• Presty the DJ for April 3

    April 3, 2018
    Music

    Today in 1956, Elvis Presley appeared on ABC-TV’s “Milton Berle Show” live from the flight deck of the U.S.S. Hancock, moored off San Diego.

    An estimated one of every four Americans watched, probably making it ABC’s most watched show in its history to then, and probably for several years after that.

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  • The Contract on Wisconsin

    April 2, 2018
    Wisconsin politics

    James Wigderson came up with the headline for Bill Osmulski‘s listing of a People’s Republic of Madison’s sympathizer’s dream:

    If there were ever any doubts over what designs the Democrat Party has for Wisconsin should it regain power, look no further than Rep. Chris Taylor’s (D-Madison) proposed amendments to the state constitution released Friday.

    The joint resolution would make broad changes to Wisconsin’s Bill of Rights to include open-ended promises that government cannot possibly deliver and shift power away from the Legislature and governor to the bureaucracy. In general, the changes seek to undo everything Republicans have accomplished since 2011 and make it difficult for them to ever be in control again. The role of government would expand uncontrollably, as voters would lose influence over state officials.

    Here is a breakdown of Taylor’s manifesto:

    1. The Second Amendment And Local Gun Ordinances. In a transparent attempt to undermine the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Taylor’s Bill of Rights claims to maintain the right to bear arms, but it allows local governments to regulate the carrying of arms. This would effectively gut the constitution, the right to keep and bear arms and the state’s concealed carry law because local ordinances would supersede state law.
    2. Right To An Abortion. This isn’t surprising given Taylor’s history as Planned Parenthood’s policy director in Wisconsin. Of course, in true Orwellian fashion, she calls it “the right to reproductive freedom.”
    3. Right To “Access Quality, Affordable Health Care Services.” Democrats always claim this is their goal, but their actions consistently undermine it. This goes well past their rabid defense of Obamacare, which resulted in the mandated purchase of health insurance, fewer coverage choices, and skyrocketing premiums costs – 36 percent last year alone. Wisconsin Democrats voted against reforms like direct primary care that are proven to lower costs and increase quality.  They also promote ideas like “BadgerCare for All,” which the Legislative Fiscal Bureau warns would decrease access and increase cost. Their ideas will never result in quality and affordable healthcare, but they’ll happily destroy the state’s finances as they try anyway.
    4. Right to A Living Wage. Forget about the “Fight for $15.” Taylor’s living wage could push the minimum wage in places like Madison or Milwaukee to over $25 an hour, based on an MIT study. As Taylor puts it, “Every person has the right to a just and fair wage that ensures for the person and the person’s family an existence worth of human dignity and a sufficient standard of living.” Working hard to achieve that is not a part of Taylor’s math, nor is the impact this would have on employment. A 2014 MacIver Institute Study found 91,000 Wisconsinites would lose their jobs if the minimum wage was raised to $15. Considering that many of those are entry-level jobs, a “living wage” mandate would close countless opportunities to young workers just getting started in their careers.
    5. Right To The “Highest Quality” Education. Here’s another vague goal. A conservative might interpret this as school choice for all, but Taylor’s no conservative. In fact, this “right” contradicts another one of her proposed changes to the constitution that would ban state funds from going to religious schools. She doesn’t say what she considers to be the “highest quality” education, but it probably doesn’t have anything to do with test scores. The only thing liberals care to quantify when it comes to public schools is funding, and it’s never enough. The real question here is how high would Taylor raise your taxes to pay for this?
    6. Right To Equal Pay. First off, we agree that it is wrong to discriminate against someone because of their gender. Remember, too, that it is currently against the law to pay someone less based solely on their gender. Studies that examine the gender pay gap, however, don’t support the liberal narrative. An often-cited study by the American Association of University Women claims women in Wisconsin make 78 cents for every dollar a man makes. However, the report also said that can be explained by considering life choices like college major, occupation, hours worked and taking time off to raise children. So would this amendment force employers to make gender the primary consideration for determining wages regardless of experience, education, and position? Liberals like Chris Taylor never let questions over implementation get in the way of a good narrative, and this is just one more example.
    7. Eliminate Residency Requirements To Vote. Right now you need to live in a district for 28 days before an election with no intention of moving afterward. This change would eliminate the need to be a “resident” and only require that you “reside” in the district for 10 days before an election. That’s right. She literally removes the word “resident” from the voting requirements. That would mean out-of-state hotel guests could (and would) vote in our elections.
    8. Reinstate The GAB. The Government Accountability Board proved itself incapable of impartiality in overseeing Wisconsin’s elections. It looked the other way when fraudulent signatures appeared on recall ballots, elections officials reported irregularities and breaks in the chain of custody, and it actively participated in the John Doe witch hunt that violated the constitutional rights of conservatives throughout the state. The Wisconsin Legislature did the responsible thing by eliminating this political weapon of the left. Of course, Taylor and her allies want it back.
    9. GAB Would Be In Charge Of Redistricting. Not only does Taylor want to resurrect the GAB, she wants to give it the responsibility of redistricting. Currently, the Legislature is responsible for drawing new district boundaries after each U.S. Census. Taylor wants to take the power away from elected officials and give it to unaccountable bureaucrats, who historically have aligned themselves with liberal politics. She’s betting this will sideline voters and give Democrats a permanent edge, whether or not they can actually win elections.
    10. Reinstate Straight Ticket Voting. Before 2012, Wisconsin voters could simply vote for a party and automatically cast votes for every candidate in that party on their ballot. It undoubtedly gave an edge to Democrats. In Milwaukee, for example, Democrat voters were six times more likely to vote straight ticket than Republican voters. The impact of doing away with this practice was immediate. During the Racine Recall Recount in 2012, many voters only voted in the top race and left the rest blank. Only nine states still allow straight-ticket voting, and surprisingly they’re all Republican states.
    11. Require The State To Use A Progressive Income Tax. A flat tax would make Wisconsin more competitive and help reduce tax migration that results in $460 million of income leaving the state annually. Taylor prefers the antiquated progressive income tax that punishes success.
    12. No Tax Exemptions. Not only would the state be required to have a progressive income tax, Taylor’s plan would eliminate all exemptions. While a simple and clean tax code is a goal we can agree on with Taylor, that is not what Taylor proposes. She wants to eliminate only certain tax code carveouts that she deems unnecessary or unworthy. The tax carve-outs that advanced her political agenda and her ideology would stay of course.
    13. Right To “Clean Air.” So what exactly would qualify as “clean air?” If I get seasonal allergies would the Wisconsin Constitution protect me from pollen? What would be the standard for “clean air?” Just this year, the EPA tried to shut down economic growth in southeastern Wisconsin because of high ozone levels, which had drifted into the area from Chicago and Gary. Would the “right to clean air” clear that up, shut down industry, or force everyone to move? Chances are these questions would be left to unelected bureaucrats and the standards would always be changing.
    14. The Superintendent Of Public Instruction Gets Representation In The DNR. What does DPI have to do with the DNR? Nothing, but the state superintendent is usually a liberal. Taylor wants to expand DPI’s reach in state government. She would reduce the seven-member Natural Resources Board to five members, selected by the governor, attorney general, state superintendent, treasurer, and secretary of state. So the state superintendent would have just as much influence in the DNR as the governor? Makes sense to a liberal.
    15. A Natural Resources Board Would Pick The DNR Secretary, Not The Governor. About twenty years ago, the Natural Resources Board got to pick the DNR secretary instead of the governor. Of course, that meant the department was dominated by radical environmentalist policies with no counter voice. That’s exactly the system Taylor wants to go back to – one where the voters are as far removed from state environmental policy as possible.
    16. The State Superintendent, Not The Legislature, Would Determine Funding Levels For Public Schools. Under the manifesto, DPI would decide how much schools need, rather than the Legislature weighing the support schools need and other important budget priorities. Like health care. Or higher education. Or public safety. In other words, Taylor would take budgeting out of the budget process.
    17. Religious Schools Can’t Receive Public Funds. Overall, religious schools outperform public schools, and that’s why students use the school choice system to attend them. It’s far more important to Rep. Taylor that kids receive a public-school education rather than a good education. Clearly, Rep. Taylor believes the term ‘public education’ refers to government institutions and the plight of educrats, not what it should be. ‘Public education’ should be about what every child in Wisconsin needs to be successful.
    18. Right To Collective Bargaining. Before Act 10, Governor Doyle and the Democrat-controlled Legislature created a $3.6 billion budget gap. Act 10 fixed that, then saved the state $5 billion over the next five years, gave local governments the tools to balance their budgets, created regular surpluses, and eliminated state worker furloughs. Taylor and her allies would undo all of that. They would make it is a constitutional right for public and private workers to “organize and collectively bargain through representatives of their own choosing on subjects including but not limited to wages, hours, and working conditions.” That means eliminating Act 10 and Right To Work, and reinstating prevailing wage… and massive budget deficits. It would be like the past 8 years never happened.

