I should save this 'til next month but life is so short.

It can be even shorter when you make a regular habit of firecracker slumber parties. But it looks like so much fun. This one comes from Cecelia in Austin, Texas. To make some attempt at being proper, it is the work of one Justin Blyth. You can see other things he did HERE.

Meaty Puppets

I saw the Meat Puppets last night at the EARL. I was stoked at the beginning of each song.
Also, I was fascinated by the bass player's perfect, tear drop-shaped boobs. He's the one holding a guitar upside down.

My friends are drunks

I've come to the realization that this blog is essentially a satanic neck tattoo that I keep on the Internet, in terms of finding gainful employment anyhow. It's worse really. I don't even have to show up for an interview. Prospective employers can simply Google my neck tattoo.

So I may as well have it all out now. Some friends of mine from college, Lindsey and Leo, have an ongoing multimedia project called Lush Life: www.livethelushlife.com. It deals with all the finer things in life that have alcohol in them. So, I decided it was pretty germane to my ongoing project over here, especially when Leo told me about the 12 second cocktails. This is their Tumblr page where you can watch little videos where they make uncomplicated cocktails. They have received some enviable viewer responses.

"This kid responded to our 12 second cocktails with his 12 second cocktail," says Leo.

"It's called 'too much rum' and it's rum in a pint glass," he says.

"That's a cocktail?" I ask over a shitty cell phone connection.

"In that you drink it and it has alcohol," he says.

I want these kids to do, like, a guest week on Bad Idea Potluck.

You may view instructions for too much rum HERE.

Its creator is officially the Bad Idea Icon of the June, even if, as Leo has suggested, the "rum" in the video is actually beer.

Letters: Bad Idea Exit Strategy

This one comes from Tina in New York! Extra spite gets you extra points!

Per your request, like, a month ago, here is how I am NOT going to exit my job:

I work in the dean's office at a large, moderately prestigious, university. Trust me, you've heard of it. In the course of my job, I work with one of two classes of students: the best and brightest, and the ones who have gotten themselves in a world of shit. Generally, the kids who have gotten themselves in a world of shit who end up on the other side of my desk are entitled little assholes who expect to be bailed out of their mess because mommy and daddy gave the school a big ol' endowment, or because mommy and daddy always bail them out of everything, and they've just come to believe that life has no consequences over the years. These sorts tend to be repeat offenders, and as the offenses escalate over their years at the university, so does their sense of entitlement. The problem is that, unfortunately, they're right, and mommy and daddy DO actually continue to bail them out, and they never get the administrative ass-kicking they so richly deserve.

Next year, I'll probably be leaving my job. I'll have finished a graduate degree in a field I'm passionate about, and I'll be qualified to get a job in said field, so there's no reason for me to stick around and continue taking abuse from the endless rotation of stuck-up little shits that end up in my office. Although several of the more egregious offenders have since graduated, by the time I'm ready to give notice, there will be a fair number of these obnoxious students still enrolled. When I leave, I would like to exact my revenge in the following manner: I'd like to write a letter of expulsion to each of these kids, in the dean's name. It would be really easy - I have access to official letterhead, and a jpg of the dean's signature. I would print them from a public access printer so it couldn't be traced back to my office. I'd also wait a week or so after I was gone, and then return to campus and drop the letters in a university outbox. There would be no way it would get back to me, or anyone else left working in my office.

Thing is, it would leave my boss with a lot of explaining to do, and I really like her. She's been absolutely wonderful over the years, and she gets enough grief without me adding to it, so I'm not going to celebrate my resignation this way. Probably.

Baby birds are so fly

The nest is very precarious and located directly above my back door. Yikes.

Beer of June: Abita Strawberry Harvest Lager

The Abita Strawberry Harvest Lager is my first Abita beer. Some popular Abita beers have frightening names for something you are supposed to put in your stomach, such as "Turbodog" and "Purple Haze," so I have passed the brand over in the past.

The strawberry at least is super refreshing and great for summer. It has a delicate, not-too-sweet flavor a bit like herbal tea with a hint of fruit. You barely realize you are drinking, which means you can tell yourself that you aren't!

It's seasonal so don't sleep on it. Check it out.

How I will save the newspapers

First of all, if newspapers are going to exist in the future they are going to have to operate on a shoe string. Plenty of people make money off of print media and the web. They just don't make a lot of money. Maybe the future of journalism will look like the past of journalism. In the early days, journalists led far more miserable lives than they do today, which is saying something. Today journalists have fancy degrees and make enough to live in the suburbs, as one veteran of the field observed to me. This is bad.

