NYT: "It takes a tough man to tell a bad joke."

But apparently, guys with man-boobs can tell them too. Nice photo, Toby.

Black flies in my chardonnay

Two ironies not lost on me:

∙ The music from The Natural playing after Sammy Sosa hit his 600th home run.

∙ President Bush telling us, "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical. And it is not the only option before us."

Swingin' A's, again

You have to wonder whether Ray Ratto knew about the rumor referenced here when he wrote this column.

Says Ratto:

I mean, when you have the best numbers in baseball, you don't get to go winery hopping with your wife (or anyone else's, for that matter).

#2

Here.

My new gig

First post here.

And the beards have all grown longer overnight

It's nice to know that while some people in the Jam-Band State consider secession to protest "electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, [and] a culture of militarism and war," the wingnuts in Utah's Dixie would secede because they fear that the U.S. is controlled by "a group of Soviet KGB masters under the direction of the Soviet Comintern."

Speaking of bad taste in music, why were they playing Bonnie Tyler at the Progressive Convention? (Via Laz.)

Simply because you're near me

A NYT reviewer writes the following of Let's Get Lost, the Chet Baker documentary:

Jazz history hasn’t been kind to him; his talent, though real, was thin.... When you hear Mr. Baker’s stuff, you can’t help picturing his ideal listener as one of those lupine swingers of the Playboy era, decked out in a velvet smoking jacket and loading smooth platters onto the hi-fi to get a hot chick in the mood for love.

And he says that like it's a bad thing.

We get a noseful from our so-called friends

Also in the Ertegun documentary, a smirking Mick Jagger tells this story:

You'd meet [Led Zeppelin manager] Peter Grant, and he'd say, "Would you like some cocaine?" And then he'd say, "I have three kinds of cocaine. There's the cocaine for the band, for Jimmy. There's the cocaine for me. And then there's the cocaine for you.