    Getting all this into the state constitution would be no easy task. Amendments must be passed by two consecutive sessions of the Legislature and then pass a statewide referendum. One might question why she introduced this plan with Republicans in charge when it has no chance of passing this session.

    In the past couple weeks, Democrats have introduced dozens of items in the Senate and Assembly, even though the session is essentially over. One Democrat representative told MacIver News, in reference to a different bill, that they know their late session bills won’t get passed this year. They are setting the stage in the event they are able to take back control of the Legislature and governor’s office.

    Should that happen, Rep. Taylor’s plan shows how far liberals are willing to stretch our laws to meet their goals. The Wisconsin Constitution was written to empower the people and limit the government. Taylor’s Amendments would fundamentally alter that relationship to limit the people and empower the government.

    Point 16 is blatantly unconstitutional. The only people in state government with the power to tax is the Legislature. That has been the case every day of this state’s history. A Supreme Court challenge would invalidate any proposed constitutional amendment 7–0.

    None of what Taylor asserts as “rights” are actually rights except to anyone on the wacko left as she is.

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  • Presty the DJ for April 2

    April 2, 2018
    Music

    Today in 1955, the Louisiana Hayride TV show broadcast this concert live from Shreveport, La.:

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  • Presty the DJ for April 1

    April 1, 2018
    Music

    Today is April Fool’s Day. Which John Lennon and Yoko Ono celebrated in 1970 by announcing they were having sex-change operations.

    Today in 1972, the Mar y Sol festival began in Puerto Rico. The concert’s location simplified security — it was on an island accessible only by those with tickets.

    (more…)

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  • Presty the DJ for March 31

    March 31, 2018
    Music

    Today in 1949, RCA introduced the 45-rpm single to compete with the 33-rpm album introduced by CBS one year earlier. The first RCA 45 was …

    Today in 1964, the Beatles filmed a scene of a “live” TV performance before a studio audience for their movie “A Hard Day’s Night.”

    In the audience: Phil Collins.

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  • When your past comes back to amuse you

    March 30, 2018
    Wisconsin politics

    My efforts to avoid political advertising around elections meant I missed this …

    … specifically this shot:

    That is future Sauk County Circuit Judge and state Supreme Court candidate Michael Screnock, a tuba player in the UW Marching Band (whose annual concerts in the Kohl Center are April 19–21, by the way) while I was a trumpet player in the world’s best college marching band. (Mike — I mean, Judge Screnock — graduated in 1990, two years after I did, which means we are both of the era when the band didn’t get to perform at bowl games and NCAA tournament games because UW didn’t play in those games.)

    A sign of my advanced age, or something else, is that I have personal connections with at least four present members of this state’s judiciary. One of my coworkers (with whom I shared political ideology) at my only daily newspaper job is now a Columbia County judge. One of my high school classmates (with whom I did not share political ideology, to put it mildly) is now a state administrative law judge. One of the two local circuit judges (with whom I have never discussed politics) was a teammate of mine on the softball team of my first full-time employer, a team utterly lacking in athletic talent with few exceptions (one of them being a guy nicknamed “Baseball”), yet somehow not the worst team in the league.

    Even though I haven’t paid attention to the commercial, this mailer from the Republican Party of Wisconsin appeared in the mail yesterday:

    From JudgeScrenock.com: “After graduating from Baraboo High School, Judge Screnock chose to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was an active member of the UW Marching Band tuba section. He met his wife, Karen from Brookfield, Wisconsin, on the UW campus and they were married the summer before he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1990.”

