--busted in Toronto, the mastermind was from Scarborough, Ontario, right outside Toronto. The oldest of this bunch is 22. The youngest are teenagers. The Canadian authorities claim these cells are a new phenomenon in Canada. They say these dudes are the same kind of natural-born citizens who pulled off the London subway and bus bombings. These are Muslims, yes (Canada profiles Muslims), but they are kids who barely know where Afghanistan is, and only know Iraq off a map, but they are beginning to sympathize with their Muslim brethren in Pakistan and Bangledesh and when they were arrested, they all had weapons taped to their legs and were carrying amunition. The Canadians say they started going after these kids when they intercepted some encrypted messages they were sending over the Internet; jihadic messages saying they wanted to bomb sites in Canada, especially around the Capitol in Ottawa and some of the skyscrapers of Toronto. The also said some of these dudes were being spied on by our own crack FBI; two Amurican kids are involved with this group, it seems. More and more now the Amurican newscasts are saying the US authorities knew all along about this and they, in fact, told the Canadians about this cell and the US authorities were on top of it before the Canadians. Don't you just love what lying sons of bitches we Amuricans are?

New York City folks see now why the Homeland Insecurity maven old drunk-looking Michael Chertoff (he's a tired, worn-out, old pompous-looking ass; he reminds me of the old Gay actor Clifton Webb) reduced anti-terrorist funds to NYC; they're needed in Canada looks like. So Hell let the guard down in New York City; no icons, folks, sorry; the jihadists want icons to blow up, like the Taliban blew the Buddha statues up in Afghanistan. Where's the largest Buddha statue in the U.S.?

Crazy mucked up world Georgie Porgie and his Rootin' Tootin' New World Order Crusaders have given us isn't it? Remember, Paul Wolf O'witz is head of the World Bank. Afghanistan is a timebomb. The Taliban are coming back strong. Iraq's president is now cursing out the U.S. I mean, he's pissed that the Pentagon gave the O.K. to the gyrenes blowing away grandmas, toddlers, babies, and even pregnant women in that Baghdad sururb. Just like the Pentagon said the brakes gave out on that vehicle that ran down those Afghanis and started all the rioting over there. More and more the Iraqis are mooning us, wanting us out of their country; they don't want our brand of freedom--you know, that freedom that's on the march Georgie Porgie is willing to kill for generations to come to keep it marchin'. Praise the Lard.


If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness? Marshall has the last word.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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The Daily Growler Quote of the Day
"A side interest, though it was a deep one, had led me in 1884 to obtain from Merck some of what was then the little-known alkaloid cocaine and to study its physiological action. While I was in the middle of this work, an opportunity arose for making a journey to visit my fiancee, from whom I had been parted for two years. I hastily wound up my investigation of cocaine and contented myself in my book on the subject with prophesying that further uses for it would soon be found. I suggested, however, to my friend Konigstein, the ophthalmologist, that he should investigate the question of how far the anaesthetizing properties of cocaine were applicable in diseases of the eye. When I returned from my holiday I found that not he, but another of my friends, Carl Koller..., whom I'd also spoken to about cocaine, had made the decisive experiments upon animals' eyes and had demonstrated them at the Ophthalmological Congress at Heidelberg. Koller is therefore rightly regarded as the discoverer of local anaesthesia by cocaine, which has become so important in minor surgery; but I bore my fiancee no grudge for her interruption of my work." Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study , The Norton Library, 1963.