Sour grapes from Malta: [link]

One of the members of Lordi looks like a Predator in that picture.

Finland rules!

The country that brought us Linux and Lordi....

Ian Copeland died: [link]

Ian Copeland died

so sad. He certainly helped shape the music of my youth.

Back to Lordi, this is a better quality video, plus excellent commentary from the Brits: [link]

plus excellent commentary from the Brits

I'm a big fan of understatement, but that video needs commentary by Mike Judge: Butthead, it's Gwar! It's Gwar!! Except Gwar was more entertaining. I liked "the rockalypse" but the music was pretty lifeless. I kept thinking they should be singing "Immigrant Song" because a) it's much better, and b) I'd love to see the guy in foot tall boots singing "Valhalla we are coming!"

I think it's a pretty darn catchy song. I mean, yeah, it's mired by murkiness but when the zombie keyboardist's gravity-defying vocals swoop in, I get the goosebumps.

In a completely unrelated but much more bizarre story, I saw Marlena Shaw, three or four weeks ago, in a Galway nightclub called Cuba. She was terribly good and terribly sexy. Anyway, it seems that when the nightclub sent her performance fee to her account, the US bank blocked it because the transaction referenced Cuba. She was only allowed her money after the bank had been assured that the venue had nothing to do with Cuba, the nation.

She was only allowed her money after the bank had been assured that the venue had nothing to do with Cuba, the nation.

I highly recommend Ann Louise Bardach's Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. You can read a couple chapters here. It's a really compelling book, even if ultimately I found it pretty depressing ("yeah, yeah, what don't you find ultimately pretty depressing?" shut up, man...). Endlessly fascinating, completely twisted (the carte blanche given to Cuban exiles who've committed outright acts of terrorism both here and abroad), and surprisingly central to our current political situation (she makes a compelling case that w/o the Elian Gonzalez episode Bush wouldn't have won FL in 2000, & Jeb has very, very strong ties to the exile community.) And Fidel doesn't come off any better; Bardach is no Castro apologist. If all that sounds rather bleak I should point out that the book is very lively and is filled with outsized characters and soap opera-worthy twists, which I don't mean disparagingly. When you're telling a tale that in many ways is a decades long family feud (I was unaware that a lot of Castro's relatives are, and have been all along, key players in the Miami exile community) a lot of soapish elements will work their way in. I know we're all busy, and most, if not all, of us have an ever-growing pile of books we may or may not get to, but I hope someone takes a chance on my recommendation.

I will. I visited Havana last December and plan to go this year too, for the film festival...

This may interest you, Lola: Send a Piana to Havana. I think I've mentioned in the past, but I still think it's cool as can be and I have the opportunity I will mention it again. It's an organization that sends pianos and replacement parts to Cuba, and makes a yearly trip to repair and tune pianos. (The organization's founder is a piano tuner by trade.) See this for the group's ongoing scuffles with Washington. The harassment goes back to the Clinton years, but has increased under Bush. Inspirational Government Warning (emphasis added):

What began as a plan to confound the embargo by sending pianos to Cuba in spite of the blockade, became a tax-deductible project when the Department of Commerce unexpectedly licensed the shipments in 1995. The Office of Missile and Nuclear Technology gave final approval, under the sole condition that the pianos not be used for "torture or human rights abuse."