    It should be obvious (but requires saying in our hyperpolitical times) that the UW Marching Band does not endorse political candidates, then or now. (Including in 1978, when UW Marching Band members played on the school bus procured by or for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Dreyfus.) At least in my (or our) day, I think it’s safe to say that band members skewed rightward, perhaps in part because there were more of them from small towns than from Madison (including, yes, me) and Milwaukee, or because we had some military reservists in our ranks, or because we were in the band during the Age of Reagan. (One of the aforementioned reservists finished a concert at the State Capitol by exhorting a vote for Reagan, “the official presidential candidate of the UW Band!”, which wasn’t met with unanimous agreement in the band. However, Reagan did win Wisconsin.)

    Then again, politics in the 1980s, certain victims of Reagan Derangement Syndrome notwithstanding, was not as stupid as it is today. Every part of Madison skewed Democrat, but no adult I knew — that is, the parents of my classmates and friends — took the extreme leftist viewpoints that appear commonplace today in the People’s Republic of Madison. Politics obviously got discussed at UW–Madison, and even at my high school, but not to the extent it is today, certainly not with the nasty tone of today (with the exception of those were seen as a few bubbles off plumb), and people rarely made personal decisions (as far as I was aware of) based on political considerations. (An exception: My high school journalism teacher refused to take us to Madison Newspapers Inc., a place budding journalists might like to have seen, because the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times broke the newspaper strike. On the other hand, we didn’t go to field trips anywhere, which may have been for nonpolitical reasons, and we got to talk to reporters in our classroom. I was in fifth grade during the state’s last teachers’ strike, but I don’t recall the subject coming up at all after the strike ended.)

    The band certainly was and is patriotic, and that came from the top. In those days, and I assume today, the National Anthem was preceded by a patriotic drill that started with “Songs to Thee Wisconsin,” and then included some combination of “Bound for the Promised Land,” the spiritual “Simple Gifts” (from which came part of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring”), versions of “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful,” and like songs. That was probably a bigger challenge when UW Band director Mike Leckrone arrived on campus during the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

    There were a few political moments, but not many in my band days. One inadvertent controversy came when, during a debate over whether the band should play “You’ve Said It All” …

    … selected because fans at the 1973 NCAA hockey tournament wanted a polka …

    … which became a country song …

    … that when Budweiser used it in its commercials was criticized for allegedly promoting drinking …

    … Leckrone pointed out, correctly, that the melody of “The Star Spangled Banner” came from a British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.”

    (For those who think political issues have metastasized into ridiculousness in the 21st century, I present this as evidence that this has been the case longer than you might think.)

    I somehow managed to miss band members’ playing at an appearance of Gov. Anthony Earl shortly before he lost the 1986 election. I did, however, play at an event for state Sen. Carl Otte (D–Sheboygan), because I was told he was a “friend of the Band,” and more importantly for the free food and beer. (Afterward we ended up at a tavern — I’ll pause to allow readers to recover from the shock of that statement — to see Earl and a couple of his aides playing cribbage at a nearby table.) The band has also played for governors since Earl. If the governor calls, what are you going to do?

    Which brings to mind this amusing paraphrased story from Rick Telander’s book From Red Ink to Roses: The band generated some more controversy by greeting the Chicago Bears as all Wisconsinites should during a Packers game at which the band played. That apparently prompted a phone call from Gov. Tommy Thompson (a Republican) to UW–Madison chancellor Donna Shalala (not a Republican), during which (perhaps not with complete seriousness) Thompson asked Shalala what she was going to do about the band. To that, Shalala replied that she couldn’t very well reprimand the band for telling the truth.

    The biggest political incident in my band days came before the 1984 UW–Ohio State football game, which (in those days when not every game was on TV) was nationally televised by CBS. That meant an 11:05 a.m. kickoff, which pushed everything else back from the usual 1 or 1:30 p.m. starts. We played the National Anthem around 10:45 a.m. When we got to the line “And the rocket’s red glare” there came a sight so bizarre that it didn’t register at first — people running on the field past us. They were members of the anti-nuclear dance group (really) Nu Parable, previously known for getting kicked out of Madison shopping malls for their mime-like “die-in” in which they simulated becoming victims of a nuclear attack. This was during the 1984 presidential campaign, when left-leaning UW students (but I repeat myself) were absolutely convinced that, having inexplicably failed to destroy the world in a giant mushroom cloud during his first term, Ronald Reagan would certainly accomplish that feat during a second term in office.

    The crowd’s reaction was probably not what Nu Parable had in mind — booing once fans figured out what was going on, accompanied by the student section’s chanting “Nuke ’em!” A few of them made the mistake of “dying” in front of band members (unfortunately, not me), who literally marched over them, with one of the Nu Parables getting literally punted by a Marine reservist.

    After we were done playing, a few of us went over to watch them get arrested by UW police. One of them was our drum major, who always reminded me of the Grim Reaper. If looks could have killed, there would have been no second Nu Parable die-in, because they all would have dropped dead on the spot. As it was, when they had another “die-in” before the next pre-election home game, they stayed away from the band.

    The obligatory inside joke here is my having to contemplate voting for a tuba player. (The obligatory inside joke follow-up is that, I suppose, that beats having to vote for a reed-sucker.)

    Readers could correctly conclude that I planned on voting for Screnock before this anyway. Our common experience in the band taught us the value of hard work whether or not anyone notices, doing more than you physically (and otherwise) think you can do, the esprit de corps of being in the world’s best college marching band, and a term you hear a lot of today — accountability without excuses or blaming someone else for your own faults and problems. That doesn’t make the UW Band a right-wing organization, and if anyone thinks it does, they are wrong. If hard work, exceeding your self-imposed limits and personal accountability are values out of favor with liberals, that is their fault.

    As for Screnock’s opponent, who announced earlier this week that she has “San Francisco values,” greater San Francisco includes Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and the abomination known as the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band …

    … known for this list of things, and of course acting as tackling dummies.

    Compare and contrast:

    The other thing Judge Screnock and I have in common is that we grew up in an era where not everything, even on the UW–Madison campus, was political. As you know, the words “change” and “progress” are not synonyms. (Though I suspect Screnock and I would both agree that change in UW football and basketball since we were in the band is both change and progress.)

