Rubber Bullet

Josh Woodward: Check Out His Music

This lazy Saturday in November, I’ve been noodling around on iTunes and the iLike sidebar, a social music discovery application that suggests music based on one’s musical tastes. I have come across several new musicians whom I particularly like. One of them is a talented and prolific singer–songwriter named Josh Woodward. He is an independent musician who shares his music freely, and it just seems right to get his name out there in whatever way possible, even if it’s on this tiny little blog floating aimlessly in the cosmic blogosphere. I suggest checking him out here (www.joshwoodward.com).

Windshield Rites

Okay. What is this new phenomenon of people eulogizing their loved ones on their vehicle windshields?

 “R.I.P. Tammy 7/16/81–6/10/09. We love you, babe!” written next to a quaint jagged (ripped?) broken heart.

Somehow, I don’t think Tammy would appreciate being memorialized on a Ford F-150 windshield after she and the two tons of metal she was using as a cell phone booth was wrapped around a cement light post somewhere near Jigger, La.

Legalized Drugs: Why Our Great-Grandparents Were Happier

Bayer’s Heroin


A bottle of Bayer’s heroin. Between 1890 and 1910 heroin was sold as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. It was also used to treat children with strong cough.

Stephen Colbert Rips Apart Glenn Beck: Building His Career on 9/11

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63rd Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima

In honor of Hiroshima Day, I’d like to take a minute to reflect on just how absurd it is for America to maintain 10,000 nuclear bombs. Defense experts say that many simply aren’t needed, and by reducing the nuclear arsenal our country could save $14 billion dollars—more than enough to save the lives of six million kids who die of starvation in impoverished nations each year.

Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign)

With a stroke of the pen, a stranger transforms the afternoon for another man in this emotionally stirring short film by Alonso Alvarez.

Director : Alonso Alvarez Barreda
Running Time : 04:50
Year : 2007
Country : Mexico/ U.S.A
Category : Short film

HISTORIA DE UN LETRERO (THE STORY OF A SIGN)

Book Review: Dark at the Roots by Sarah Thyre

All I can say is that I’m a little miffed that I did not beat Sarah Thyre to the punch and write my own memoir of growing up in the South, and in particular, Louisiana. After all, I, too, was born into a peculiar, quirky Catholic family and attended a parochial school also named Our Lady of Prompt Succor (although in a different city) run by sadistic, hirsute Cajun nuns who mastered corporal punishment. I hunted and trapped nutria in bayous and witnessed their hides being flayed from their carcasses, although performed by my brother, not a hayseed boyfriend with a cruel streak. My family often shopped at a convenience store not unlike Pic-a-Pac replete with a cast of colorful characters with IQs matching their inseam measurements. I could go on an on.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about the hilarious, poignant and sometimes shocking adventures of a young, tenacious and sometimes truth-bending girl growing up in a large Catholic family in the Deep South. The writing is crisp and clear as Abita Springs artesian water, and each word is deftly chosen to perfectly capture experiences as seen through the eyes of a young person thrust into an idiosyncratic foreign land—much like Waveland, Mississippi—determined to rise out of the squalor and mediocrity that is endemic to so many families in the state known as Sportsman’s Paradise.

I found myself laughing out loud not only at the bizarre quandries in which the author and her siblings found themselves trapped, but at the language used to bring these situations into full 1970s Technicolor t.v. brilliance, with a heaping fistful of rabbit-eared antennae static.

If you are looking for one of those rare reads that you just cannot put down until the last page is turned with Cheeto-orange stained fingers, Dark at the Roots is one of those rare gems...or rhinestones, depending on where you do your shopping.

Cube Life Is No Life

5 Minutes To Kill Yourself

9: A Film by Shane Acker

Overheard in Baton Rouge

The Rite Aid down the street was uncharacteristically deserted this past early summer Saturday. The automatic double doors at my neighborhood’s location are timed particularly slow to open, the delay I think intentionally set by the management to identify the intoxicated.

I was there before noon to buy cheap beer in anticipation of a thirsty afternoon, grabbed the goods I had come for, and approached the checkout clerk. As I stood at the register while she rang up my purchase, the automatic doors to my right opened with a blast of hot, steamy air, and a woman in curlers and slippers entered, announcing, “Hey, Gurl!” I couldn’t tell to whom she was speaking until I spotted one of those Bluetooth phones that clip around one’s ear cyborg-style tucked beneath her mop of pink rollers. Her slippers hissed on the drugstore tiles.

She was obviously in no hurry to complete her drugstore mission but rather more interested in her personal conversation. As the clerk let me know how much I owed for my purchase, the Bluetooth woman said, “Gurl, you betta call me when dem biscuits is ready!” I reached for my wallet during which time Bluetooth’s party must have been talking, obvious from the long pause. She stopped walking, wrangling with an over-sized purse, and then spoke again, “I haven’t had me a biscuit in a minute!” I paid the clerk who gave me a twinkle-eyed grin. Bluetooth just stood there, her slipper hiss silent, still engrossed in her own not-so-private conversation, pining, “I do loves me some biscuits.”

Smiling, and with purchase in hand, I stood and waited patiently for the automatic double doors to open with a blast of oven-hot Louisiana oxygen-thin air, the kind my grandmother used to say “you could cut with a butter knife.”

I drove home daydreaming of fresh, homemade, hot buttered biscuits, my beer cans in the passenger seat already beginning to sweat.