When I used to live in the “German Studies house” — it used to be the “Southeast Asia house,” until it got overrun by Stanford grads who read Habermas day and night — my housemate Mike would scoff at me for listening to Steely Dan. “Look at them!,” he’d say, pointing to the photo in the Columbia House catalog of the long-haired musicians in a studio. (Mike listened to the Stone Temple Pilots, so what did he know.) At any rate, Steely Dan was one of my first conduits to jazz, believe it or not (except for a recording of “Budo” on a record my folks owned); their version of Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” — made me seek out the original.

But back to the song on my list: “Kid Charlemagne” sounds like it’s starting in the middle — a little instrumental passage between stanzas, or the middle of a drug bust. Whatever it is, it works: the song drops you right into a seedy, sun-soaked, coke-fueled, sour-tasting hangover of a scene, populated by “Day-Glo freaks” and “low-rent friends.”

What makes the song most memorable for me are the two all-too-brief soaring guitar solos unleashed by Larry Carlton (and drums by Bernard Purdie!), particularly the one that still echoes in the ears of the listener on the way out. That and the unforgettable couplet, bracketed in the last verse (and sung by Donald Fagen with a half-faltering note that makes it sound like undisguised joy) for maximum effect:

“Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there’s gas in the car.”

Sometimes it’s just the slightest detail that turns a song into a masterpiece.

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- Wretchard writes on suicide bombers as the “least cost-effective weapon.”

- And if you haven’t seen this one yet: another Matrix parody. Of ping-pong.

- The long-delayed, previously regular, Fetish Find of the Month (probably not safe for work): smoking women (via Geisha Asobi).

- Some bad use of statistics here: California is not Iraq.

- We knew the Man Who Would Be Governor had a checkered past, but this is just embarrassing.

- More poets on novelists: Eileen Tabios on Wilfrido Nolledo, and Ron Silliman on Philip K. Dick.

- And if you had a lot of disposable income and wanted to invest in something super-kitschy, let me give you an idea where to spend it.

- Tom Tomorrow writes on the Dean campaign.

- MacDiva writes a “defense” of Tom Cruise, of all people.

- A lovely poem on Tram Spark (it’s the one that begins “The worst bits of love”).

- I want a copy of this comic book; where can I get it?

- Slim’s in San Francisco has a great lineup in October: Shonen Knife with Deerhoof opening on the 9th, My Morning Jacket on the 10th, two Guided By Voices dates on the 17th and 18th, and Cannibal Ox on the 30th.

- And I’ll end with an extended excerpt from Reverend Mykeru on those two tons of rock in Alabama:

Asking whether or not [Judge] Moore should be compelled to follow the law is the wrong question because unless someone amended the Bill of Rights while I wasn’t looking, his little brownie-points-with-Jesus stunt is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. I’ve seen the Constitution. It’s in a sealed, inert gas-filled case in the National Archives building. I’ve looked it over thoroughly and there is no fine print that gives a special exemption for Fundamentalist Christians.

So the fundies have a clear choice: Obey the Constitution, amend the Constitution or pack the their fucking bags and head off to the jungles of Guyana where they can follow “God’s law”. Here in this country, in the 21st century we follow secular law and God shouldn’t even be able to get his parking tickets fixed.

Nothing is so strange as the particularly American spectacle of people who fancy themselves to be uber-patriots and more- American-than-American thinking they can willfully break the law, even if they justify it with a laughably thin revisionist take on the intent and purpose behind the Constitution.

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And like her dad, she has her lists too:

Favorite movie(s):
Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders’s Lilo and Stitch
John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton’s A Bug’s Life

Favorite album(s):
The Best of Elmo
Dan Zanes and Friends’s Rocket Ship Beach

Favorite book(s) of the last three months, in no particular order:
Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon
Al Perkins’s Hand Hand Fingers Thumb
Peter McCarty’s Hondo and Fabian
Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
Marc Simont’s The Stray Dog
Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar

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After the abortive attempt to paint Kristina Leung as the evil female Fu Manchu / Dragon Lady, the New York Times is raising the heat on China again:

With unemployment high and American manufacturers reeling from three years of misery, politicians and businesspeople around the country have found a villain to blame for these troubles: China, or more specifically its currency.

Whee! And the front page story is followed up with an even more lurid story on the abuse of urban migrants.

I don’t mean to defend China’s abysmal human-rights record, and I don’t mean to necessarily approve of the billions of dollars in trade deficits with the U.S., but I mean, come on: pot, kettle, black.

