Obama, skeet-shooting last August.

The photographic evidence — responding to skepticism — uploaded at the presidential Flickr page today:



IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said: "Cool picture. I want a poster of it to put next to my poster of Nixon bowling."



ADDED: White House coins the term "skeeters" to make fun of people don't believe Obama goes skeet shooting all the time at Camp David.

"In order to stay competitive, airlines need to keep pace with the rapidly changing demands of corporate travelers..."

Says Nigel Page, Emirates' vice president of commercial operations.

"That's why we consistently invest in refining and enhancing our first-class product." The Dubai-based carrier delivers on its promise—thus far, it's the only airline to offer showers for first-class passengers aboard its fleet of 21 A380 jets.

Showers. In-flight showers...



What other rapidly changing demands are corporate travelers making? Personally, I'd like to see a bowling alley.

Bowl.

Just an old sign I liked. In New Richmond, Wisconsin.

If you're traveling in the north country...

... where Highway 63 meets Route 2... there is a café... Casablanca Traders...



... where the nice lady kept the place open for an extra 15 minutes so that Meade could have a smoothie and I could have a peppermint tea with a shot of internet. We were the only customers, and Meade said you must do very well in wintertime, and she said that's what she, a transplanted San Diegan, thought when she moved up here and opened the place. But the truth is, no one comes in the winter. The customers come on the sunny warm days (which are few, up north).

In winter, where does everyone go? Don't they want to be somewhere cozy? We drove quite a ways in the Chequamegon Forest. And what we saw were bars, bars, bars. Bars and bowling alleys. The culture up north isn't so much about coffee and WiFi. It's more about beer and bowling. That was my observation, as I drove by....



... with my vision admittedly blurred... by speed, not beer. I was on peppermint tea...



... and to-go chocolate cake, leftover from lunch.

"I can't seem to get a strike to save my soul..."

"... but, fortunately, the salvation of my soul doesn't depend on my getting a strike."



Recognize the artist?

What if hippies had money... and good taste?

A photo-walk around Madison's East Side got me thinking. There's a hippie aesthetic, but it's not well-developed enough, and there isn't enough money to run with it, which could be a disaster if there isn't good taste — and it's hard to have good taste and hippie taste at the same time.

But when it all comes together, it's really cool:





Wouldn't it be fabulous if, taking this house as the exemplar...



...the whole neighborhood could bloom with hippie aesthetic?

(I have no idea whether the people who did this to their house are actually hippies or how they would verbalize their aesthetic, but whoever they are, I salute them.)

I'm now set free...

... by Henry.

Whew! It was getting hard to breathe.

UPDATE: Via Twitter:

You could do eight posts and then go bowling. Because that would be Henry the eight and Ann Bowlin'. Don't lose your head!

"He threw his 300 game with all of his friends, gave each other high-fives and it's like the story ended. He died with a smile on his face."

"Don [Doane] will be a legend. It's something that will never be forgotten as long as people bowl here."

(Via Metafilter.)

ADDED: Bowled. Over.

"Where does the story come from that I don't like beer? Come on, man."

Barack Obama on "60 Minutes," fending off a Steve Kroft crack about how he's gone out of his way to seem like the common man.

ADDED: Here's some transcript (and video):

"You know, I think we really underestimate people in the neighborhood. In the neighborhoods I came from, you came from. I really think we underestimate them," Biden remarked. "People get it. I think they're looking for more than whether or not Joe Biden's from Scranton and she hunts. I think that's you know, 'What ya gonna do about it?'"

"But you tried really hard to reach these people. You went and sipped beer, which I know you don't particularly like - I mean you even…," Kroft remarked.

"Steve, I had a beer last night. I mean, where do these stories come from, man?" Obama asked.

"I'm the one… [that] doesn't drink," Biden pointed out.

"Where does the story come from that…I don't like beer? …C'mon, man," Obama said.

"You even tried bowling," Kroft remarked.

"Time out there," Obama said.

"I've got to defend my bowling honor here," Obama said, laughing. "It is true that my bowling score left something to be desired. The reason I bowled though, wasn't to try to get votes....."

