So elfin' true ...

Those sly foxes over at Keebler know how to get my attention. What's next - an attitude overhaul for Ernie?

It's subtle work, photoshopping. Very subtle.

A rediscovered Youth

As a kid, I was always encouraged musically. I started playing piano when I was five. I started learning percussion when I was eleven because I had trouble reading rhythms in my piano studies. I battled with practicing these two instruments until I was twenty years old. Drums won.

Despite all of this musical activity and encouragement, I totally missed out on a lot of music growing up. I really didn't start listening to the music of my generation until it was tailing off, and even then, I just wasn't in to a lot of it. Nirvana didn't hold a lot for me. I did love Soundgarden's Superunknown and Stone Temple Pilot's Purple.

Now, in my adult life, I'm rediscovering all sorts of good music I missed out on back then. One of the biggest revelations to me has been Sonic Youth. I have an excuse for not having listened to Daydream Nation - I was only seven when it was released - but this band was a major piece of the musical puzzle when I was in my formative music-listening years.

The crazy thing is that this band, formed in 1981, is still creating music. They recently left Geffen Records and signed with Matador Records who plans to release the band's latest effort on June 9th.

I think that, if for no other reason than the repose of my teenage soul, I may just check this one out.

Can you spare some change?

We've all been approached with this phrase at least once in our adult lives. It's usually accompanied by a wave of mixed feelings and followed by a dismissive nod or muttered 'no' on our part.

Playing for Change is an organization that seeks to bring people around the world together through music. Their first project: start with a base track of a street musician in Santa Monica performing Stand By Me and then take it around the world to let others add their own voices and instrumentation.

I'm a little behind the curve in putting this out there, so maybe you've already seen this, but it's a worthwhile cause and an interesting take on a classic tune.

Also ... I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not that this was the first thing I thought after watching the above video, but if you're in the mood for comedy about change, just click here.

Rosebud ...

Dead or alive ... it could probably turn out to be a very simple thing.

I've never seen Citizen Kane and, as of this moment, I'm only 15 minutes in. I have to say, the look of black and white film seems to fit movies like this in a way that color doesn't. It's as if, by removing the objects, places and people's colors, you gain an extra degree of leverage through which you can mold them in a way that dialogue can't.

I suppose lighting is about 95 percent of this effect and I'm not going to ramble on and pretend I know anything at all about the techniques in play here. I'll stop short of that and just say that I like it.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of adequate storage space

I think we can all agree that the future of the Antarctic Ice Shelf is something we all consider important to all of mankind. And the future of continental shelves everywhere are a constant source of concern for people called marine biologists, whom I can only assume felt the Peace Corps was a bit too patsy and the Coast Guard was too much effort. In general, shelves are fairly important to us, but nowhere is our struggle with their future more apparent to the common man than with those shelves of the laminate wood variety.

Those of us in landlocked states can ignore the continental shelf, as we are not generally concerned with things that are underwater and meant to be that way in the first place. The Antarctic Ice Shelf is a little different because it's on the news a lot and seems to be connected with Al Gore in some way, but still, there seems to be a lot of ice around and we seem to have the hang of making more if we need it.

In stark contrast to these shelf's extraneous relationship to us, the store-bought wood shelf makes an impact on us all at least once, if not more often than that, depending on how well read you are or your attitude towards a carrying a library card and re-learning the Dewey Decimal System. These shelves can turn an otherwise calm day or evening into an exercise of human wit and will against mounting stress and Murphy's Law.

Where's that other piece? Did they even give it to me? Why the hell won't this fit where it's supposed to?

I won't even attempt to answer these questions. Mostly because I don't like the look of that last one.

These shelf projects always start - and end - the same way. You take out all of the pieces. Maybe you arrange them neatly, depending on your proclivities (nice way of saying depending on whether you're OCD or not). Then, it begins.

Things aren't quite fitting together. That one little piece isn't there, so you either leave it out or find some discarded 'extra piece' from a previous project. God forbid you have to call the manufacturer of the shelf to ask them to send you a screw, pin or one of those crazy round things that you quarter turn clockwise to hold this unstable wreck of a furniture piece together.

So, maybe by now you've finished putting the shelf together and you're ready to start putting your first editions up there. Wait ... what happened there? Oh. shit. There's one piece on backwards so that the natural wood veneer that you so painstakingly chose is giving way to plain, disgusting, flaky wood laminate. You can't just take that one piece out, flip it over and be done with it. This thing is together now, and it was a pretty big pain in the ass.

How could this happen? You followed the instructions, so what gives? The answer to this one is surprisingly simple. Shit happens.

No matter how clear the directions are, and they're not always so, you will make at least one mistake putting one of these things together. Maybe you can live with it, or maybe you can't and you have to start over, though I would say that almost no mistake you could make in your right mind in this activity would be worth restarting this process.

This is all starting to sound like some allegory of life, but all I'm trying to say is that, until the majority of us stop fucking up when we try to build modular furniture from IKEA and Target, there is no way in hell we're not gonna fuck up something else too.

Sign of the times ...

I saw a building with two signs on it today - Boxing and Triple Boxing. I don't know about you, but I've seen people box before and I'm pretty sure they got the amount of punches to the face right the first time.

The Constitution as a selfish document

There's not much you can write to back up the statement this bog displays as its title. Our Constitution is a document that binds us all together through common aims, goals and a common belief in the community's ability to transcend what one man can accomplish, and if anything, this document has been made less selfish over time by the addition of key amendments.

If there was, however, a breeding ground for selfish attitudes embedded in to this document, it would be in the Second Amendment - the right to bear arms. Here's what it says:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

I'm going to immediately throw away any notion of the founding fathers not realizing how truly massive our country and its governing infrastructure would become in the coming decades and centuries. That might be true and it might not be, but what I do know is that it's not relevant to what I want to talk about.

The Tennessee state legislature is currently mulling over an amendment to the state's gun laws which would allow guns to be carried in establishments that serve alcohol and state parks and recreation areas. I don't know the details of this document, but you could glean some info from this article from the Commercial Appeal in Memphis - a city that knows guns and gun violence better than most in Tennessee.

This desire to carry a gun wherever and whenever you please is exactly where selfishness invades our discussion about constitutional rights. Let me reiterate that the Second Amendment guarantees that 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms' will not be infringed. Notice that it's not 'a well regulated Militia' and ' the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.' These two things, as they relate to the language of the amendment are actually one and the same. The militia is the expression of this right to bear arms and the militia is what is protected by the Constitution, not the gun strapped underneath your jacket or tucked away in your boot.

'But, I want to carry a gun because what if [insert pseudo-heroic anecdote here]?'

Guess what. I don't care what you want and neither does the Constitution. If you want to be an active participant in the protected activities of the Second Amendment than be a policeman. Join the military. Join the National Guard, which seems to be the true embodiment of the militia in our times. But, whatever you do, don't come crying to me about wanting to carry a gun everywhere.

What if, in your heroic display of marksmanship that will no doubt ensue if some criminal does terrorize your local watering hole, you miss the bad guy and hit someone innocent? I'd ask if you can take the ramifications of this, but that's not the point. The point is that they are not your responsibility now, and they should never be. This is the responsibility of the police and those who make it their life's work to protect and serve. They're trained to do these things and they're educated about the consequences.

I'm not against people owning guns, or even carrying them in some situations (though I would bet that instances where carrying a firearm worked out the way the carrier wanted them to are few and far between). However, I do not think that the individual right to bear arms is in any way protected and I'm not sure that it should be.