I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU GOT THERE FROM HERE

Michele speculates a bit on the bizarre possibilities involved in some bands doing covers of other band's songs. For example: Quiet Riot doing Toni Basil's Mickey, or Glenn Frey doing Funkytown.

Even better, in the comments, there's a link to the Covers Project, which has lists of "cover chains" ("a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the band who covered the preceding song"). You can also look up individual artists to see who they've covered and who's covered them.

Longest chain? 157 songs. My favorite 3 link series? Joan Baez to Pat Boone.

Via Judas Priest.

BIG GUN IN ACTION

Via an old high school buddy, I've found out that there's now a video available of Metal Storm, that million round per minute gun I mentioned before.

It's over with too darn quick, but it's still a beautiful sight.

There's also a closer look at this sweetie over at the Weekly Standard, including a comprehensible description of the technology that makes it work.

COLORLESS

Boots & Sabers has a link to Toothbrush's piece on the virtues fighting back against the "race" box when filling out forms. Since I consider race to be an irrelevant construct, I'm glad to see it.

Mostly, though, I just want to brag about how far ahead of the curve I am on this issue. Way back in '94, during my college days, I wrote a short piece for the campus rag about my experience with the race box on one of the UW's forms. I'll share it with you.

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"Maybe I'm just confused, but I was always under the impression that UW-Whitewater didn't discriminate on the basis of race. Something about the law and equal opportunity.

So why does UW-W have a block specifying my race/ethnic classification on my advance registration/student information worksheet?

And why does UW-W have a block requesting my race/ethnic classification on it's undergraduate admission application?

Am I supposed to believe that that information will never be used for the purpose of racial separation, segregation, or discrimination? What other purpose could it possibly have?

Anyone who prefers that UW-W not be able to hold this particular threat over his/her head can go to the Admissions office and politely request of the counter person that the racial/ethnic classification be deleted from their record. I did it recently, and it took less than five minutes, start to finish.

It feels good to be a human being again instead of just a color."

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It's still a good feeling, and I strongly recommend the same action any time you come across that noxious little box.

UPDATE: on a related note, Right Wing News has his favorite Walter Williams quotes up. They're all priceless, but this line really sums up the whole race issue for me:

"In my book, race might be an achievement, worthy of considerable celebration, only if a person was born white and through his effort and diligence became black."

SUBVERSIVE LAMPS?

I don't usually read stories about the plight of the Cubans. Mostly because I'm  already aware of the big picture and don't generally feel the need to go out of my way to gawk at someone else's misery.

But I do hit all the posts at CotV, so I came across this piece at Babalu and was impressed. It's short, human, and  perfectly illustrates the horror that Cuba became. It does so with a description that is casually conversational and makes you feel  the wrongness of it, instead of merely saying, "it's wrong."

Go have a gawk.

TODAY’S GRAFFITI CURRENCY

 

No matter how closely you follow the instructions, spam-based get-rich-quick schemes just never seem to work.

A QUICK GOODBYE

Mean Mr. Mustard is hanging up his blog so he can concentrate on his studies. He's a conservative at Berkeley, which makes for some interesting stories.

Having been a libertarian at UW Madison, I can understand.

Now he's headed for law school (still at Berkeley), so it only gets harder from here. He's heading into hell.

But I expect he'll come out on the other side wearing the Devil's teeth on a necklace.

Godspeed, Russ.