http://www.joelcage.com/

Here’s something kinda cool …

Neil Young hosts a website entitled Living With War Today.  Along with articles regarding the assorted military conflicts in which our country is embroiled, songwriters are encouraged to post links to anti-war tunes they have penned.  I posted  “No Peace In Dying”  a few months back and it was entered onto the list of – now – 3,256 tunes. As I have monitored this page I see that No Peace changes in it’s position on the chart, a result of, what I can only imagine, represents the number of times people have listened to the tune.

No Peace current resides at #240 – not bad out of 3200+ tunes.    So I ponder – if all you guys go to:

http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwsongspage.html

find No Peace In Dying,  and give it a play,
if it won’t begin to climb higher on the chart…
who knows, maybe even propel it into the Top 10!
What benefit this is to me or anyone else I know not,
but it sounds like fun.

Give a poke and let’s see what happens.

So I’m online the other day, watching Hulu (Studio 60 – cool show) and an ad for Verizon FiOS comes on. The exceedingly typical looking announcer-guy proudly boasts that along with high speed internet you also get access to 16,000 movies.

.. an awesome year – sitting and watching 16,000 movies nonstop. WAY worse than eating at MacDonald’s for a month – maybe there should be a movie about THAT.

There have been times when, for the most part,  no-one really understood rock-n-roll, computers, the internet, file sharing, the grab your ankle dance, reality shows, the $500 concert ticket …  these are now all thoroughly accepted concepts.

The point is, we have got to be careful, the ideas we spill into the mainstream, because they become the mantras of our time .. and while the thought that watching tv nonstop for full year might seem absurd at this moment, the sequence is quite predictable:

Hey, what do I care? It won’t happen in my lifetime or the lifetime of my son, whom I feel the tendency to discourage from having children so that he doesn’t feel the terrible dismay that I do when I imagine the world in which he must face his future.

It is important to recognize absurdly destructive ideas when they are introduced into the mainstream, and to violently reject them in your thinking – acknowledge not only the absurdity of the idea but of ALL those responsible for its dissemination, from the one who thunk it, to those whose efforts aid and abet its syringe-like injection into the blank unsuspecting minds of those who soak it all up and believe everything they see and hear in the media.

Freedom of speech is a great thing but it requires responsibility on our part to reject the bullshit and acknowledge & support that which we believe to be true, and I just don’t see that happening.  If a guy can look me in the eye through a TV screen and say, in all earnestness, that to watch TV non-stop for a year would be awesome, there must be present the belief that certain viewers will agree … and that simply should not be.

Time to wake up… again.