Authors seek anthologizement while we are dancing

While all these authors gather in Chicago for the gladitorial cage matches to see whose work will be selected for an exciting anthology, here, we are dancing. Tinariwen's CD, Amassakoul, will get you out your chair and moving. Reading their website it looks like the group have a pretty strange history that merits some further research. Track 1 goes straight onto the next mix tape.

music time

Something about a new Rosebuds CD dropping from North Carolina to the rest of the world? More about that some other time.

The Evens new (debut, first, nouveau) CD isn't in the Black Sheets of Rain-level of you-will-get-some-work-Done but given a little volume there is some movement of the brain caused by movement of the body. (No, there's no Bob Mould connection.)

It hasn't been heard yet, so we're taking a chance here, but Jim & Jenny & The Pine Tops new one, Rivers Roll On By came out today. Recommended for purchase with the Bloodshot mug* or the glass.

* Beer for breakfast, beer for lunch. What's for dinner? Don't know, 'm passed out on the couch.

Police Stories MMV: Still Not Getting Along

Is anyone surprised that police stories don't match arrestees?

1,806 arrested. "91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial." 9/10? Is that an acceptable percentage?

"[T]he public should not rush to criticize officers simply because their recollections of events are not consistent with a single videotape."

True. The camera lies for anyone.

So, wonder what wil happen to those policemen who told one story and the videotapes told another?

Please join me...

...in saluting Iain A. Boal, an Independent Scholar in Berkeley, California who has been named a 2005 Guggeheim Fellow so that he might study "the bicycle in world culture." Write a good book, Independent Scholar Boal! Includes lots of pretty pictures of bicycles!

this is not a scholarship competition.

A WaPo reporter (and mother of three) plays dress up at Miss USA; you know, the one they judge more or less based on how you look in a swimsuit:

Rondinella's skilled hands give your face bones you didn't know you had, and in the intimacy of her chair she engages you in relaxed, reassuring tones. This is good, because you're starting to feel like a drag queen. You stifle your fear and concentrate instead on the energy of the people around you. The room is filled with beauty professionals, edgy folks in black pants and gelled hair. As a team of three stylists brush you and curl you, they whisper words to make you feel pretty. You're Miss Desperate Housewife, you quip to them.

Miss-Sterious, Miss Diagnosed, offers hairstylist Brian Fontenot, who adds reassuringly: 'I tell people I've got more to offer at 36 than I did at 26.'

A Miss USA contestant wanders in to get hair extensions. 'I'd say 75 percent of the girls wear extensions for length and texture,' says hairstylist Albert Luiz. He calls for silk therapy and 2 1/2-inch hot curling irons.

'Remember, one shoulder exposed for softness,' Luiz instructs, brushing your hair away from your face. The judges are seated below the contestants onstage, he says, and that helps lengthen your neck, 'makes it look more swanlike.'

Also, an acknowledgement that you must be a mutant to win, and never, never a dead girl:

With the ones who have it, there's a connection, Kobayshi says, "you can see it in the eyes immediately. Some people are beautiful, but dead, no life."

The woman who wins doesn't have to be the most beautiful, but she's got to have that "X-factor," Kobayshi says, a sense that she'd rather be onstage, looking beautiful for all you people, than anywhere else in the world.