     

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  • The biggest Chevy (non-truck) of all

    March 30, 2018
    Wheels

    Long-time readers know my fondness for big, big cars of old, including my former 1975 Chevrolet Caprice, all 18 feet, 4,300 pounds and 11 mpg of it.

    Well, I’m not the only one. Riverside Green writes:

    A good friend of mine is the “Brougham Whisperer,” Jason Bagge, also known as Mr. Caprice, ha ha! He buys real cars about as often as I buy model cars. Which is to say, a lot. Most of those cars are 1970s land yachts, though not exclusively so. But one of his favorites are the Nimitz-class 1971-1976 Chevrolet Caprice. He’s owned several over the years, but perhaps the coolest one he had is the subject of today’s Klockau Classic. The 1976 Caprice Classic Landau. In triple black, no less!

    Living in the Pacific Northwest, he is in a great position to find clean old cars that just need a little love to be really nice. In fact, it’s uncanny. Every time he finds a new car I think, “Holy crap! I haven’t seen one of those since about 1993!” And then he sells it. And then, three months later, he finds ANOTHER one, often times nicer than the last one. The man has a knack for this stuff!

    Late last year, he sold this mint pistachio-hued 1974 Chevrolet Impala. It was nice when he got it. But he gave it that extra polish he is well known for in the old car hobby, including an NOS grille, new whitewalls, and myriad other things. At the time I told him this one should be the “keeper.” It was that nice. So of course he sold it. Ha ha!

    And almost exactly a year ago, I told him to keep this one, an ice blue metallic 1976 Caprice Classic Sport Sedan. I wrote it up right here at RG, and at the time he still had it. But not long after it was heading to the Midwest, to its new owner in Chicagoland!

    But that’s how it goes. He sees a car, performs his magic, enjoys the car a while, someone makes him an offer he can’t refuse, and the car is away and the search for a new classic is on!

    Which brings us to the elusive, Broughamtastic 1976 Chevrolet Caprice Classic Landau.

    A couple of years ago Jason was scouring the online classifieds when he spotted this. It had been turned into a half-assed lowrider (little wheels but no hydraulics, heh!) but it was a genuine factory triple black Landau (meaning black paint, interior and top, for those of you born before the Brougham Age).

    He had to have it. And he got it! And immediately began working on it. The interior was a little rough, but the doofy little wheels were almost immediately ditched, sold, and factory wheels and Caprice wheel covers were sourced. Along with brand new whitewall tires. Naturally.

    But those standard Caprice Classic wheelcovers were just placeholders. You see, the Landau package, available on two-door Caprice Classics and Impalas, came with their very own wheel cover style. And were color-keyed to the car’s paint for Maximum Broughaminess.

    So of course the “regular” Caprice Classic wheel covers just wouldn’t do long-term. Jason was able to acquire the correct ones, and painstakingly masked them off and painted them to match. Fun fact: The 1976 Landau wheel covers were the standard 1975 Caprice Classic wheel discs, but with painted centers. Ebay is your friend!

    In no time the Landau was looking damn fine! As it should be.

    The biggest talking point on all 1976 Caprice Classics were quad rectangular headlamps, giving the Caprices a decidedly Cadillac-like look up front. Of course there was a new grille too.

    The top of the heap was the Classic Landau, which added an Elk-grained Landau vinyl roof, accent stripes, dual color-keyed sport mirrors, and deluxe bumpers with rubber impact strips front and rear.

    Said dual sport mirrors included a remote control for the driver’s side. Rounding out the special features were “Landau” script etched into the quarter window glass and the aforementioned special wheel covers with color-keyed centers and “Landau” center caps.

    The Caprice Classic Landau retailed for $5,284 new, and that was before any options were added. But even that base price was a healthy bump over the standard Classic two-door coupe, whose MSRP was $5,043.

    At the end of the model year the regular Caprice Classic was the winner sales-wise, but Landau sales were not too shabby either. 28,161 regular Caprice Classic coupes were sold, while Caprice Classic Landau production was 21,926.

    Today any stock Caprice Classic from The Year Of Our Lord 1976 is rare, as these automobiles have fallen prey to myriad custom-car aficionados. And said demand has bumped the price of these “Whopper” Caprices in the market. They are certainly no longer the old, worn-out $900 beaters they were circa 1991. Jason will tell you!

    When he got done with the car, it looked terrific! He was hoping to source upholstery for the somewhat worn interior when someone offered him a ton of money for it. So with some regret, the car moved on. Too bad. I loved this one. I messaged Jason at least a couple of times, saying ‘keep this car!’ But money talks and…well, you know.

    But wait! There’s even more. As we speak a new car has been acquired and is on the way to Jason’s driveway, so stay tuned. You will hear all about it, later this year! Until then, keep calm and Brougham on!

    What’s interesting to me is that, other than the “pistachio-hued” Impala, every Caprice here is a ’76. These represent a few of what’s left of the 152,806 Caprices built (many in the late Janesville plant) and sold in the 1976 model year. There were 21,929 Landau coupes, as opposed to 28,161 non-Landau coupes. (We had a non-Landau coupe; I can find no breakdowns of 1975 production by body style.) The four-door Caprice pictured here is a Sport Sedan (as if the term “sport” applies to an 18-foot-long car), notable by the window in the C-pillar and the nonexistent B-pillar, of which 55,308 were built, as opposed to the 47,411 non-Sport Sedan sedans.

    Interestingly, perhaps, those 152,806 Caprices represented a huge sales jump from 1975, when 103,944 (including the last 8,349 convertibles) were sold. I don’t know how widely it was known (except perhaps among car buffs) that GM was downsizing its full-size cars for 1977. Perhaps that had something to do with the 47-percent jump in sales. The sales jump is unlikely to have been because of the few changes from ’75 to ’76, including the rectangular headlights and replacement of the instrument-panel-knob pictograms with woodgrain. (Really.)

    Bagge has two videos of the black ’76, which includes what is known derisively as the “Mark of Excellence” — a cracked dashboard. This has a 400 V-8, the biggest small-block V-8 Chevy ever made. It doesn’t have the ironic option of the temperature gauge (only because some car buffs looked askance at the 400 for its cylinder head design that was claimed to be prone to overheating) and Econominder, a fuel economy (actually engine vacuum) gauge.

