These are the people who cheered for Disney's Prince John as a kid.

"There's Levon in his 'city shirt,'
He's slithering up the bar,
All the girls who know are scatterin'
Like a flock before a car,
He rolls them in his snake eyes,
And he says he 'likes their style',
As he says through their resolve
With his prepared-piano smile…"

(Yes, a #JohnCage joke)
#lyrics

The last time America had a civil war, with half of it fighting the other half, it resulted in four years of bloody conflict and a death toll of 2-2.5% of the population.

It's reassuring to know that the next civil war could potentially be settled in a long weekend.

I'm truly curious why people are only now going after indie writers for feeding their prompts to a highly derivative AI and calling themselves "novelists," when James Patterson has been working this way for 30+ years. He could just afford to hire ~40 humans to pretend to be ChatGPT before ChatGPT.

Wait, people are still using American mapping technology?

In the Free World, we have German-Dutch provider Here Technologies. wego.here.com

To be fair, Google Maps isn't lying to Canadians about the lake's name yet (see below). Like the administration, maybe it starts by lying to Americans first.

I should be sorry for posting the exact same video back-to-back, but I am absolutely not.

I could shamelessly self-promote, but no; nothing I do approaches the absolute & pure artistry of #JoniMitchell at her very best, her most raw & unadorned & exposed.

O Canada!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOKE...

"I play the least cool instrument, the mountain dulcimer..."

...

... < #JoniMItchell has entered the chat > #Canada 🍁
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOKE...

I can never again watch #StarWars the same way. I used to see Han Solo as a hero—not a lying deadbeat criminal. But the 2020s have taught me how desperate times, against exponentially worse threats, can suppress the worst flaws & bring out the most admirable, heroic traits of almost anyone.

4/4
…a song by Sheffield, UK folksinger Royston Wood, of "The Young Tradition" fame. He used the old shanty for his song "The Woodbridge Dog Disaster," made famous here by Canadian folk legend #StanRogers.

The melody's almost identical, but I swear I stole it from "trad.," not from Stan & Royston.😅

3/x
…rhyme scheme & verse structure are not at all the "Edmund Fitzgerald"-style quatrain: the melody & stanza structure are actually from an old English sea shanty, going back a long way with a variety of lyrics.

The best known setting of lyrics to this tune in a Canadian folk context is likely…

2/x
The concept album, Desolation Sound, was meant as an homage to the Canadian #folkmusic scene of the 1970s, and this song really fills out the Bingo card.

Of COURSE it's a tribute to #GordonLightfoot, who's the reason every Canadian folksinger needs a documentary song about a shipreck. But the…

2/2
…the COVID lockdown, just to keep sane. Some #coversongs, some #orignalmusic. Not all great, but a few bangers.

I've come back to a few of them in the "Refluxions" videos. But here are the raw vids from my (chunkier-yet-healthier) days—with lengthy liner notes!:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

It's a few years old now (which is how you know it was a time-consuming parody lovingly done by hand using creative VFX editing, not just a few AI prompts), but the #Owlkitty parody of Titanic is as close I can get you:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEPf...

2/2
…trying to DENY same-sex couples the right to marry, to adopt & raise kids—in short, to participate in the very stabilizing nuclear family structure they felt was under threat.

Denying #LGBTQ folks the right to "normalized" social structures isn't conservative. It's a betrayal of conservatism.

1/2
What baffles me is that once upon a time, people weren't sure what legitimizing #LGBTQ culture would do to the nuclear family unit—the structure on which the postwar economy was built. So yes, homophobia was a conservative value in 1950.

But NOW, people who brand themselves conservatives are…

If they're getting restless and they need an audience participation, I'll just play Norwegian Wood in 5/4 and make once side clap on 4 and the other side clap on 5.

Those who can do it contribute substantially to my ability to maintain it, and those who don't hear it just stop & listen for the 1.

He's been trying to track down those turkeys Biden pardoned during the last Thanksgiving of his presidency, but they just keep outsmarting him and staying one step ahead.

I feel "Christian" has great value as an adjective, but virtually none as a noun.

Some Christian [people] are really ChristLIKE people who do ChristLIKE things.

But many people who DON'T say that's what they are say & do Christlike things anyway.

And many who say that's what they are, do not.