Look here tomorrow for massive Brain Pan news.

     Well, it looks like CBGB'S will probably close, despite the 11th hour negotiating help of Steven Van Zant. That is sad. BUT HEARTEN FRIENDS! All this high profile publicity means that it will likely open up somewhere else in New York. So that means that it will be exactly the same, and that the spirit of Punk Rock will continue on unabated, and I will be young forever, right?
     No. Not to diminish it's value as a landmark, but most people, including myself, didn't even know it was still open in the first place, and our interest in its continued existence was really based more on principal than any thing else. If it moves it will just be some other shitty rock club. They won, the landlord always does, and anyway CBGB'S hasn't launched any careers lately so it really doesn't matter. Now maybe if Bono had gotten involved…

Read an actual news story about it HERE.

     My mother watched the evening news every weekday night when I was young. She was usually good about the TV, and let my sister and I watch whatever we wanted. That included a phenomenal amount of crap. For example, it is very likely that you can tell me the plot to just about any episode of Saved By The Bell, and I will be able to tell you its ending. On my account my mother suffered through countless hours of Voltron, Star Wars, The Back to the Future Trilogy, and epic marathons of The Comedy Channel (this was before The Comedy Channel merged with competitor network HA, and started to suck. Does anybody out there remember The Higgins Boys and Gruber, or SAST, or Rich Hall’s Onion World?) My Mother was also forced to endure my sister’s The Little Mermaid phase. This was a time wherein my sister, who was very young at the time, watched the animated Disney movie ‘The Little Mermaid’, every single day. When not watching the movie she listened to the soundtrack on a little white cassette that she had up in her bedroom. During any other time of the day she could be found singing the key songs to herself, often at full volume. The entire period lasted for about a year and a half, and My Mother was extremely patient about it. 

     But at five O’clock my mother’s will reigned. The TV, unquestionably, found itself turned to ABC, and we all sat down and watched Peter Jennings tell us what had happened that day.

     Peter Jennings WAS the news. I had no love for any anchor but him. Because of my Mother, the moment any major event exploded onto the American consciousness, it was to Peter Jennings that I turned. He gave me the word on Iran Contra, six presidential elections, hundreds of national disasters, two wars in Iraq, a recount, and everything in between. He explained to me what Chad’s were.

     Every time the President opened his mouth, or anybody had a party convention, I watched it on ABC, so that I could hear what Peter Jennings had to say about it. In 2000, when he stayed up for 48 hours or whatever, I put in as many of those hours with him as I could spare. We rung in the millennium together and I wished then that we could have done it every year.

     I am not writing this to eulogize him, as that has been done weeks ago, eloquently, by the friends and colleagues who knew him and worked with him. I instead want to make this point: I knew, when he died, that news would be less fun without him, and that with the absence of his unique talent and perspective I would forever be, somehow, less informed. I knew all that. But it was when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and Peter Jennings wasn’t there to tell me about it, that I realized what his being gone actually meant to me.

     Charlie Gibson just isn’t the same.

     This is just odd: The International Jewish Conspiracy . It's like the onion, but for Jews I guess.

     A few words about Art Garfunkel: I like Simon and Garfunkel, many don’t, and I can understand, but I do, and I was always under the impression that of the duo, Garfunkel was, perhaps, the weaker member. 
     This may or may not be true. 
     One thing is for CERTAIN however, and that is that Garfunkel is DEFINITELY the bigger pot smoker. 
     Garfunkel, who has already been to court once in the past year for marijuana possession, was charged again yesterday after police pulled him over for blowing a stop sign, and upon searching his car, found a joint in his ashtray. (I like the mental picture involved here: The police are searching Art Garfunkel’s car, stricken with their serious cop faces, probably being dicks about the whole thing, and he is standing roadside with that pissed off, I’m screwed, look on his face.)
     I have two comments to make regarding this incident. First, if he were any of the non-famous, Garfunkel would be looking at some serious trouble. Two possession busts in a year is bad news. I don’t know how bad, as I am no expert on the laws regarding misdemeanor drug possession in the sate of New York, but I am sure that it is bad nonetheless. 
     Second, Art Garfunkel wasn’t even trying to be careful. He was just blasting around in his car, blowing stop signs, blazing away on a big ole’ rock star hooter, totally oblivious to any possible trouble that might make for him. Brilliant. Who knew Art Garfunkel had such big balls. Ozzy Osbourne is tramping around on TV with his boring ass family, and Art Garfunkel is racking up two drug busts in a year. I wonder if he hangs out with Courtney Love?

