YOU GUYS.
Experience Dave Rawlings’ live session at NPR’s KEXP (with Gillian Welch!) on YouTube. The video and audio quality are great, and it’s all so good.
Click here for the other videos/audio; there are four songs. You can, uh, thank me later.
I like pandas. But octopuses…they just can’t beat octopuses.
This is great! From the article:
Much ado is made about the plight of the panda. Pandas are endangered due to habitat destruction, the Chinese tradition of poaching, and a hilariously low birth rate. While their exact fertility rates are unknown (it’s kind of a personal question), most experts believe that pandas reproduce once every ten million years. This has prompted aggressive captivity breeding programs. These never work, because getting pandas to mate is like launching a satellite into orbit. Simply put, pandas and mating are like Quakers and military drafts. Zookeepers have even resorted to showing them pornography, which is more a measure of desperation than scientific training.
Every so often captive pandas will mate (always by accident), and the local news then runs endless loops of a gross panda cub in an incubator as it plots a life of not mating.
Pandas’ problems come from their basic refusal to act like real bears. First of all, real bears like to mate. Real bears also eat things they’re supposed to eat. But pandas, despite having the digestive tract of a carnivore that cannot effectively digest cellulose, nevertheless insist on keeping to a diet that is 90 percent bamboo. This means that they have to feed constantly, subtracting from time that could otherwise be spent at least pretending to care about mating.
7 Songs performed live, six of which from Swell Season’s forthcoming album “Strict Joy”, out October 27.
Nobody wants to high five because the swine flu will KILL YOU, so here are some alternatives. Complete with pictures.
I’m a firm believer in the Snap and Flick.
I’m never going to the website for an NPR show again. I accidentally went to the website for the show “A Way With Words.” For some reason I’d always imagined the people as trendy hipsters, and they’re clearly not. Now the show will never be the same.
Ha, me too. I frequently imagine that NPR hosts somehow all look cooler than regular talk-radio hosts, that they all carry messenger bags and listen to Calexico or Joanna Newsom and read Dave Eggers novels while taking public transportation to work every morning.
And then I imagine that I’d totally fit in working with them, and they would encourage me to wear more plaid flannel and we’d have great music and political discussions over an inoffensively omnivorous lunch.
