Operator's Debut Record

So I got the Operator CD that finally came out. I wasn't able to find it in any stores, so I got it off iTunes instead. Soulcrusher remains the coolest song, but overall it's not bad.

Johnny Strong really is the bastard child of Chris Cornell, but it could be worse. At least he's not aping Chester Bennington (or the dreaded Jonathan Davis). And I might add, this is what Audioslave probably should have sounded like.

Unlike most of the music I listen to, I can see even the ladies digging it. There's more hummable ballads than shredding rockers on the record, but again, it could be worse. At least there are no rap songs.

Dare I say, the band veers into Black Crowes territory. Take this snippet from Delicate. The Robinson brothers and company could definitely rock out on that one, if they were still around that is.

And that's the great thing about this Operator record. It's not afraid to rock, even sinking so low as to actually embrace the transcendent guitar solo. Witness this from Black Cloud. You go C.C. Deville.

But they also know the power of a good heavy groove. You don't have to go a hundred miles an hour to be heavy as shit. You just need some good palm muting and an impeccable sense of timing. Witness What You Get.

I'm a big lover of profanity, and there's a lot to love in the title track Soulcrusher, where Johnny Strong managers to rhyme "no other" with "don't give a fuck about ya." That takes talent.

And there's more where that came from in Live Your Way. As Roscoe P. Coltrane once said, I love it, I love it, I love it.

The final word:

Put this one in your queue and rock it.

Because $168,000 Just Isn't Enough

Tony Snow is leaving the White House, but the reasons might surprise you.

"I'm not going to be able to go the distance, but that's primarily for financial reasons." Snow said.

I'm not going to call Tony Snow a liar...

But I will call him a greedy motherfucker.

Consider: A salary of $168,000 a year puts you in the top 5% of U.S. wage-earners. The top 5% in the richest country in the world!

He's not hurting for anything.

All Gay Wednesday

Andrew Sullivan comes back from vacation with fire in his belly.

Gay couples are human beings. To have our families ripped apart and have no legal recourse is institutionalized cruelty - designed for no other purpose than to stigmatize and marginalize a small minority. We need and deserve full equality now. Nothing short of civil marriage will ever suffice.

Hell Yeah!

The False Start Mechanism

So I'm reading this blog post and the writer says:

As for the uproar over what is being called on Huffpo as Richardson's "macaca moment", there has been -0- direct evidence of a genetic link to homosexuality. Further, the idea of homosexuality being genetic in nature goes against evolutionary theory, unless it is a remnant of a time before the dinosaurs when animals had homosexual reproduction (don't you have to go all the way to the earthworm for that?)

First, there's about as much "direct evidence" to suggest that homosexuality is genetic as there is to suggest that it's a "choice." (Here's an example of some evidence that supports a genetic component to homosexuality.)

Second, it's not wise to assume that because something isn't proven to have genetic origins, then it is, by default, a "choice." It's not a zero sum game here, and when it's all said and done, I think the correct answer isn't "nature" or "nurture," but rather "a little bit of both."

Third, who said a genetic origin of homosexuality "goes against evolutionary theory?" Isn't it just as likely that homosexuality plays an important part in "natural selection," which is, ahem, a crucial part of evolutionary theory?

What if homosexuality is nature's way of weeding out undesirable genetic traits in a particular bloodline? Ah, what if?

I don't come to these conclusions lightly. I base them on observations of my own family history, not any kind of scientific study. (Doctoral students...please, run with my hypothesis if you want.)

Way back in the family tree, about five or six generations, a pair of first cousins married and had children. The kids all had one head and all the necessary appendages, but they lacked a certain blood clotting agent. Fast forward to my grandfather, who lay in a hospital bed bleeding to death from every orifice in his body.

Before he died, he passed his genes, and a diluted form of this blood disorder, to his kids. One of them was gay. His kids had kids, and they too passed on the family genes and the blood disorder. One of them was gay. And so it might be for the next generation.

I don't know if the two are connected, but if being gay is in the genes, then perhaps they are. Perhaps the defect triggered a shutdown mechanism in the genetic code and said, "Woah, now, slow down. Looks like this was a false start. Back to the drawing board."

Of course, the genes just write the program. They don't actually play the game. You could say my example is invalidated by the fact that both of the gay members in my family have had children (and passed on their genes), so the "false start" mechanism didn't work anyway.

So?

Does that make them any less gay? Maybe they just "chose" to be hetero that day.