How to snack like Barack Obama.

You'll want 2 things:

1. MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars. (Get some here. Hmmm: "This product contains sugar alcohols, which may cause gastrointestinal discomfort. Excessive consumption may have a laxative effect." Be careful, Barack!)

2. Black Forest Berry Honest Tea.

And if you're thinking of making this into the Barack Obama diet, so you can be as fit as Barack Obama, you might want to get your own personal "body man," and let's hope he has a name like "Mr. Love." Damn it, I want a body man. (Hillary Clinton has a body woman, you know — Huma Abedin.)

Mr. Love said he had been hired with “no job description whatsoever.”

“It was just like, ‘You just go out there and — Take. Care. Of. Stuff,’ ” Mr. Love said, taking his time with each word.

Would you want to be shadowed about by a body man (or woman)? What would your body man do?

When Mr. Obama dropped food on his tie while eating in the car between stops, Mr. Love was ready with a Tide pen. He always carries one, along with ballpoint pens, and has turned himself into a walking dispensary of Sharpies, stationery, protein bars, throat lozenges, water, tea, Advil, Tylenol, Purell and emergency Nicorette, not to mention his ever-present iPhone, BlackBerry and Canon Rebel XT digital camera.

So, one thing is: he basically carries your purse. Your gigantic purse. (Or manly variant of a purse.)

He watches TV with you:

“One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch ‘SportsCenter’ and argue about that.”

He says nice things to the media when they are writing puff pieces about you:

“He’s quick and he’s strong,” Mr. Love said of Mr. Obama. “A lot of people still don’t know that he’s left-handed, so he can get to the basket and get his shot off, even though he’s not the most explosive or tallest player on the court.”

The things a lot of people still don't know. How will we ever get up to speed on the candidate by November? Anyway, Barack is left-handed, so hold that MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bar in your left hand as a tribute when you undertake the Barack Obama diet. Get plenty of exercise, too. Play basketball. Don't be bowling. Watch sports. Don't watch the news. Check your BlackBerry and have a sip of that Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. Layer in some Nicorette for balance. Now, relax. Purify your hands. Hope. Dream. Everything is going to be all right.

ADDED: "Are you gonna save me? Can you save me? You gonna make me happy? You gonna make me smile? Can you save me? Tell me, Mr. Love."

I play 2 video games.

Twice recently, I've had a house guest who has brought a video game system, attached it to my television, and insisted that I play it.

1. My first guest brought a Wii, and the game I was induced to play was: Bowling. I felt a little silly acting out the motions of bowling while holding a remote control and being represented on screen by a character that looked like one of those old Fisher-Price LittlePeople, but it was kind of fun. I don't remember my score. Better than 37, I'm sure. Efforts to induce me to play another game or to bowl again failed. I did watch a lot of playing and contemplated whether this was a reasonably healthful, decently athletic activity for a young child. Good enough, I thought. But as long as you're up and moving around, why not move around in this real world we have here instead of manipulating your guy in an impoverished play world? The more realistic a video game is, the more I'm likely to think about how much more realistic real life is. If you're making your guy bowl, I'm going to think: Hey, we should go bowling — actual bowling. If you're making multi-shaped blocks drop onto a pile, I'm just thinking rotate it! or whatever.

2. My second guest brought an Xbox, and the game was BioShock. So there I was floating in the ocean amidst the burning wreckage of a plane crash. Look around, I'm told. That is, wiggle my right thumb. Go places. That is, wiggle my left thumb. I'm told the crucial skill is to move around and look around at the same time, in some sort of fluid 3-D fashion. I realize I am never going to learn this skill. I'm either going to be looking around or moving, not both. But I have the game on "easy" mode, so I'm able to survive this and every other ineptitude. Okay, so I find the stairway out of the water and bumble my way into an elevator to the bottom of the ocean past various signs and cityscapes that make me say, "Hey, this game seems to be based on Ayn Rand." I'm told this is a correct observation. So I'm all: "You bought a right-wing game." Yes. But then I'm mostly moving around in lots of dark hallways, rooms, and staircases where various characters come at me and I slug them with a big monkey wrench I picked up somewhere. No matter how vicious my attackers are, I always kill them, because I'm playing in "easy" mode. I find I like to hit them about 10 more times after I've killed them, spattering blood about and feeling the thud in the vibrating controller in my hands. "Why do I like doing that? Does that mean I'm a bad person?" After a while, I say that's enough for me, get up, and feel queasy and dizzy. I go get a glass of orange juice, take a sip, then sit down at the table and put my head down. "That game made me sick."

