I caught Flying Car Successfully Takes Off in PC Magazine and thought it worth passing along: "The company said that the flying car (sorry, but the official name is a mouthful) can travel at speeds up to 115 mph for 450 miles in the air, drive at highway speeds on the ground, and fold up to fit in a standard garage with a parked width of 81 inches and a height of 80 inches."
For its first flight, Phil Meteer, Colonel, USAFR (Retired) flew the car at Plattsburgh International Airport in Plattsburgh, NY. The chase aircraft was piloted by Giora Guth. The flight lasted less than a minute and was maybe 10 feet in the air, but it's a start. (A short video of the flight has been posted on Gearlog.)
Zero Boys - Indianapolis Hard Core: "It came out of nowhere in 1982, this punk rock/hardcore fireball with the bright yellow sleeve. In one sense, The Zero Boys' Vicious Circle was yet another example of how U.S. punk seemed to peak coast to coast that year. But unlike most coastal punk, the Zero Boys were pointing the way to a scene that could accommodate heaping helpings of melody, intelligence, and rock 'n' roll sus, not just turbo-charged ferocity.
From 1979 into '83, the Indianapolis based ZBs were the finest hardcore blitz in the Midwest if not all the lower 48 states. Proof is Vicious Circle and the two decades since of copyists, bootleggers, practitioners and reunion concert pogoers."
"Alexander and his business partner, Paul Bickel, will open Bickel’s Uptown Cafe in the former Bickel’s Key and Lock business downtown at 21 W. Eighth St. They hope to have it open with two or three weeks.
The building is situated between two parking lots for county workers and is within walking distance of City Hall, the Madison County Courthouse and several banks, attorneys’ offices and downtown businesses. Alexander is banking on the downtown foot traffic to make his breakfast and lunch buffet popular.
“They’re going to be interested in a restaurant that’s close, the food is good and quick, you didn’t feel like you were rushed, you had options and it was an attractive, clean environment,” he said."
***Bickel’s will serve a breakfast buffet starting at 6 a.m. with breakfast staples and made-to-order omelets, as well as a mini-biscuit and coffee package for under $2.50.
Lunch items will include broasted chicken and other meat specialties, a salad bar and traditional side items like mashed potatoes and green beans: “a combination of comfort food and fine dining,” Alexander said.
Bickel, who is known for making candy at his key and lock shop, will make and sell candy in the restaurant, too, along with pies, cakes and other desserts.
***
“Anderson needs a place you can actually sit down and eat that’s not a cattle stall,” Alexander said. “We were trying to figure out what to do with this building because it was an asset that wasn’t making us any money.”
Even The Rolling Stone got into the act. But give Rolling Stone credit for putting photos and songs online for listening here. The Guardian has photos also. Do read the Village Voice piece here more for the comments than for the main article."The Cramps were founded in New York around 1976 by Lux Interior (born Erick Purkhiser in Stow, Ohio) and the guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Wallace) with a distinct musical and visual style. As connoisseurs of seemingly all forms of trashy pop culture from the 1950s and ’60s — ranging from ghoulish comic books to Z-grade horror films to the rawest garage rock — they developed a sound that mixed the menace of rockabilly’s primitivist fringe with dark psychedelia and the blunt simplicity of punk."
***
Taken aback by the question, he replied: “Rock ’n’ roll has absolutely nothing to do with music. It’s much more than music. Rock ’n’ roll is who you are. You can’t call the Cramps music. It’s noise, rockin’ noise.”
No, this was not Bon Jovi or Def Leppard. They were having a lot more fun. Here is how The Stone reviewed Fiends from Dope Island:"In his 1984 review of Cramps comp Bad Music For Bad People, Kurt Loder wrote, “This is rock & roll the way it never really was on the radio, but the way you always dreamed it could be — drooling horrorama lyrics, great cheesoid guitar riffs, postlobotomy drum-bashing and a singer for whom inhibition is the dirtiest ten-letter word of all. Slurp it up, sleaze fans.”"
The Guardian also gave Lux an obit, Lux Interior, founding member of the Cramps, dies aged 62:The Cramps: Fiends Of Dope Island : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone: "Now that Lux Interior and Ivy Rorschach's strictly retro sound as performed by the current wave of garage rockers is literally all the rage, the Cramps still hold one card those other bands don't: Outrageousness. Twenty-five years on, the Cramps have managed to take their voodoo bash and tiki trash thing into the outer limits without messing too much with the back-to-basics sound they forged in punk rock days. They don't wanna grow, and they haven't... Fiends of Dope Island doesn't just slip into darkness, it lives there, though at times the Cramps' hallmark nod and wink seems absent. But if you dig the Cramps scene, baby, this is it in all its perverted and shocker-ific glory."
"Lux Interior, the founding member of garage punk band the Cramps, has died aged 62. Interior, whose real name was Erick Lee Purkhiser, passed away on 4 February at Glendale Memorial Hospital in California. He had suffered from a previously existing heart condition.
Interior was the theatrical, macabre frontman of cult punk-rock group the Cramps. He founded the band in 1973 with his wife, Poison Ivy, whose real name is Kristy Wallace, and quickly became a staple of the New York punk scene. The band's music fused their love of horror B-movies with rockabilly and surf rock, and their influence can be heard in bands such as the White Stripes, My Bloody Valentine and the Horrors."