    Bagge’s Caprices represent cars no one will ever make anymore. Technologically cars today are much more capable, but most of them are destined to be remembered as much as your previous refrigerator. My Caprice represented my first taste of transportation freedom. Perhaps any car I was able to drive with my new driver’s license might have, but that car did.

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  • Ended by surprise like everything else I’ve been through

    March 30, 2018
    History, Music

    The History of Rock Facebook page tells the story of one of the more amusing moments in rock and non-rock-music history tied to this song:

    On March 27th of 1971, the very popular song … was pulled from rotation by an influential radio station. It was the ‘flagship’ radio station of the NBC network. Other stations across their vast radio network soon followed suit … due to pressure from censors and higher-ups at the network and that’s what brings all of the things and/or people in the pics below to my post here. They include…

    • Jerry Garcia
    • WNBC, a now defunct radio station in New York City
    • Lawrence Welk
    • 2 singers from the Lawrence Welk show by the names of Gail Farrell & Dick Dale
    • Myron Floren, the accordionist from that show
    • And of course, last but certainly not least, Brewer & Shipley, in a concert promo flyer within the pics … with a song that can be described as a ONE HIT WONDER in more than one way. A song that was controversial for more than one reason as well

    Like for instance, Jerry Garcia had been hired to play steel guitar on the “Tarkio” album from 1970 that this song comes from. There was no need for steel guitar on this song…but when it was released as a single … Jerry played on the song on the B side … by the name of “Oh Mommy (I Aint No Commie)” … which is a song about being ‘allowed’ under federal law to start up a revolution.

    … Brewer says, “We wrote that one night in the dressing room of a coffee house. We were literally just entertaining ourselves. The next day we got together to do some picking and said, ‘What was that we were messing with last night?’ We remembered it, and in about an hour, we’d written ‘One Toke Over the Line.’ Just making ourselves laugh, really. We had no idea that it would ever even be considered as a single, because it was just another song to us. Actually Tom and I always thought that our ballads were our forte.

    The incident that sparked this song happened at the Vanguard in Kansas City, Missouri. The band was playing the show because, in seeking to escape the LA music scene, they started a tour of their Midwest homelands. Shipley reports that he was given a block of hash and told to take two hits. He ignored the advice and instead took three. Shipley says, “I go out of the dressing room – I’m also a banjo player, but I didn’t have one, so I was playing my guitar — and Michael (Brewer) came in and I said, ‘Jesus, Michael, I’m one toke over the line.’ And to be perfect honest, I don’t remember if Michael was with me when I took that hit or not. I remember it as ‘not’; I think Michael remembers it as ‘yes.’ And he started to sing to what I was playing, and I chimed in and boom, we had the line.”

    Brewer also remembers the occasion. “I just cracked up,” he said. “I thought it was hysterical. And right on the spot, we just started singing, ‘One toke over the line, sweet Jesus,’ and that was about it; then we went onstage.”

    Now, jump to the very conservative, family oriented, WHOLESOME tv show from back in the day…by the name of The Lawrence Welk Show. The host and his compatriots were famous for playing music of all kinds…but also for playing it with big band and/or polka instruments. Welk had heard the song by Brewer & Shipley and put it on his show (also in 1971), to be performed by 2 of his many regular performers. When the song’s slot came up in the show…accordionist Myron Floren who would often introduce acts, called it, “one of the newer songs”. At which point, singers Gail Farrell & Dick Dale launched into their wholesome rendition of “One Toke Over The Line”. At the end of the song…Lawrence bookended their performance by saying, “there you’ve heard A MODERN SPIRITUAL by Gail and Dale”…..

    I am absolutely convinced that of everyone in this Lawrence Welk clip, Floren (of whom my grandparents were big fans, and saw him in concert at least twice) is the only person here who knew what the song was about, which explains his, uh, throat-clearing moment.

     

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  • Presty the DJ for March 30

    March 30, 2018
    Music

    The number one single today in 1957 was the first number one rock and roll single to be written by its singer:

    The number one single today in 1963 …

    … which sounds suspiciously similar to a song released seven years later:

    (more…)

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  • The non-student leaders of the student anti-gun movement

    March 29, 2018
    US politics

    Jacob Sullum:

    David Hogg began his speech at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday by accusing Marco Rubio, Florida’s Republican senator, of exchanging students’ lives for donations from the National Rifle Association. Dividing the $3 million or so that Rubio has received from the NRA over the years by the number of primary and secondary students in Florida, Hogg figured that the senator had charged $1.05 for each of the 14 teenagers killed in the February 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where Hogg is a senior.

    Hogg and the other young activists who attended demonstrations across the country on Saturday to demand legislation aimed at preventing school shootings may have energized the debate about gun control, but they certainly have not elevated it. Taking their cues from the grownups they say have failed them, Hogg and his compatriots assume their opponents are motivated by greed, cowardice, and crass political considerations—anything but honest disagreement.

    “School safety is not a political issue,” the March for Our Lives website insists. “There cannot be two sides to doing everything in our power to ensure the lives and futures of children who are at risk of dying when they should be learning, playing, and growing.”

    There cannot be two sides. That sort of logic practically demands contempt for anyone who does not share your policy preferences, as illustrated by Hogg’s comments about legislators who do not vote the way he thinks they should.

    “They’re pathetic fuckers that want to keep killing our children,” Hogg said in an interview with The Outline. “They could have blood from children spattered all over their faces, and they wouldn’t take action, because they all still see those dollar signs.”

    Hogg is only 17, but comments from older, supposedly wiser advocates of gun control reflect a similar attitude. “If you’re a political leader doing nothing about this slaughter,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted after the Parkland attack, “you’re an accomplice.”

    Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is five times as old as David Hogg, shares his assumptions about people who disagree with her, although she expresses them in more temperate terms. “The students protesting inaction on gun safety,” she tweeted on March 14, “have the courage to stand up to the NRA and lawmakers would do well to follow their example.”

    If fear of the NRA is the only conceivable reason why people would fail to support the legislation favored by Hogg, Murphy, and Feinstein, there is no point in debating whether, say, an “assault weapon” ban, a limit on the capacity of magazines, or background checks for every gun transfer can reasonably be expected to have a meaningful impact on the frequency or lethality of mass shootings. The only sensible course is to shame or scare people into doing what everyone knows is the right thing—whatever that happens to be at any given moment.