Charlton Heston, "remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo."

Goodbye to one of the all-time great movie stars, Charlton Heston, who has died at the age of 83.

When I read "remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo," I wondered, by whom? I'm pretty old but I've never seen those movies. I was alive when they came out, but too young to go to movies like that, and they weren't the kind of movies I was ever interested in over the decades I've spent catching up on old movies. So I don't believe Charlton Heston is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo. I think most people younger than 60 remember him chiefly for "Planet of the Apes."

Ask the man on the street to imitate Charlton Heston and I bet he'd say "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"



Or maybe:



Ah, we loved Science Fiction Charlton Heston!

It was Charlton Heston that turned me against Michael Moore. Remember this from "Bowling for Columbine" — taking advantage of the old man's deteriorating mind?



Horrible. Moore must have felt so self-righteous about his anti-gun agenda that he couldn't see why it was indecent to use that footage. [ADDED: Actually, I don't think that clip is "horrible" or "indecent." When I posted this, I was remembering it and the discussion around it at the time. After watching it just now, I think, given Heston's NRA activities, it was appropriate to interview him and push him, and Moore addressed him with an appropriate level of respect.][AND: I think the unfairness to Moore that I'm remember occurs outside of this clip, when Moore refuses to leave politely after Heston ends the interview.]

The obituary outlines Heston's political career. He started out as a Democrat, and though he, like Ronald Reagan, served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he never wanted to run for office.

He became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition....

In December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.”

The next year, at 73, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton’s White House: “Mr. Clinton, sir, America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”

I said it 3 days ago, and now Hillary is saying it: Hillary is Rocky.

On March 29th, I presented the "Rocky" analogy:

You know if this campaign were a movie, Hillary would have to win... or at least "go the distance." She would be the central character, because the story is most interesting from her point of view. She's got a fabulous backstory, which includes suffering, but she starts out on top and full of hubris. Along come the one man who can block her path to fulfillment. She's torn down and laid low, humiliated once again. But she needs to learn to fight, and she's not going to give in. Come on, I'm getting chills just sketching it out. If the movie was about Obama, sure, it should have ended on Super Tuesday, with just an epilogue showing him in the White House. But if he's not the central character, we're still building toward the most thrilling climactic scenes.

Today, Hillary is all "I am Rocky":

... Clinton said to end her presidential campaign now would be as if "Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum steps and said, 'Well, I guess that's about far enough.'"

"Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people," Clinton said.

And as long as she's talking about beating him in a fight, why not expand into other sports? Especially bowling. Everyone can beat Obama at bowling. And sure enough, here's Clinton, taking advantage of any opportunity to kick his ass:

Cyberchondria.

Do you have that special internet hypochondria?

IN THE COMMENTS: Peter Palladas tells this story:

I had an email from a strange woman - like you do - some years back. She had been visiting her GP with concerns about a weird lump in her belly.

GP had written it off - as they do - as something and nothing. A lipoma [bundle of harmless fat] is the most common guesstimate made in such circs.

But she wasn't satisfied and began searching the Web for options: 'lump, unexplained, useless GP, death,' etc.

That search took her to something I'd written about my own fucking disease - soft tissue sarcoma - where I'd moaned about ignorant GPs who don't know their lipoma from their sarcoma.

So she went back to her GP and told her to think again. So GP did have another think and lo and behold this woman did have exactly a soft tissue sarcoma the size of a bowling ball in her gut.

Surgeons whipped it out pronto and a life was saved.

Pogo -- a doctor -- wrote:

Palladas is on to something. Physicians were trained to be a priestly class, whose secret knowledge and arcane phrases must be translated to be understood.