"In his sleeve notes to the rarities compilation How to Make a Monster, Lux complained about those who regarded the Cramps a joke. Lux and the Cramps were serious about rockabilly, horror, foot fetishes, sci-fi B-movies and 50s kitsch. They were all about keeping it pure, raw and minimal, but could never be described as revivalists.
They deconstructed rockabilly gems such as Surfin' Bird, Jailhouse Rock, The Way I Walk and Love Me, and made them throb with playful menace. They came from a similar place to the Gun Club, whose declared mission was to 'destroy rockabilly', but the Cramps (for whom the Gun Club's For the Love of Ivy was written) didn't crash and burn or go through reinventions. Rather like the Ramones, who came from the same CBGBs scene in New York, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy clung to their buzzsaw sound and never diluted it.
Like the sexploitation, hammer horror and B-movie imagery they maintained to the last, the Cramps' treasure chest is almost bottomless – from Tear It Up to Ugh! A Music War to the ridiculously camp surreality of Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs. So has Lux Interior joined the ranks of the living (or surfin') dead? Next full moon (on Monday), you might just hear him howl."
And you could dance to all of it. Condolences to Poison Ivy.They did that god damned rock n' roll -
The kinda stuff that don't save souls -
Ain't nuthin' good about it that i know -
Yea i dig that goddamn rock 'n' roll now king tut put it on a chart,
Noah took two on his ark, even before van gogh had art, adam and eve did it in the park now these days 'bout all you got is bull,
Ya got yer rockheads and your croissant rolls,
In days of old,
Though,
When knights were bold, they tied a sock around their jelly roll
The Sunday Herald - What the Bard means to me.While in Edinburgh, Burns wrote several poems commemorating the life and work of the recently deceased Robert Fergusson, his immediate precursor in the art of Scots poetry and song. Both Fergusson and Allan Ramsay provided him with validating examples of a vernacular poetry which drew on rather than apologized for the strength, energy and occasional ferocity of everyday speech. Burns also found in this Scots language tradition his characteristic stanza, the “Standard Habbie”, the shorter fourth and sixth lines of which provide the perfect vehicle for his ruminative asides and biting comments. Some of Burns's early Scottish and English readers unquestionably regretted his use of what they regarded as a semi-barbarous dialect. It is worth remembering that Burns’s language was as remote from many of his Edinburgh readers, with their “improved" manners and speech, as it was from his London audience; his work has needed a glossary from the first moment of its publication. The use of Scots was, though, a gesture of solidarity with an idea of Scotland rapidly fading in a country increasingly conceived of as part of a larger, imperial whole; and it is when Burns’s poetry makes contact with the everyday speech of his contemporaries that it comes to life. His forays into the bland and formulaic poetic diction of Augustan English serve as a kind of foil against which the demotic passages shine all the more brightly. In the “Address to the Deil”, for instance, the poet’s confession of his own sins is followed by an assertion that he might yet escape the Devil’s clutches: “But faith! He’ll turn a corner jinkan / And cheat you yet”. This “jink” or sudden change of direction is the last resource of the desperate fugitive, the weak man’s chance to outsmart and outmanoeuvre the strong; it is a word that encodes a social history. It was Wordsworth, some fifteen years later, who stated that poetry should use “a selection of the language really used by men”; but it was Burns who succeeded in this aim more thoroughly and consistently than his English successor. Placed alongside Burns's vernacular verse, with its roots deep in the life of his community, many of Wordsworth’s efforts look like anaemic, academic exercises.
"Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that."
I leave you with Inscription For An Altar Of Independence: At Kerroughtree, the Seat of Mr. Heron.:In the Year of Homecoming, which officially ends on St Andrew's Day on November 30, Scots descendants and expatriates from around the world are being invited to visit Scotland. Today, meanwhile, the 250th anniversary of the Bard's birth in a stone cottage in Alloway will be celebrated by a range of events throughout the country, although his Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire stamping grounds will remain at the heart of the activities.
The showpiece is Burns Light, for which Dumfries has been preparing for months. Three thousand lanterns have already been made, but organisers expected a rush to last-minute workshops yesterday so there could well be many more.
Over 100 community lantern workshops have already taken place, with groups including 42 schools, Guides, Scouts, Brownies, Cubs, after school clubs, church groups, local charities, local businesses, community groups and Boys Brigades. Some villages are chartering buses to bring families and entire primary school rolls to Dumfries to take part in the processions.
The spectacular finale will be the fire sculpture, believed to be the biggest Tam O' Shanter in the world and weighing in at 4 tonnes. Tam, made by local artists Alex Rigg and Trevor Leat, who make the Edinburgh Hogmanay fire sculptures, will be fired in the middle of the River Nith beside the medieval Devorgilla bridge. A concert featuring contemporary and ceilidh bands will then be held on the Whitesands stage.
"Thou of an independent mind,
With soul resolv'd, with soul resign'd;
Prepar'd Power's proudest frown to brave,
Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;
Virtue alone who dost revere,
Thy own reproach alone dost fear-
Approach this shrine, and worship here."
I suppose one needs a particular sense of humor for this but give it a whirl. I do know that the Dictionary can be found online."THE DEVIL'S Dictionary By Ambrose Bierce (Bloomsbury) £7.99
What happens? An alternative dictionary, one in which Bierce gives his rather sour, not to mention amusing, alternative definitions of words. For example: 'Admiration - Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.'"
In the first of two extracts from an explosive new book, the original rebel rockers tell the story of their beginnings in their own words
