Electric Josh

Tunes
Here's what happens when real authors decide to talk intelligently about music.

Country music has become so squeaky-clean that a recent song in which Tracy Lawrence claimed that his grandfather taught him ''how to cuss and how to pray'' was banned from several radio stations, cussing being too strong a concept for airplay. Long gone are the days when Merle Haggard took care of his searing morning hangover with an ''afternooner'' and sang about it. This is thanks in large part to the vice grip of Clear Channel Radio, which buys up radio stations and makes carefully researched decisions about what Americans are free to listen to. Clear Channel has decided that patriotism sells, and that cussing and afternooners are definitely out.

O: How do you feel about being closely identified with the politics of "Okie From Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side Of Me" now?

MH: Oh, I must have been an idiot. It's documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time, and I mirror that. I always have. Staying in touch with the working class... but it's pretty easy to lie to me. You could lie to me. They had me in a film called Wag The Dog because of "Okie From Muskogee" and my close scrutiny of the people that are being shitted. I've become self-educated since I wrote that song. But it still has a very timely description.

Times
Holy crapola! The Times has discovered that one of their reporters has been serially making stuff up.

In an inquiry focused on correcting the record and explaining how such fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The Times, the Times journalists have so far uncovered new problems in at least 36 of the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting assignments late last October. In the final months the audacity of the deceptions grew by the week, suggesting the work of a troubled young man veering toward professional self-destruction.

Mr. Blair, who has resigned from the paper, was a reporter at The Times for nearly four years, and he was prolific. Spot checks of the more than 600 articles he wrote before October have found other apparent fabrications, and that inquiry continues. The Times is asking readers to report any additional falsehoods in Mr. Blair's work; the e-mail address is retrace@nytimes.com.

Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, trusts its employees to uphold central principles, and the inquiry found that Mr. Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth. His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer - which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts - as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole.

On the other hand, consider the difference in tone between this sort of annoyed, sheepish apology (Just by reading, you can actually tell that the authors are living beings, super pissed about this guy and sheepishly apologetic!), and the usual monotonous pap that most papers (including this same one) usually emit, the unending stream of jargon-laden, single-sentence paragraphs thrown together in essentially random order. Maybe an interesting writing voice, or at least a non-mechanical one, might be too confusing for most readers...?

At least the usual, terrible dryness leads to great humor, even if unintentionally.
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SAT
Given that among this space's dozen loyal readers there are relatively few that are sufficiently nerdy to read Slashdot regularly, we take time out from Mother's Day festivities to point out (especially to Libby) this new frontier in taking the SAT's: minimizing your score. (This space would smugly admit to having failed badly at minimizing our SAT scores back in the day (heh heh), but it's kind of pathetic when guys pushing 30 still remember their SAT scores.)
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