A familiar taunt of patients who had read a bit (circa 1980) was and where did you go to medical school?. And boy did that shut them up.

This isn't so much the case anymore, and the Internet has become the modern equivalent of the Protestant reformation, wherein the priest can be bypassed, and salvation gained independently.

ADDED: My grandmother was regarded as a hypochondriac for many years, when in fact, she was suffering from scleroderma, which eventually killed her. So not only did she suffer horribly from the disease, she also had to endure the extreme disrespect of doctors and family members who saw her as an annoying crazy old lady.

"Americans have a third fewer close friends and confidants than just two decades ago."

USAToday reports:

In 1985, the average American had three people in whom to confide matters that were important to them, says a study in today's American Sociological Review. In 2004, that number dropped to two, and one in four had no close confidants at all....

The study finds fewer contacts are from clubs and neighbors; people are relying more on family, a phenomenon documented in the 2000 book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, a Harvard public policy professor.

The percentage of people who confide only in family increased from 57% to 80%, and the number who depend totally on a spouse is up from 5% to 9%, the study found.

I'm surprised the number who confide only in family is so high, but then why is the number who confide only in their spouse so low? I guess that 80% who confide only in family confide in more than one person, often including a spouse. You can't tell from those statistics what percent of individuals don't confide in their spouses or who confide in only one family member other than a spouse. What percent of Americans confide only in their mothers? More than 9%?

Why people have fewer close friends is unclear, Putnam says. "This is a mystery like Murder on the Orient Express, in which there are multiple culprits."

The chief suspects: More people live in the suburbs and spend more time at work, Putnam says, leaving less time to socialize or join groups.

Also, people have more entertainment tools such as TV, iPods and computers, so they can stay home and tune out.

Yes, what about those blogger characters who confide in the whole world? That's not me. But I'm just saying...

A question I have about the statistics -- and I've only read the news report, not the underlying scholarly article -- is whether the idea of what it means to confide in or rely on someone has changed over time. "The study is based on surveys of 1,531 people in 1985 and 1,467 in 2004," and I'm sure that basically the same questions were asked. But people may think about the questions differently now than they did then. And what it means to be close to other people may have changed. For example, you might be more likely to have someone to talk to about your sex life but less likely to have someone to take you to the doctor. Maybe we've come to accept more professional help for certain kind of problems that we used to rely on friends to help us with.

1985, the year of the original survey, was also the year that "Dionne and Friends" had a big hit with the song "That's What Friends Are For." The recording was made to benefit the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and that expressed the notion that "What Friends Are For" is to help you when you're sick and you need comforting and -- let's be frank -- money. But what friends are for is open to question and redefinition. It would be a different sort of study that examined what it means to have friends. You might feel that you have several friends that you can talk to about your deep feelings and aspirations but still think there is no way you'd ever ask them for money or to do your errands when you're in the hospital. That's what family are for.

"Internet addiction disorder."

There are therapists who diagnose and treat Internet addiction disorder.

[A] leading expert in the field is Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack, the director of the Computer Addiction Study Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. She opened a clinic for Internet addicts at the hospital in 1996, when, she said, "everybody thought I was crazy."

Dr. Orzack said she got the idea after she discovered she had become addicted to computer solitaire, procrastinating and losing sleep and time with her family.

Well, playing computer solitaire obsessively really is a problem. But just strip it out of your computer and move on. You won't get the shakes or anything. If you're at the point of spending a lot of money or checking into an institution to cure your problem, step back and reason it through. You could simply get rid of your internet connection or your computer and eliminate the problem. The same applies to the "addiction" to watching television. You always have the option to remove the TVs from your house. Then you'll need to find something else to do. Don't plunge into indulgent notions of yourself as weak and diseased.

"I think using the Internet in certain ways can be quite absorbing, but I don't know that it's any different from an addiction to playing the violin and bowling," said Sara Kiesler, professor of computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. "There is absolutely no evidence that spending time online, exchanging e-mail with family and friends, is the least bit harmful. We know that people who are depressed or anxious are likely to go online for escape and that doing so helps them."

