"Barry Melrose is going into the hall of fame tonight. Not for hockey, 33 points in 300 games as a player or 79 wins as a coach are not enshrinable numbers, even for a place that honours Harold Ballard as a member.

No, tonight during their game against the Portland Pirates, the Manchester Monarchs are inducting the Kelvington, Sask., native into the mullet hall of fame."

Some of you will have no idea who Barry Melrose is.  You are the lucky ones.

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"Life. Death. Guilt. Afterlife. For the Fishers, the more things stay the same, the more they change. On March 2 at 9pm ET, it's time to break new ground with the Season Three premiere of the Emmy®- and Golden Globe-winning series Six Feet Under! "

Yay! 

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"The band Great White's performance rider contains no mention whatsoever of pyrotechnics being used during the rock group's current tour of clubs and small theaters, The Smoking Gun has learned. TSG today (2/21) obtained copies of the band's rider from two separate promoters who booked shows by the group during the past month. A copy of the Great White performance specs can be found below. A third promoter, Domenic Santana, told TSG that the band set off a pyrotechnic display without his permission during a show in Asbury Park, New Jersey last Friday (2/14), putting the "lives of a lot of people in danger." Santana, owner of the Stone Pony, said that he "had no idea" that pyrotechnics were part of the rock band's show and pointed to Great White's standard performance rider, which makes no reference to pyrotechnic displays. Last night, at least 95 concertgoers were killed and 170 people were hurt at a West Warwick, Rhode Island show when the club erupted in flames following a pyrotechnic display during the group's opening song. Owners of The Station, the Rhode Island club where scores perished, this afternoon released a statement claiming that they, too, were never told about Great White's pyrotechnic plans."

Die filthy hair band, die.

"Every icon needs an origin myth. Born in the same city as jazz, Wynton Marsalis was blessed with a signifying provenance. "I'm from New Orleans," he has told an interviewer, as shorthand for his musical background. "We don't need a concert hall for jazz." In many ways Marsalis's story is so neatly connected to jazz history that it defies credulity. Had a screenwriter created Wynton Marsalis, a cynical producer would have sent back the opening scenes for rewrite: too perfect. Not only did he come from the cradle of jazz but he plays the trumpet, the instrument that originally defined the music. "The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden," Marsalis once said, "and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel." Moreover, Marsalis rose to prominence in the mid-1980s, just as jazz was approaching its centennial. "There's a tremendous symbolic resonance that has always been a part of what Wynton's about," says Jeff Levenson, a veteran jazz writer who also worked as an executive at both Columbia and Warner Bros. Records. "This kid emerges who's a hotshot ... and the whole thing has a kind of symmetry to it. Louis Armstrong starts things off—trumpet player, New Orleans, turn of the century. Wynton closes it out—a trumpet player from New Orleans." "

The Atlantic Monthly article on Wynton Marsalis I mentioned here a few weeks ago is now available online for those that are interested.

"He’s a best-selling author who’s caught in a real-life cliffhanger. Arrested, accused and convicted of high crimes, he may be writing his next chapters in prison. But the jurors who found him guilty are now feeling guilty themselves. It all centers on a growing controversy that could be headed to your state, about the law of the land, the will of the people, and what can happen when they clash. Over the years “Dateline” has interviewed many juries, but what these jurors had to say was truly remarkable."

Dateline covered the Ed Rosenthal case tonight (for background look here).  It was heartening to see a mainstream media outlet covering this story in a reasonable manner indicative of how mainstream medical marijuana as a "Good Thing"(tm) has become.  I suspect there are a lot of folks around Mr Rosenthal (if not Mr Rosenthal himself) who wouldn't mind seeing him go away for a while as a martyr for the cause.

"And with voters in more and more states contemplating medical marijuana laws like California’s, the conflict between states’ rights and federal law may grow even sharper."

Amen, hallelujah and bring-it-on!  We've got plenty of other things to spend our federal tax dollars on.

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