    “Our lives are more important than your guns,” said a sign held by a teenager at the D.C. rally. Similar slogans, presumably written by adults, could be seen on signs held by preschoolers. The implicit message—that Americans must surrender their firearms and their Second Amendment rights in the name of protecting children—was not exactly designed to provoke a fruitful dialogue. But that approach makes sense if you think all the relevant issues have already been settled.

    Lara Vance, a middle-aged Kentucky woman who was interviewed at the D.C. rally, said she was “rather shocked that this is even an issue.” After all, “This is something that can be solved. It doesn’t take a lot of thought. We know what the problems are, and we need Congress to get their act together and get this problem solved.”

    I disagree with pretty much every part of that, but I have no doubt that Vance sincerely believes it. I wish she would extend me the same courtesy.

    University of Maryland Prof. Dana Fisher adds:

    In the days before and after more than two million Americans participated in the March for Our Lives, the gun-violence conversation has focused on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivors and their “student movement.”

    The school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and the passion of the teenage survivors have become a catalyst for the current movement. With the help of some well-resourced benefactors, including Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney, the survivors organized an extraordinary rally in D.C. and sister marches around the country in a mere six weeks.

    However, the young faces of the advocates have created an assumption that “youth” and “students” are the core of the movement. My research tells a different story about who participated in the March for Our Lives — and it is more complicated and less well-packaged for prime time.

    As part of my research on the American Resistance, I have been working with a research team to survey protesters at all the large-scale protest events in Washington since President Trump’s inauguration. By snaking through the crowd and sampling every fifth person at designated increments within the staging area, we are able to gather a field approximation of a random sample. So far, the data set includes surveys collected from 1,745 protest participants.

    During the March for Our Lives, my team sampled 256 people who were randomly selected. This gives us the chance to provide evidence about who attended the March for Our Lives and why.

    Like other resistance protests, and like previous gun-control marches, the March for Our Lives was mostly women. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March was 85 percent women, the March for Our Lives was 70 percent women. Further, participants were highly educated; 72 percent had a BA or higher.

    Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.

    Participants were also more likely than those at recent marches to be first-time protesters. About 27 percent of participants at the March for Our Lives had never protested before. This group was less politically engaged in general: Only about a third of them had contacted an elected official in the past year, while about three-quarters of the more seasoned protesters had.

    Even more interesting, the new protesters were less motivated by the issue of gun control. In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue, compared with 60 percent of the participants with experience protesting. …

    The March for Our Lives had the allure of a free concert — in fact, the event’s website maintained a list of performers but never listed the speakers. But it is one thing to turn out to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ariana Grande perform, and quite another to vote in the midterm election in November.

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Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

The thoughts of a journalist/libertarian–conservative/Christian husband, father, Eagle Scout and aficionado of obscure rock music. Thoughts herein are only the author’s and not necessarily the opinions of his family, friends, neighbors, church members or past, present or future employers.

