Picks to Click

1) “16 Military Wives,” the Decembrists. Say what you will about reaching a saturation point on bands with kooky/baroque lyrics, sincerity qua authenticity, and eccentric instrumentation – I myself shake my knees underneath my desk to this song, and occasionally push my rollie chair back and do a quick 360 (luckily the headphones cord is long enough to enable this maneuver) with my knees pulled up to my chest for maximum velocity. I think may just have a thing for songs-by-numbers, or songs-with-numbers, or whatever. See also “The Engine Driver,” which contains the lines, “if you don’t love me let me go” and “I am a writer / writer of fictions / I am the heart that you call home / and I’ve written pages upon pages/ Trying to rid you from my bones”

2) The EU debacle.

George Will gets to intimate that the French are [insert pejorative Willian adjective,] CS Monitor compares capitalistic oranges with socialistic apples, and Mr. Buckley peers into the mind of the “French working man” the better to understand the extent to which nationalism lives, breathes, and determines electoral behavior.

3) Whoa, Derek Lee! What the fuck have you been eating for breakfast? If Derek Lee were an animal, he would be Afleet Alex, but not really. Also, when does Vegas start coming out with over/unders on the number of games Prior and Wood combined will play each season before enduring an injury that involves appendages?

4) Derrida from the grave, in the Village Voice for God’s Sake (Dude’s got street cred from here to Algeria):

If, as I believe, the concept of crime against humanity is the count to be answered in this self-indictment, this repentance, and this forgiveness-seeking; if, ultimately, the only justification for this concept lies in the sacral nature of the human (from this point of view, there is nothing worse than a crime against the humanity of the human being and against his or her rights); if the principal—if not indeed the only—resource of the meaning of that sacral nature is to be found in the Abrahamic memories of the faiths of the book and in a Jewish, but above all Christian, interpretation of the terms "neighbor" and "fellow man"; and if, accordingly, a crime against humanity is a crime against that which is most sacred in the living world and hence against the divine in humankind, in God-made-man or man-made-God-by-God (the death of man and the death of God would in that case result from the same crime), then the "globalization" of forgiveness resembles an immense scene of ongoing confession, and hence of a virtually Christian convulsion-conversion-confession, a process of Christianization that no longer has need of the Christian church.

5) Also, what’s with hip-hop’s fetish with skits? I dug “I’ll sew your asshole shut and keep feedin’ you” as much as the next person, but WU TANG FOREVER aside, are there any skit-type intros or whatever worth keeping? I’m on the fence with the skit on the Biggie album when the orgasm-reaching female calls him a Kentucky Fried Chicken eatin’ motherfucker. Ditto for the answering machine motif, which is hip-hop’s equivalent of the-blurb-on-the-back-of-the-book. (Cf. Soundbombing III)

6) Prediction: Rickey Henderson comes out of retirement just to spite Oil Can Boyd.