It was Professor Kiesler who called Internet addiction a fad illness. In her view, she said, television addiction is worse. She added that she was completing a study of heavy Internet users, which showed the majority had sharply reduced their time on the computer over the course of a year, indicating that even problematic use was self-corrective.

She said calling it an addiction "demeans really serious illnesses, which are things like addiction to gambling, where you steal your family's money to pay for your gambling debts, drug addictions, cigarette addictions." She added, "These are physiological addictions."

Yeah, I agree with Kiesler. Or maybe you just think I just haven't gotten to the first step of admitting I have a problem. I think if you find yourself passionately absorbed in something, the question should be whether it is a good thing, not whether you are passionately absorbed.

"It's a bloggerly day in the blogging world/A bloggerly day for a blogger..."

In the unintentional humor category, over at OSM, the top news under "Current Headlines"-- I kid you not! -- is: "AP: Winnipeg bowler advances to semifinal of Qubica/AMF Bowling World Cup."

And in the intentional humor category... we have a winner.

"They are making me crazy. They have ruined my life."

It's those terrible not-ladybugs. Remember when you were all ooh! cute! ladybugs!? We know so much better now:

Unlike domestic ladybugs, the multicolored Asian variety likes to keep its polka dots indoors in the winter. In older rural neighborhoods, where houses are not knit tight, only insecticide can hope to keep them out. They swarm by the tens of thousands. Unlike the domestic ladybug, the Asian variety leaves a yellow stain. It can bite. Worst of all, it stinks.

As Michael F. Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, explained: "When the beetles are handled or disturbed in any way, they emit this yellow substance from their leg. It's lady-bird blood. It has a noxious odor."

Or, as Lorene Bowling of Olive Hill, Ky., put it, "They stink something terrible."...

Ruth Hopkins, who lives in Mount Vernon, about 40 miles from Lexington, said she got up several times every night last winter to get her hand-held vacuum and sweep the bugs off the sheets and off her ailing 89-year-old husband.

"I would just take that sweeper and sweep all night," said Mrs. Hopkins, whose home is near the Daniel Boone National Forest. "All winter long, we got no rest. They would drop off the ceiling everywhere."

We have them in Wisconsin, but not anywhere near that bad. They seem to be energized by a warm day after it's been cold, on certain days in the fall and spring. I guess in the south, there are days like that all winter. I suppose with the onset of global warming, we'll be seeing more of these horrible bugs. Is there any solution other than insecticide?

In Asia, the bugs do not winter in dwellings, but land on tall, light-colored rocks and find their way into warm, damp recesses in the stone. When the beetles got to the United States, the white vinyl siding on small buildings and granite or light stone walls on larger ones may have beckoned the same way their native rocks had.

So, usually on warm, sunny autumn afternoons after a hard frost, beetles light on the western and southwestern sides of buildings, favoring light-colored buildings over dark ones, and showing a particular affinity for surfaces with contrasting dark vertical lines - like vinyl siding. When they crawl around in search of warm recesses, they end up inside, in light fixtures or attics for the winter.

I'm going to take that into account the next time I have my house painted. I want to know how dark I need to go to make my house not remind them of a rock in China. The poor darlings are just homesick.

UPDATE: Wouldn't mosquito netting work better than a DustBuster? I'm really disturbed by the idea of repeatedly vaccuuming a sick, old man.

"THX 1138."

George Lucas's first film, "THX 1138," is about to come out as a "director's cut" DVD. You can pre-order it on Amazon and get "at no additional cost--a collectible aluminum replica of the THX 1138 ear tag featured on the DVD packaging art (while supplies last)." Good thing it's collectible, because I wouldn't want an aluminum replica of an ear tag that somehow stood in the way of my collecting it. And what does it even mean to collect a single item? If there's only one, isn't it just ... keepable? A keepsake? And what is the charm of an ear tag anyway? I'd like to run across someone actually wearing a THX 1138 ear tag, just to test the image I have in my head of the kind of guy who would wear a THX 1138 ear tag. I'll just leave it at that.



