Ten ways to fight back against it.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Gamestop
A good description of what’s been happening with the stock. I was discussing this with some other options traders this morning.
[Update a while later]
More here.
[Late-night update]
Stop laughing about this stock manipulation.
It could be a harbinger of things to come.
[Friday-morning update]
Suck it, Wall Street.
[Bumped]
1984
Someone made a trailer of a muppet version, and it does seem watchable.
Don’t Be Shiftless
A list of new cars that you can still buy with a stick shift. I don’t know how much longer they’ll survive, but it will be an end of an era.
[Via Glenn, who points out that they make excellent anti-theft insurance, since most young people don’t know how to drive them]
Freedom
I’ll bet Google won’t let this stay up for long. It’s too subversive.
Kicked Out Of The Comedy Club
Thoughts from Andrew Doyle on how British comedians seem to have lost their sense of “humour.”
Asking The Important Questions
Why can’t Star Wars Storm Troopers shoot straight?
The Final Smuggling Frontier
A brief history of space contraband.
Dave Portnoy
…journalist of the year.
Not to take anything away from him, but there wasn’t a lot of competition.
Tony Rice
We have lost a legend of acoustic flat-picking guitar.
It’s late, but more thoughts tomorrow, with personal remembrances.
[Sunday-morning update]
I saw him live several times. The first time, I think, was with the Grisman Quintet at McCabes in Santa Monica. He was later replaced in the band by fiddling prodigy Mark O’Connor, who is/was also an amazing guitarist. But the most memorable concert I saw him in was at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, about thirty years ago. It wasn’t just him, but Norman Blake and Doc Watson. It was like a pantheon of the flatpicking guitar gods.
He was an amazing innovator, in folk, bluegrass, and jazz, often integrating them. He picked up the fallen torch of Clarence White after he was killed in an auto accident while loading gear after a concert in Palmdale, CA. He bought White’s guitar, a Martin herringbone D-28 with an enlarged sound hole (the fretboard hung out over it), that gave it a unique tone. I wonder who will play it now?
[Update Sunday evening]
I was introduced to the music of Tony Rice in 1978 by a friend when I was living in Tucson (a philosophy major at the U of A, who was a great guitarist, who later went to work on AI at Los Alamos), but who while he loved the bluegrass (he loved Doc Watson, and did a hell of a version of Tennessee Stud), never got the jazz. I got the jazz.
Tony knew, in standard tuning, where every note was on the keyfretboard, and how to combine them for jazz chords, which is a hell of a lot harder to do on six strings than eighty eight.
[Update Thursday afternoon]
An elegy from Chris Eldridge.
[Bumped]