Paige Williams reconnects with Dolly Freed the author of Possum Living a book about how to “Live well without a job and with (almost) no money.

In a time when 1 out 5 of us are unemployed or underemployed this book might as well be required reading.

Nick Toshes goes on a hunt for the last opium den.  Real opium.  The Philosopher’s Stone of drugs apparently.

It’s a good read.

I love this line about Obama’s presidency so far:

Though it’s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of “clean coal” and refusing to tax emissions,

…

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his “Yes We Can!” slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede).

…

Obama … follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States).

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

These entire article reads like a bizarre Hollywood movie script starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.  Except true.  Worth a read if you feel like maintaining your general ongoing outrage about Gitmo.

I’m making the saddest of sad faces right now.

My friend Linda wrote about it too.

“Looters,” reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Port-au-Prince, “were scaling a crumpled building, apparently a grocery store, and throwing items to the assembled throng below.” That “looting” is traditionally construed to mean illegally obtaining goods for one’s own benefit—not for the benefit of a waiting crowd of the recently homeless—seems to have entirely escaped these reporters.

…

just a few blocks away on the road, a store owner was calmly overseeing an orderly emptying of his broken shop. He was using a kind of bucket-brigade of some 30 young men stretching over the store’s shattered roof, handing out goods can by can.” This article, incidentally, is headlined “Haiti Authorities Battle Looters.”

You can read the whole article but you’ve probably already figured it out.  Haitians intent on surviving are doing what it takes to survive.   But newspapers are nothing if not predictable in their headline writing.

I had MLK day off, but I’ll have a Monday Jam up for you later today.

The story is the most illuminating article I have ever read about PEDs. How they work, what they are used for, and why athletes use them. In light of Mark Mcgwire finally telling us what we already knew I think it’s worth reading again. I pretty much consider it mandatory reading before you get to have an opinion about PEDs.

Drug Test.

Hennessy, Dog Crap, And A Touching Glimpse Into The Head And Home Of Ron Artest - The Dark Side Of The Locker Room - Deadspin.

I’ll never forget what I saw inside. Instead of crown molding, there were empty Hennessy bottles glued to his wall. There was dog crap everywhere, and where there wasn’t, there was either someone sleeping or evidence that someone had just slept there — a sleeping bag and pillow. There were guys all over the place. On the landing of the stairs. On the couch. Free-style rapping in the corner. (I can’t help but wonder if one of his stairwell dwellers, transplanted to Los Angeles, was the “box” Artest tripped over last month.) I engaged one for a few minutes as Ron went to change clothes. I asked if all the guys were from the “QB,” Queensbridge, the public housing development in New York where Artest grew up. The reply still sticks with me.

“Yeah,” he said. “We all are. We all made a deal when we were young. If one of us made it out, we’d take the rest with us. Ron made it out.”

Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Rollino was proudest of one in particular. “My finger strength,” he told an interviewer for ESPN The Magazine. “Six hundred thirty-five pounds. See the size of it. At 150 pounds, nobody ever beat me in this world.”

He was run over by a van while crossing the street. Even the world’s strongest man can’t live forever.

Here’s this morning’s: Go Go Gorilla from the Shandells. Just another forgotten garage band.