I won't be buying this DVD, even with the added incentive of the ear tag, because I've seen this movie. I saw it when it came out in 1971, and I consider that a bit of a distinction, because it was a pretty obscure movie. The name George Lucas meant nothing then. Francis Ford Coppola produced this movie, but it was still a year before "The Godfather." Back in those days we had a bit of a thing for "You're a Big Boy Now," the 1966 Francis Ford Coppola movie, but I doubt if that was the draw. As nearly as I can remember, we just liked science fiction movies. "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Green Slime"--whatever. And "THX 1138" was "supposed to be good," which was enough. I saw this movie at a drive-in that summer (the same summer when I saw Alice Cooper in concert--or thereabouts). I was stranded in southern New Jersey. You know how you feel when you've gone away to college and then you come back in the summer and live with your parents? But it was worse because my parents moved right after I graduated from high school. So instead of going back to Wayne, New Jersey, where I knew people and could easily get to New York City, I had to go to Blackwood, New Jersey, a desolate place--literally "The Pine Barrens" (that is not just the name of an episode of "The Sopranos").



It was really dull and depressing, somewhere along the White Horse Pike, midway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City (pre-gambling Atlantic City). The closest thing to anything to do there was to play pinball in a bowling alley. I've only been punched in the face once in my life, and it was in the parking lot of that bowling alley. I made fun of the words to "Born to Run" yesterday, but "a death trap ... a suicide rap" is about how it felt. People think of those early Bruce Springsteen songs as being about New Jersey, but they are about southern New Jersey, and it really was an awful place to be in the early 1970s. People in New York who laugh at New Jersey are talking about northern New Jersey. Southern New Jersey is a big step down.



But we did have a drive-in, and they were playing "THX 1138." I remember that the set was blank white, but not in the happy "Isaac Mizrahi Show" way, in the extreme sensory deprivation way. And--if I remember correctly--everyone was dressed in white, had shaved heads, and spoke in a flat, lifeless way. I was already living in southern New Jersey and that was already more sensory deprivation than I could take. Normally, I loved bleak cinema: we saw every Ingmar Bergman double feature that played at Cinema Guild during the school year back in Ann Arbor, and, believe me, Cinema Guild showed a lot of Bergman double features. But that summer, in that place, in a drive-in, "THX 1138" was profoundly, profoundly boring.



So I will not be competing with all you ear tag collectors and George Lucas fans. In my alphabetized DVD bookcase, "Three Kings" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" will for now remain side-by-side.



UPDATE: Chris points out that "THX 1138" is getting a theatrical release too.

Pete Townshend vs. Michael Moore.

I learned about Pete Townshend's website through Gawker, which succinctly notes that Pete doesn't like Michael Moore. Here's what Pete writes:

Michael Moore ... says – among other things – that I refused to allow him to use my song WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN in his latest film, because I support the war, and that at the last minute I recanted, but he turned me down. ... I had not really been convinced by BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, and had been worried about its accuracy; it felt to me like a bullying film. ...



I pointed out that WGFA is not an unconditionally anti-war song, or a song for or against revolution. It actually questions the heart of democracy: we vote heartily for leaders who we subsequently always seem to find wanting. (WGFA is a song sung by a fictional character from my 1971 script called LIFEHOUSE. The character is someone who is frightened by the slick way in which truth can be twisted by clever politicians and revolutionaries alike). ...



I have nothing against Michael Moore personally, and I know Roger Daltrey is a friend and fan of his, but I greatly resent being bullied and slurred by him in interviews just because he didn’t get what he wanted from me. It seems to me that this aspect of his nature is not unlike that of the powerful and wilful man at the centre of his new documentary. I wish him all the best with the movie, which I know is popular, and which I still haven’t seen. But he’ll have to work very, very hard to convince me that a man with a camera is going to change the world more effectively than a man with a guitar.

A classic artist's statement that reminds me why I like art more than politics. One of the reasons "We Won't Get Fooled Again" is a great song is because of the complicated ambivalence expressed by the character who sings it. A hardcore politico cannot use those words, even though a hardcore politico is likely to hear that song and mistakenly believe it expresses what he believes.