The Girls at the Washington Post are Terrible Coworkers

It's primary day here in New Jersey. We'll be voting for Tom Kean in the NJ07 GOP congressional race. Kean, who's a typical moderate, has been running against crime, illegal immigration, and Joe Biden. His ads are quick and sharp. Here we are in the autumn of 2020 during a phone bank session:

It's true, I look great.

The New York Post tells us that The Washington Post has suspended reporter Dave Weigel for a month after colleague Felicia Sommez publicly attacked him over a bad joke tweet. Weigel should sue Sommez. What a cunt. Sommez not Weigel. Between this and the Taylor Lorenz drama, the WaPo seems like a great place to work. It's like a college dorm where all the girl's menstrual cycles have synced up. Rhymes with rich. 

In the Mother Country, Boris Johnson (tosspot) survived the no confidence vote. M. Steyn's thoughts on the man reflect our own. 'He blew it', Steyn concludes. Steyn thinks Boris is 'mortally wounded', but wouldn't he be stronger after winning the vote? Any British/Commonwealth parliamentarians out there wanna opine? This blog doesn't know what happens next. This blog doesn't care. 

Boris winning, the Alberta conservatives voting out Jason Kenney, and Doug Ford annihilating the Ontario libs would make a great article for our KGB handler. We sigh forlornly. We miss colluding with Russia. We really do. No other gig has materialized despite some queries. [Some folks just don't appreciate your genius-Ed] 

The great Don Surbur argues what we've argued for some time. Russia is winning. In the end Russia will get much of what it wants. Ukraine will be flooded with more foreign aid and more westerners, which means more Davos types. But the nation will never be the same. Wouldn't it have been better for Ukraine to concede the facts on the ground and agree not to join NATO in exchange for a no-invasion pledge? Exit question, how much pressure did/does NATO put on Zelensky to keep fighting? Peace is good for Ukraine but bad for Davos.

Monday (not) Metal

From the Atlantic, and via Kathy Shaidle, this is too delicious not to re-blog:

Do you like prog rock, the extravagantly conceptual and wildly technical post-psychedelic subgenre that ruled the world for about 30 seconds in the early 1970s before being torn to pieces by the starving street dogs of punk rock? Do you like the proggers, with their terrible pampered proficiency, their priestly robes, and their air—once they get behind their instruments—of an inverted, almost abscessed Englishness? 

And..

Money rained down upon the proggers. Bands went on tour with orchestras in tow; Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Greg Lake stood onstage on his own private patch of Persian rug. But prog’s doom was built in. It had to die. As a breed, the proggers were hook-averse, earworm-allergic; they disdained the tune, which is the infinitely precious sound of the universe rhyming with one’s own brain. What’s more, they showed no reverence before the sacred mystery of repetition, before its power as what the music critic Ben Ratliff called “the expansion of an idea.” Instead, like mad professors, they threw everything in there: the ideas, the complexity, the guitars with two necks, the groove-bedeviling tempo shifts.

For me Genesis means that nice, poppy Invisible Touch album, and Peter Gabriel, well, Sledgehammer. During the first season of That Metal Show, I wondered what the hell Rush's Geddy Lee was doing there. Not metal, guys, not even hard rock.

Rush is nerd rock. Which is fine. You can see them at mom's kitchen table, locks of hair hanging over the game board, Dungeon Master's guide open, dice at the ready, an empty pizza box and coke cans strewn about. 2112 plays in the background. I say this from experience, people.

For the record we like Rush's first album, 'Yeah! Ohhhhh-yeah! insert cool riff.

Also for the record we can recognize precisely one ELP song. This one:

We saw it once on MTV the summer of 1986. That synth riff could be metal. Why not?