Leonard Cohen:
http://youtu.be/Lin-a2lTelg
Midnight train to Georgia
Gladys Knight & The Pips:
Break up to make up
Joan Osborne:
http://youtu.be/wcs5iMwWLD0
Credit card blues
Deb Callahan:
Happy Hour: Charles Mingus – Pedal Point Blues …
Van man
Daniel Norris has a 92 MPH fastball and the best strikeout ratio in the minors. Oh, and he lives in a van:
THE FUTURE of the Toronto Blue Jays wakes up in a 1978 Volkswagen camper behind the dumpsters at a Wal-Mart and wonders if he has anything to eat. He rummages through a half-empty cooler until he finds a dozen eggs. “I’m not sure about these,” he says, removing three from the carton, studying them, smelling them and finally deciding it’s safe to eat them. While the eggs cook on a portable stove, he begins the morning ritual of cleaning his van, pulling the contents of his life into the parking lot. Out comes a surfboard. Out comes a subzero sleeping bag. Out comes his only pair of jeans and his handwritten journals. A curious shopper stops to watch. “Hiya,” Daniel Norris says, waving as the customer walks away into the store. Norris turns back to his eggs. “I’ve gotten used to people staring,” he says.
This is where Norris has chosen to live while he tries to win a job in the Blue Jays’ rotation: in a broken-down van parked under the blue fluorescent lights of a Wal-Mart in the Florida suburbs. There, every morning, is one of baseball’s top-ranked prospects, doing pull-ups and resistance exercises on abandoned grocery carts. There he is each evening, making French press coffee and organic stir-fry on his portable stove. There he is at night, wearing a spelunking headlamp to go with his unkempt beard, writing in his “thought journal” or rereading Kerouac.
He has been here at Wal-Mart for long enough that some store employees have given him a nickname — “Van Man” — and begun to question where he’s from and what he might be doing. A few have felt so bad for him that they’ve approached the van with prayers and crumpled bills, assuming he must be homeless. They wonder: Is he a runaway teen? A destitute surfer? A new-age wanderer lost on some spiritual quest?
The truth is even stranger: The Van Man has a consistent 92-mile-an-hour fastball, a $2 million signing bonus, a deal with Nike and a growing fan club, yet he has decided the best way to prepare for the grind of a 162-game season is to live here, in the back of a 1978 Westfalia camper he purchased for $10,000. The van is his escape from the pressures of the major leagues, his way of dropping off the grid before a season in which his every movement will be measured, catalogued and analyzed.
If a baseball life requires notoriety, the van offers seclusion.
If pitching demands repetition and exactitude, the van promises freedom.
“It’s like a yin-and-yang thing for me,” he says. “I’m not going to change who I am just because people think it’s weird. The only way I’m going to have a great season is by starting out happy and balanced and continuing to be me. It might be unconventional, but to feel good about life I need to have some adventure.”
Elizabeth Warren isn’t running
And if you read this Politico interview, you’ll begin to understand why. It’s really long, go read the entire thing:
In an interview, Warren maintained, with a dismissive sweep of her hand before the question could even be posed, that the White House thing just isn’t going to happen. And she pushes back, hard, when we suggest that she is using her hard-won national platform merely to pull Clinton to the left in 2016. “You are framing it, in a sense, too narrowly,” she says. “No, the question for me is how can we change, how to make this country change, how to get this country back on a path where people can build real economic security.”
As for Warren’s own path? “She’s much, much too smart to run for president,” says her friend and ally, former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, who co-authored the Wall Street regulation bill passed after the 2008 financial crisis that included Warren’s signature initiative, a consumer board that looks after the interests of bank and credit-card customers. “She has no chance to win—none—and she would kill her credibility if she did. She’s devoted her life to issues that she cared about, and the second people perceive her as ambitious, you know, interested in running, that’s over.”
[…] But conquering the Senate, that marble-columned killing field of legislative ambition, has proved to be a far tougher task for Warren in her first two years. She has tried unsuccessfully to complete big deals on issues like student loan reform and housing. And her relationship with the White House, strained in recent years, has turned downright frosty thanks to her vow, transmitted to Obama and his top staff directly, to block the appointment of bankers to key posts. Here, too, as in her relationship with Clinton, Warren is trying to mix the inside with the outside games, hoping to “retain her purity without, you know, turning into Ted Cruz,” in the words of one senior Obama administration official.
But is it really possible to be both an ideologue, and a player, in today’s Washington?
“Sooner or later, you have to go produce something,” says West Virginia’s conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who tried and failed to get Warren’s support for a compromise deal that would cut interest rates on student loans. “You gotta say, ‘I did something.’ It’s one thing to just keep throwing the red meat out there and say, ‘Boy, I fed the lions today, they’re happy.’”
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
New rules
Look, I know some of you hate Hillary Clinton. I don’t. And I’m not going to spend the next two years reading Hillary Hate in my comments section. Whether men acknowledge it or not, there is a strong gendered subtext to most of the violent attacks made on her. (A friend told me the other night that of course I wasn’t imagining it, and said the only reason he could come up with were mother issues — which is what female bloggers decided back then, because there was no other obvious explanation for why white male progressives adored one corporatist centrist candidate, and despised the other.)
But whatever. I went through this in 2007-08, and I’m not going to go through it again in my own living room.
I don’t want to stifle debate. But at least here, it will be respectful and fact-based. If you need to bash Hillary Clinton, go do it at Democratic Underground or Daily Kos, where you will find many kindred spirits.
Psychedelicized
The use of psychedelic drugs does not increase a person’s risk of developing mental health problems, according to new research published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Norwegian clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen and neuroscientist Teri Suzanne Krebs said the findings show that most of the claims about the harms from psychedelic drugs like LSD, “magic” psilocybe mushrooms, and mescaline-containing cacti are unfounded.
“There is little evidence linking psychedelic use to lasting mental health problems. In general, use of psychedelics does not appear to be particularly dangerous when compared to other activities considered to have acceptable safety,” the researchers wrote in the study.
“Concern about psychedelic use seems to have been based on media sensationalism, lack of information and cultural biases, rather than evidence-based harm assessments.”
The study was based on 135,095 American adults who participated in the annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The researchers found no association between psychedelic drug use and psychological distress, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts. Those who used psychedelics were actually less likely to need mental health treatment than those who didn’t use the drugs.
“Over 30 million US adults have tried psychedelics and there just is not much evidence of health problems,” Johansen said in a news release.