In the future there may be less work for journalists and journalism may have to step down from its lofty position as a respected profession. Journalists may have to go back to being like other writers: poor people who are generally mistrusted by society and looked down on by their families.

People worry that without huge corporate-owned media conglomerates there will be no decent coverage of international news. This just in: there is no decent coverage of international news. Newspapers and other news outlets haven't been investing in that for years.

A small, lean, independent and web-oriented newspaper business might find that it actually doesn't cost that much to send a brave, reasonably articulate kid overseas with a camera. This will become clearer after all the giants collapse.

(I have an alternate theory that newspapers will really go the way of the dodo, that TV news will just have to get better and that written journalism in the future will be funded by television stations and mostly will be available on the web as a supplement to TV news and podcasts, which will all simply have to get better. These written news stories will have to justify their existence by being either lightning quick updates or seriously in-depth and fascinating reports that expand on subjects touched on in necessarily short TV spots. But I don't think it has to turn out that way.)

(Oddly enough, NPR is quietly doing a terrific job of having a useful and interesting multimedia web presence. But they are not for profit so no one is going to take them seriously as a model, even though they are one of the best news sources in America and everyone fucking knows it.)

But back to newspapers sucking so hard. I fell in love with newspapers as a child, and especially with the international news features I read in the New York Times. I love a well-written, in-depth news or feature story, but I feel like something has gone wrong in the culture of newspapers. I think it somehow stems, ironically, from the fact that the towering accomplishments of journalists since the field became professionalized have been so very breathtaking. Then came the destruction of the World Trade Center and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The latter two were treated as justifiably foregone conclusions by the shell-shocked mainstream media. They never recovered from that and now I don't care if they ever do. I felt, and still feel, abandoned.

I found an intelligent and in-depth response to what was going on around me in books and in scattered magazine articles, even in comics, but not in newspapers and certainly not on television.

And this is my problem with the extreme responsibility of newspapers. The fear of seeming biased, the idolization of objectivity as an ideal that can never be questioned, leads to coverage that is kind of dumb. You don't just write down everything the president says and print it. If that's all you are doing then what good is all your supposedly valuable "access"? Reporters today are expected to know more and more but think less and less. Slow the fuck down and think. Screw your damn 24-hour news cycle.

I realize that there is some great reporting going on but I think that it has been going on in defiance of the prevailing culture in news and not because of it. The concept of objectivity as practiced in newspapers is hypocritical and needs a total overhaul.

The book pictured above is The Sun and the Moon by Matthew Goodman. Despite the fact that it is a book about the New York Sun in the 19th century printing a false science story about a telescope that revealed man-bats living on the moon, I found it very inspiring.
In the good old days some reporters were educated but others were not that educated. And most newspapers had a clear bias. For me, there is something so clean and honest about that. Especially since these biases were often vociferous and extreme.

Papers called other papers on their shit and argued for totally crazy Utopian visions like an America without slavery where women could vote. We need to get back to that and stop wringing our hands over things like "balance" and "libel." No one individual publication need shoulder the paternalistic burden of presenting a measured response to events and interpreting them for an ignorant public. We don't live in that world anymore. Everything that has ever happened is on YouTube now.

Unfortunately, nearly all newspapers shoulder that useless burden and the result is that they are really dull. Maybe they are failing because you can read all of them on the Internet and they are all saying the same things and reprinting the same stories in accordance with conventional wisdom. Any paper that does something even slightly different has an immediate economic edge over the competition.

Op-ed columns usually only have opinions that are reasonably palatable and, whether right or left, can be expected to represent the pre-existing opinions of some percentage of readers. This is a boring and pointless approach to opinion and news analysis. Exciting and truly controversial ideas should not be relegated to special interest publications and intellectual magazines of various stripes. Why can't I open a newspaper and be surprised by what I find there? (Okay, the Wall Street Journal does a decent job of shaking things up.)

Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy but that doesn't mean the press itself is. Not through its very existence anyway. Newspapers need to stop putting on airs and acting like the saviors of the free world and the sole protectors of truth. For one thing, they clearly don't have a corner on that market now and they never did.

Once the giant dinosaurs die out, they can be replaced by cool, humble little mammals and the cycle will begin anew. But, for a time, the little mammals can be useful, relevant and possibly even economically viable.

Note: I will not be starting one of these publications of the past/future myself but I am willing to work for one as a consultant for a small retainer.