Seal and the President

I have an upright bass. It was originally purchased by my brother for my Introducing Zack Hexum record. It stayed at his house for the last decade or so, and was a (slightly dusty) fixture in his living room. A year or so ago it was bequeathed to me. Now it's an extremely dusty figure in my living room. Through a friend of a friend of a friend it's now on it's way in an SUV to be used in a music video for Seal. I should've slipped a note in the fingerboard letting Mr. Seal know that I used to play his first album real loud in the (not dusty) living room when I was thirteen. I may or may not have danced around a little bit too. You'll never know, and neither will he.

According to his Wikipedia page Seal had six birth names, which he has since whittled down to one. That has to be a record. I wish I could have that kind of efficiency with my CD collection. Perhaps that kind of ability to cut away the fat would be good in the political process.

After reading about and watching some of the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson, and her failing the pop quiz on the Bush Doctrine (or as I've nicknamed it the oxy-doctrine-moron, because "anticipatory self-defense" sounds like something a locker-stuffing high school bully who was on the debate team would make up) I found myself thinking...

Who would you vote for if there were such thing as a Presidential Aptitude Test (PAT, henceforth), and your life depended on the candidate's score*. Let's say that the PAT has some multiple choice questions on current events (with extra credit for knowing how many houses you own), a speech section where you have to make Vin Diesel shed a tear, a diplomacy challenge where you have to convince a despotic military leader to trade you his chicken burrito from Chipotle for a can of spam, and finally a lie-detector with a full-blast-tazer attached that the candidates are hooked up to while watching their own commercials.

If my life was on the line I'm not picking the party who picked a VP that left her town of 9,000 people 20 million dollars in debt after her mayorship. Although, if she would've used the cash she kept from the "thanks, but no thanks" bridge to nowhere, I guess she could pay that debt back...

I'm also not picking the party that picked the V.P. candidate who still thinks that Iraq has links to Al Qaeda, even though the Bush Administration, who originally perpetrated that falsehood, have admitted there is no connection.

Tonight I play with my jazzy trio at Aura in Studio City at 10 PM.



*This was inspired by a Bill Simmons column about determining the NBA MVP race by picking one player as your teammate if your life was at stake.