A true legend of bluegrass, Earl Scruggs, has passed on at the age of eighty-eight.
One thing for sure about the music he left behind: You can feel it in your soul.
In this clip he’s on the left doing the guitar picking, and singing with his long-time partner Lester Flatt. Continue reading “Earl Scruggs dies at 88”
I’ve been trying to suppress the reflex to write anything on the death of Whitney Houston, but one’s stomach can only take so much before the need to expel becomes overwhelming.
It has become tiresome in the extreme to repeatedly witness the whole sordid pattern of a celebrity going from unbelievable levels of success to becoming drug-addled and universally mocked, and then very predictably dying of his or her bad habits and finally having his or her corpse raised up like a trophy by the same ravenous entertainment industry that had both built and consumed him or her in a new wild orgy of profit, schlock and revolting cynicism.
Hours after Whitney Houston’s pathetic and lonely death in a bathtub, Sony music mogul Clive Davis went to the stage of a pre-Grammy party, and, with her corpse in the process of rotting upstairs while surrounded by police investigators, he said this to the overpaid self-important revelers:
“She graced this stage with her regal presence so many times. Whitney would have wanted the music to go on and her family asked us to carry on.”
Continue reading “In memory of Whitney Houston, please party on”
The operation carried out by the Navy SEALS is obviously one for the history books. Bin Laden was living in a large walled compound (a “million dollar mansion”) in an urban area, not far from a military base, and he had to have had at least the tacit permission of elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus in order to do so. The danger to the SEALS was beyond calculation. They could not have a definite idea of what awaited them inside that compound. Yet, if all the reports so far are true, the operation was carried out with no American losses or injuries, in the space of forty minutes on the ground. That’s nothing short of fantastic. The military did their job with heroism and precision, and that has been the recurring story in the war that began on 9/11/2001. Continue reading “Osama Bin Laden goes to Davey Jones’ Locker”
That’s it. The end. For real and forever. Now that you know, how does it make you feel, exactly? As published in the journal Science, and summarized below by the BBC:
Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos.
Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the universe.
Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the universe was to keep on expanding.
[…]Eventually it will become a cold, dead wasteland with a temperature approaching what scientists term “absolute zero”.
Professor Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University, a leading cosmologist and co-author of this study, said that the findings finally proved “exactly what the fate of the universe will be”.
Hmmm. And how does Professor Natarajan feel about that, I wonder? She seems happy enough to be the messenger, and I suppose it is quite the feather in her cap.
You would think that this news about the ultimate fate of the universe and everything that it has ever contained — including all of our lives, legacies and dreams — would be getting more attention, and indeed perhaps it will once it filters out through the rest of what’s going on in the headlines today, like the baseball player Roger Clemens being indicted for perjury and the salmonella-induced recall of 340 million eggs in the United States. Continue reading “Universe to End as “Cold, Dead Wasteland””