  • Steve
    • About, or, Who is this man?
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Adventures in ruralu0026nbsp;inkBack in June 2009, I was driving somewhere through a rural area. And for some reason, I had a flashback to two experiences in my career about that time of year many years ago. In 1988, eight days after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, I started work at the Grant County Herald Independent in Lancaster as a — well, the — reporter. Four years after that, on my 27th birthday, I purchased, with a business partner, the Tri-County Press in Cuba City, my first business venture. Both were experiences about which Wisconsin author Michael Perry might write. I thought about all this after reading a novel, The Deadline, written by a former newspaper editor and publisher. (Now who would write a novel about a weekly newspaper?) As a former newspaper owner, I picked at some of it — why finance a newspaper purchase through the bank if the seller is willing to finance it? Because the mean bank lender is a plot point! — and it is much more interesting than reality, but it is very well written, with a nicely twisting plot, and quite entertaining, again more so than reality. There is something about that first job out of college that makes you remember it perhaps more…
    • Adventures in radioI’ve been in the full-time work world half my life. For that same amount of time I’ve been broadcasting sports as a side interest, something I had wanted to since I started listening to games on radio and watching on TV, and then actually attending games. If you ask someone who’s worked in radio for some time about the late ’70s TV series “WKRP in Cincinnati,” most of them will tell you that, if anything, the series understated how wacky working in radio can be. Perhaps the funniest episode in the history of TV is the “WKRP” episode, based on a true story, about the fictional radio station’s Thanksgiving promotion — throwing live turkeys out of a helicopter under the mistaken belief that, in the words of WKRP owner Arthur Carlson, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST01bZJPuE0] I’ve never been involved in anything like that. I have announced games from the roofs of press boxes (once on a nice day, and once in 50-mph winds), from a Mississippi River bluff (more on that later), and from the front row of the second balcony of the University of Wisconsin Fieldhouse (great view, but not a place to go if…
    • “Good morning/afternoon/evening, ________ fans …”
    • My biggest storyEarlier this week, while looking for something else, I came upon some of my own work. (I’m going to write a blog someday called “Things I Found While Looking for Something Else.” This is not that blog.) The Grant County Sheriff’s Department, in the county where I used to live, has a tribute page to the two officers in county history who died in the line of duty. One is William Loud, a deputy marshal in Cassville, shot to death by two bank robbers in 1912. The other is Tom Reuter, a Grant County deputy sheriff who was shot to death at the end of his 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift March 18, 1990. Gregory Coulthard, then a 19-year-old farmhand, was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide and is serving a life sentence, with his first eligibility for parole on March 18, 2015, just 3½ years from now. I’ve written a lot over the years. I think this, from my first two years in the full-time journalism world, will go down as the story I remember the most. For journalists, big stories contain a paradox, which was pointed out in CBS-TV’s interview of Andy Rooney on his last “60 Minutes” Sunday. Morley Safer said something along the line…
  • Food and drink
    • The Roesch/Prestegard familyu0026nbsp;cookbookFrom the family cookbook(s) All the families I’m associated with love to eat, so it’s a good thing we enjoy cooking. The first out-of-my-house food memory I have is of my grandmother’s cooking for Christmas or other family occasions. According to my mother, my grandmother had a baked beans recipe that she would make for my mother. Unfortunately, the recipe seems to have  disappeared. Also unfortunately, my early days as a picky, though voluminous, eater meant I missed a lot of those recipes made from such wholesome ingredients as lard and meat fat. I particularly remember a couple of meals that involve my family. The day of Super Bowl XXXI, my parents, my brother, my aunt and uncle and a group of their friends got together to share lots of food and cheer on the Packers to their first NFL title in 29 years. (After which Jannan and I drove to Lambeau Field in the snow,  but that’s another story.) Then, on Dec. 31, 1999, my parents, my brother, my aunt and uncle and Jannan and I (along with Michael in utero) had a one-course-per-hour meal to appropriately end years beginning with the number 1. Unfortunately I can’t remember what we…
    • SkålI was the editor of Marketplace Magazine for 10 years. If I had to point to one thing that demonstrates improved quality of life since I came to Northeast Wisconsin in 1994, it would be … … the growth of breweries and  wineries in Northeast Wisconsin. The former of those two facts makes sense, given our heritage as a brewing state. The latter is less self-evident, since no one thinks of Wisconsin as having a good grape-growing climate. Some snobs claim that apple or cherry wines aren’t really wines at all. But one of the great facets of free enterprise is the opportunity to make your own choice of what food and drink to drink. (At least for now, though some wish to restrict our food and drink choices.) Wisconsin’s historically predominant ethnic group (and our family’s) is German. Our German ancestors did unfortunately bring large government and high taxes with them, but they also brought beer. Europeans brought wine with them, since they came from countries with poor-quality drinking water. Within 50 years of a wave of mid-19th-century German immigration, brewing had become the fifth largest industry in the U.S., according to Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. Beer and wine have…
  • Wheels
    • America’s sports carMy birthday in June dawned without a Chevrolet Corvette in front of my house. (The Corvette at the top of the page was featured at the 2007 Greater Milwaukee Auto Show. The copilot is my oldest son, Michael.) Which isn’t surprising. I have three young children, and I have a house with a one-car garage. (Then again, this would be more practical, though a blatant pluck-your-eyes-out violation of the Corvette ethos. Of course, so was this.) The reality is that I’m likely to be able to own a Corvette only if I get a visit from the Corvette Fairy, whose office is next door to the Easter Bunny. (I hope this isn’t foreshadowing: When I interviewed Dave Richter of Valley Corvette for a car enthusiast story in the late great Marketplace Magazine, he said that the most popular Corvette in most fans’ minds was a Corvette built during their days in high school. This would be a problem for me in that I graduated from high school in 1983, when no Corvette was built.) The Corvette is one of those cars whose existence may be difficult to understand within General Motors Corp. The Corvette is what is known as a “halo car,” a car that drives people into showrooms, even if…
    • Barges on fouru0026nbsp;wheelsI originally wrote this in September 2008.  At the Fox Cities Business Expo Tuesday, a Smart car was displayed at the United Way Fox Cities booth. I reported that I once owned a car into which trunk, I believe, the Smart could be placed, with the trunk lid shut. This is said car — a 1975 Chevrolet Caprice coupe (ours was dark red), whose doors are, I believe, longer than the entire Smart. The Caprice, built down Interstate 90 from us Madisonians in Janesville (a neighbor of ours who worked at the plant probably helped put it together) was the flagship of Chevy’s full-size fleet (which included the stripper Bel Air and middle-of-the-road Impala), featuring popular-for-the-time vinyl roofs, better sound insulation, an upgraded cloth interior, rear fender skirts and fancy Caprice badges. The Caprice was 18 feet 1 inch long and weighed 4,300 pounds. For comparison: The midsize Chevrolet of the ear was the Malibu, which was the same approximate size as the Caprice after its 1977 downsizing. The compact Chevrolet of the era was the Nova, which was 200 inches long — four inches longer than a current Cadillac STS. Wikipedia’s entry on the Caprice has this amusing sentence: “As fuel economy became a bigger priority among Americans…
    • Behind the wheel
    • Collecting only dust or rust
    • Coooooooooooupe!
    • Corvettes on the screen
    • The garage of misfit cars
    • 100 years (and one day) of our Chevrolets
    • They built Excitement, sort of, once in a while
