Interview with Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz on his experience as a kid living in Ukraine during the Chernobyl accident. I’m seeing Gogol at the 9:30 Club in a few weeks and can’t wait. One of the best concerts I’ve ever seen was their show at Coachella in ’07.

Now, I’m not going to get too down on the coal industry, because my family in Illinois has worked in it for several generations (both mining and power plants) and it’s still a vital source of energy in the United States, but the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity’s “Clean Coal Carolers” are ridiculously lame. It’s basically a flash video where you dress up lumps of coal, pick a background, and listen to the pieces of coal sing songs like “Frosty the Coalman”. I mean, seriously, WTF? Who thought this would be a good idea?!

My clean coal carolers are at the beach, and dressed in winter clothing. Another WTF?

Even worse, they set up a Facebook page to promote the Clean Coal Carolers, and the enviros are absolutely dominating it. I bet some old dude at ACCCE was like “Hey, I hear the kids hang out on Facebook these days! Let’s make a fan page for the Clean Coal Carolers!” And then they are promptly mobbed by enviros basically calling them killers and what not. Yeah, that Facebook page was a great idea.
Basically, this was a total waste of money. Instead, they should have developed a game where you have to capture CO2 and store it or something. Duh.

Oh, and natural gas is way better.

I want to move back to the UK and be an MP.

This ad came up while I was reading an article on The Guardian:

Wow, “life = fun”? Amazing. I think a third grader designed this.

Like most babies of the 80s (with apologies to SoCo) I loved going to Chuck E. Cheese’s and eating tons of pizza, drinking several pitchers of soda, and redeeming hundreds of tickets (won from skee ball, of course) for some useless junk toy. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, several Chuck E. Cheese’s have turned into a not so family friendly environment, with some locations even hiring armed guards to keep the peace:

In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child’s birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant’s music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain’s namesake mouse perform.

Citing security concerns, two senators who sit on the Congressional committee in charge of inaugural ceremonies appealed on Tuesday to the mayor and city council of Washington, D.C., to reverse a decision to keep bars in the city open until 5 a.m. during inauguration week.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee chairwoman, said she had “grave concerns about the unintended consequences” of the plan approved by the city last week to extend the hours that bars and restaurants can sell alcohol.

Seriously, I’m so glad I have cool Senators now. Jim Webb would never bitch about this because he’s too busy polishing his collection of guns and telling Bush to mind his own goddamn business. Also, he would probably be drinking whiskey with the people until 5am, unlike Princess Feinstein.

This dog is AWESOME.

I am going to teach Tucker to do this.

So get ready for this magic moment, ladies and gentlemen. With Obama’s swearing-in comes the first audacious act of his administration: Get the population equivalent of Los Angeles to stand on a geographical pinhead and then disappear into a subway tunnel.

And across America, wingnut heads will explode upon hearing him utter “Hussein.” It’s gonna be beautiful.

For many detainees who grew up in Afghanistan — where music was prohibited under Taliban rule — their interrogations by U.S. forces marked their first exposure to the pounding rhythms, played at top volume.

The experience was overwhelming for many. Binyam Mohammed, now a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, said men held with him at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan wound up screaming and smashing their heads against walls, unable to endure more.

“There was loud music, (Eminem’s) ‘Slim Shady’ and Dr. Dre for 20 days. I heard this nonstop over and over,” he told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.