     Upon reading in an almanac over the weekend (great for the bathroom by the way), I came upon a list of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I read through it, and was angered by what I though were a few glaring omissions. I had a little conversation with myself about, pants around the ankles, this morning. "WELL HELL," I thought to myself, "I have a little corner of the web at my disposal, probably the tiniest corner, but I can none-the-less launch into a tirade about it, and try to right a few wrongs the only way I know how, IE Pointless Bitching.
     I looked over the list. The Ramones weren't on there. AND WHAT ABOUT THE CLASH YOU ASK? Nope. No Clash. I was resolved. A list was to be made. A great list in the tradition of such hack monstro-mags like Spin and Rolling Stone. I would call it: "TEN BANDS THAT SHOULD BE IN THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME AND AREN'T". Or something. But it would set things in motion. People would read it, just the usual 10 people a first, but it would grow. Calls would be made. Petitions signed. Soon there would be a great outcry to the president, or whoever, the guy who runs things down at the hall of fame, and I would soon be proved right. I, your humble correspondent, would be heralded as the next Lester Bangs, and would be quickly given Hummer, and a syndicated column. Maybe I would win the Pulitzer Prize, and get to have lunch with any Ramone that might still be alive.
     I later discovered, from an unusual bout of research that overcame me, that The Clash AND The Ramones are both in the hall, and that I am an idiot. Further inspection of the almanac shows that it is from the year 2002, and that both the above named bands were, in fact, inducted after that time. So much for my Hummer. Therefore I have decided to forgo the list. It would be silly now, and would only mean more research. I will instead leave this as a cautionary tale. The moral? KEEP AROUND AN UP TO DATE ALMANAC.

     Republicans can be nasty. This is something we all know. But few are the chances to witness just how nasty they can really be, when provoked. Take the example of Bill Frist. This man is a real right winger, Senate Majority Leader, and an all around inside player. He can get a meeting with the President, like, whenever he wants. Or could. This was until a few weeks ago, when he came out in support of Stem Cell research, at which point the right started attacking him like he was Ralph Nader.

Evangelical ads target Frist in Iowa

Why is it that Kevin Costner is only tolerable when his character is a baseball player? How can that be? Is there anyone else whose careers work like this? I don’t think so. Maybe Joe Pesci and the Mob.

     The blog spammers hit me again. WILL THE SPIES NEVER STOP! Our work here is too important to bee snooped upon.

What if THIS...



   ...fell into the wrong hands. I shudder to think.

     I am a little surprised that the media is making such a big deal out of Pat Robertson saying that the US government should assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Pat says crazy things all the time. And while I do remember there being something in the bible about murder being bad, and I can agree that Chavez is a card holding member of the Crazy-Ass Dictator's Club, I do not see how this time is very much different. Mild in fact. This is why today Brain Pan brings you:

Crazy Shit Pat Robertson Has Said

   1.  I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period.

   2.  NOW is saying that in order to be a woman, you've got to be a lesbian.

   3.  [about Planned Parenthood] It is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism - everything that the Bible condemns.

   4.  Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.

   5.  I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches? The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice... [Your children] are acting out Satanic rituals and participating in it, and don't even realize it.

   6.  The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the feminism.

   7.  The courts are merely a ruse, if you will, for humanist, atheistic educators to beat up on Christians.

   8.  Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

   9. [during an interview] I read your book. When you get through, you say, "If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom [Washington Dc], I think that's the answer." I mean, you get through this, and you say, "We've got to blow that thing up." I mean, is it as bad as you say?

   And this is the best one, as is displays is vast scientific understanding,
  
   10.  I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets. I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors.

   So see, he is always saying crazy ass things like that, and is probably only doing it for attention. Which he gets. I mean who can resist letting him make an ass out of himself in front of the nation. I sure can't.