    • A wagon by any otheru0026nbsp;nameFirst written in 2008. You will see more don’t-call-them-station-wagons as you drive today. Readers around my age have probably had some experience with a vehicle increasingly rare on the road — the station wagon. If you were a Boy Scout or Girl Scout, or were a member of some kind of youth athletic team, or had a large dog, or had relatives approximately your age, or had friends who needed to be transported somewhere, or had parents who occasionally had to haul (either in the back or in a trailer) more than what could be fit inside a car trunk, you (or, actually, your parents) were the target demographic for the station wagon. “Station wagons came to be like covered wagons — so much family activity happened in those cars,” said Tim Cleary, president of the American Station Wagon Owners Association, in Country Living magazine. Wagons “were used for everything from daily runs to the grocery store to long summer driving trips, and while many men and women might have wanted a fancier or sportier car, a station wagon was something they knew they needed for the family.” The “station wagon” originally was a vehicle with a covered seating area to take people between train stations…
    • Wheels on theu0026nbsp;screenBetween my former and current blogs, I wrote a lot about automobiles and TV and movies. Think of this post as killing two birds (Thunderbirds? Firebirds? Skylarks?) with one stone. Most movies and TV series view cars the same way most people view cars — as A-to-B transportation. (That’s not counting the movies or series where the car is the plot, like the haunted “Christine” or “Knight Rider” or the “Back to the Future” movies.) The philosophy here, of course, is that cars are not merely A-to-B transportation. Which disqualifies most police shows from what you’re about to read, even though I’ve watched more police video than anything else, because police cars are plain Jane vehicles. The highlight in a sense is in the beginning: The car chase in my favorite movie, “Bullitt,” featuring Steve McQueen’s 1968 Ford Mustang against the bad guys’ 1968 Dodge Charger: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMc2RdFuOxIu0026amp;fmt=18] One year before that (but I didn’t see this until we got Telemundo on cable a couple of years ago) was a movie called “Operación 67,” featuring (I kid you not) a masked professional wrestler, his unmasked sidekick, and some sort of secret agent plot. (Since I don’t know Spanish and it’s not…
    • While riding in my Cadillac …
  • Entertainments
    • Brass rocksThose who read my former blog last year at this time, or have read this blog over the past months, know that I am a big fan of the rock group Chicago. (Back when they were a rock group and not a singer of sappy ballads, that is.) Since rock music began from elements of country music, jazz and the blues, brass rock would seem a natural subgenre of rock music. A lot of ’50s musical acts had saxophone players, and some played with full orchestras … [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CPS-WuUKUE] … but it wasn’t until the more-or-less simultaneous appearances of Chicago and Blood Sweat u0026amp; Tears on the musical scene (both groups formed in 1967, both had their first charting singles in 1969, and they had the same producer) that the usual guitar/bass/keyboard/drum grouping was augmented by one or more trumpets, a sax player and a trombone player. While Chicago is my favorite group (but you knew that already), the first brass rock song I remember hearing was BSu0026amp;T’s “Spinning Wheel” — not in its original form, but on “Sesame Street,” accompanied by, yes, a giant spinning wheel. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi9sLkyhhlE] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxWSOuNsN20] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9U34uPjz-g] I remember liking Chicago’s “Just You ‘n Me” when it was released as a single, and…
    • Drive and Eat au0026nbsp;RockThe first UW home football game of each season also is the opener for the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, the world’s finest college marching band. (How the UW Band has not gotten the Sudler Trophy, which is to honor the country’s premier college marching bands, is beyond my comprehension.) I know this because I am an alumnus of the UW Band. I played five years (in the last rank of the band, Rank 25, motto: “Where Men Are Tall and Run-On Is Short”), marching in 39 football games at Camp Randall Stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois (worst artificial turf I had ever seen), the University of Nevada–Las Vegas’ Sam Boyd Silver Bowl, the former Dyche Stadium at Northwestern University, five high school fields and, in my one bowl game, Legion Field in Birmingham, Ala., site of the 1984 Hall of Fame Bowl. The UW Band was, without question, the most memorable experience of my college days, and one of the most meaningful experiences of my lifetime. It was the most physical experience of my lifetime, to be sure. Fifteen minutes into my first Registration…
    • Keep on rockin’ in the freeu0026nbsp;worldOne of my first ambitions in communications was to be a radio disc jockey, and to possibly reach the level of the greats I used to listen to from WLS radio in Chicago, which used to be one of the great 50,000-watt AM rock stations of the country, back when they still existed. (Those who are aficionados of that time in music and radio history enjoyed a trip to that wayback machine when WLS a Memorial Day Big 89 Rewind, excerpts of which can be found on their Web site.) My vision was to be WLS’ afternoon DJ, playing the best in rock music between 2 and 6, which meant I wouldn’t have to get up before the crack of dawn to do the morning show, yet have my nights free to do whatever glamorous things big-city DJs did. Then I learned about the realities of radio — low pay, long hours, zero job security — and though I have dabbled in radio sports, I’ve pretty much cured myself of the idea of working in radio, even if, to quote WAPL’s Len Nelson, “You come to work every day just like everybody else does, but we’re playing rock ’n’ roll songs, we’re cuttin’ up.…
    • Monday on the flight line, not Saturday in the park
    • Music to drive by
    • The rock ofu0026nbsp;WisconsinWikipedia begins its item “Music of Wisconsin” thusly: Wisconsin was settled largely by European immigrants in the late 19th century. This immigration led to the popularization of galops, schottisches, waltzes, and, especially, polkas. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl7wCczgNUc] So when I first sought to write a blog piece about rock musicians from Wisconsin, that seemed like a forlorn venture. Turned out it wasn’t, because when I first wrote about rock musicians from Wisconsin, so many of them that I hadn’t mentioned came up in the first few days that I had to write a second blog entry fixing the omissions of the first. This list is about rock music, so it will not include, for instance, Milwaukee native and Ripon College graduate Al Jarreau, who in addition to having recorded a boatload of music for the jazz and adult contemporary/easy listening fan, also recorded the theme music for the ’80s TV series “Moonlighting.” Nor will it include Milwaukee native Eric Benet, who was for a while known more for his former wife, Halle Berry, than for his music, which includes four number one singles on the Ru0026amp;B charts, “Spend My Life with You” with Tamia, “Hurricane,” “Pretty Baby” and “You’re the Only One.” Nor will it include Wisconsin’s sizable contributions to big…
    • Steve TV: All Steve, All the Time
    • “Super Steve, Man of Action!”
    • Too much TV
    • The worst music of allu0026nbsp;timeThe rock group Jefferson Airplane titled its first greatest-hits compilation “The Worst of Jefferson Airplane.” Rolling Stone magazine was not being ironic when it polled its readers to decide the 10 worst songs of the 1990s. I’m not sure I agree with all of Rolling Stone’s list, but that shouldn’t be surprising; such lists are meant for debate, after all. To determine the “worst,” songs appropriate for the “Vinyl from Hell” segment that used to be on a Madison FM rock station, requires some criteria, which does not include mere overexposure (for instance, “Macarena,” the video of which I find amusing since it looks like two bankers are singing it). Before we go on: Blog posts like this one require multimedia, so if you find a song you hate on this blog, I apologize. These are also songs that I almost never listen to because my sound system has a zero-tolerance policy — if I’m listening to the radio or a CD and I hear a song I don’t like, it’s, to quote Bad Company, gone gone gone. My blonde wife won’t be happy to read that one of her favorite ’90s songs, 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up,” starts the list. (However,…
    • “You have the right to remain silent …”
  • Madison
    • Blasts from the Madison media past
    • Blasts from my Madison past
    • Blasts from our Madison past
    • What’s the matter with Madison?
    • Wisconsin – Madison = ?
  • Sports
    • Athletic aesthetics, or “cardinal” vs. “Big Red”
    • Choose your own announcer
    • La Follette state 1982 (u0022It was 30 years ago todayu0022)
    • The North Dakota–Wisconsin Hockey Fight of 1982
    • Packers vs. Brewers
  • Hall of Fame
    • The case(s) against teacher unions
    • The Class of 1983
    • A hairy subject, or face the face
    • It’s worse than you think
    • It’s worse than you think, 2010–11 edition
    • My favorite interview subject of all time
    • Oh look! Rural people!
    • Prestegard for president!
    • Unions vs. the facts, or Hiding in plain sight
    • When rhetoric goes too far
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