Meanwhile, as the war on Iraq — I’m so sorry, I forgot the war was already declared over — becomes more grim for American troops, President Smirk pulls out the same tired crap about “the struggle between civilization and chaos:”

We’ve adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war. We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them and their camps or caves or wherever they hide before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens. We will do everything in our power to deny terrorists weapons of mass destruction before they can commit murder on an unimaginable scale.

In Iraq’s case, those WMDs were denied indeed.

We’ve sent a message that is understood throughout the world: if you harbor a terrorist, if you support a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorists, and the Taliban found out what we meant.

Saudi Arabia must be quaking in its boots.

Afghanistan today is a friend of the United States of America. Because we acted, that country is not a haven for terrorists, and the people of America are safer from attack.

Man, you can practically see him rehearsing in front of a mirror, looking at the way his lips move: “…Must mention ‘friend…’ must mention ‘the people of America…’ See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.”

America and our coalition removed a regime that built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, a regime that sponsored terror and a regime that persecuted its people.

This is somewhat new, as “WMD” is back (he had initially changed it to “weapons program”), but now that the media’s attention has shifted to Gov. Arnie and the Ten Commandments (Chief Justice Moore can put it in his living room), he can confidently bring up WMDs again.

In all the debates over Iraq, we must never forget Iraq.

Uh-huh.

We are on the offensive against the Saddam loyalists, the foreign fighters, and the criminal gangs that are attacking Iraqis and coalition forces.

Yup — that’s a lot of people there, and it’s increasingly clear that “the coalition forces” have no idea who they are, where they’re coming from, who’s financing them. The war is over, indeed…

We’re receiving more and more vital intelligence from Iraqi citizens, information that we’re putting to good use.

Obviously not good enough.

Our course is set. Our purpose is firm. No act of terrorists will weaken our resolve or alter their fate. Our only goal, our only option, is total victory in the war on terror. And this nation will press on to victory.

“Total victory” can only mean total annihilation in this case, which seems like the sum of the Bush administration’s plan for “the war on terror.”

Learning by rote is never very effective, but maybe these cheap-labor conservatives know what they’re doing. Bush has no new talking points in this speech, except for the deliberate omission of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, it could practically have been delivered a year ago, and the rhetoric would have been similar. WMDs, war on terror, America will prevail, with us or against us, blah blah, completely ignoring everything that has happened since then — a brutal and expensive war, an even more unstable world order, a rising death toll since Bush squeezed into his flight uniform, more proof (as if anyone needed more) of a tanking economy. (All this is happily abetted by some of the most retrogressive policies in education, social welfare, the environment — the outrage goes on and on…)

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1. What do the letters T.O.D.A.S. stand for?

No one got the exact wording right: Television’s Outrageously Delightful All-Star Show. Their skits were uneven, and not as cerebral as “Champoy,” but so what? Remember the pie fights they had at the end of every show? Plus, “T.O.D.A.S.” also introduced Richie Da Horsie to a stunned nation.

2. The Philippines has stood in for Vietnam in films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now. In which film did the Philippines stand in for Indonesia?

My very good friend Romeo Quintana got this one. Peter Weir’s 1982 film, The Year of Living Dangerously, with Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, was filmed in the Philippines. Watch for the scene when an old Muslim woman drops to her knees in terror, praying to Allah, with the words, “Ama namin, sumasalangit…”

3. What was the name of the building, or building complex, that Imelda Marcos demanded be completed by October 1, 1975?

No one got this one. Ali Mall — the date’s the crucial clue in the question — had to be finished in time for the “Thrilla in Manila” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. (The second most popular answer, the Manila Film Center, was built in the ’80s; the Philippine International Convention Center was built in 1976; both the Folk Arts Theater and the Cultural Center of the Philippines were constructed by 1974.)

4. “Minikaniko ni Monico…” — what’s the rest of this tongue twister straight from the Seventies?

“…ang makina ng Minica ni Monica.” My brother Happy got this one first. Not “ang kiki ni Kikay,” as Romeo answered. Ulol!

5. What were the words, heard by witnesses, that were allegedly shouted just before Ninoy Aquino was shot?

My old college classmate Maila Alberto (now Maila Eslabon) almost got this one. The words were “Heto na, pusila, pusila” (“Here he is, shoot, shoot”) — allegedly said by one of the AVSECOM guards. The Apo Hiking Society would later call their concert series “etonAPOsila” — supposedly a sly reference to the assassination, as the band became more and more vocal against the Marcos regime.

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