Widespread Panic: Why are you trying to kill me?

In an excercise typical of a healthy combination of rules 1 and 2 following last week's Savannah run, I present you with a list of "Things Widespread Panic fans like."

With at nod to these guys, and, for that matter, these guys too.

1. Destroying their bodies
Whether it's drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, a lack of sleep or, most likely, all of the above, few groups of people are into excess like Panic fans. And no one, NO ONE, is more likely to polish off an organically grown, fully vegan meal with a half gallon of bourbon. Let it be said, though, that Panic fans have good taste, and choose to destroy their internal organs with only the finest bourbons, beers, pills and powders when possible.


2. Making sarcastic remarks
Often about hippies, how they hate hippies or how dirty hippies are. It's ironic, I know.

3. The music of Widespread Panic
They pretend to like other music.

4. Dancing "my ass off"
Typically poorly. See #s 1 and 3.

5. Ridiculous outfits
As I walked out of a show last week there was a guy in a white ape suit playing a guitar and harmonica. On any other day, that might have seemed strange.






Yep. Lots of this guy.

6. T-shirts with clever sayings and/or song lyrics printed on them (men only)
This is not be confused with No. 5, and in fact has far more in common with No. 2. I suppose the female equivalent would be either a homemade dress, or an outfit that allows the girl to blend in with all the hippies wearing homemade dresses, but still look super hot.

7. Forcing other people to listen to their music.
Seriously, what makes someone decide to bring their own drum to a concert?

8. Not paying for things
I'm convinced some Panic fans have two-year community college degrees in the art of grifting.

9. Over-paying for things
This might seem at odds with No. 8, but I assure you it is not. $5 for a bottle of water? I'll have six.

10. Owning ridiculous amounts of technology
That dred-locked hippie might not have a place to stay tonight, but he's got a $3,000 laptop, a digital recorder with dual mike set and a sweet titanium mike stand. He also has an iPhone and a walkie-talkie. Can he sleep on your floor tonight?

11. Washing over you like locusts
Attention concert promoters: You cannot have too many kegs of beer or $5 bottles of water on hand for a Widespread Panic concert. I know you think you can, but you can't.

12. Selling you something
No, I don't want a veggie burrito or your charcoal drawing of "Mickey Hauser." See also: No. 8. By the way, whoever invented grill cheese sandwiches with garlic powder for $1 is a flat-out genius of consumerism.

13. Not being able to find things that are clearly in their pockets
See No. 1.














Joe Cox: Probably a Widespread fan.

14. Noticing coincidences
See No 1.

15. Talking about how awesome shows they attended were
Trust me, unless a member of the band ascended into heaven during the show you're talking about, you might as well be quiet. See also: No. 1.

16. Predicting the next song
This is often followed by an insistence that the band was, in fact, "teasing" that song "just like two nights ago in Orange Beach." See also: Knowing that was a Bloodkin song.

17. Referring to band members as "the boys."
See also: Referring to multiple shows in a row as "runs."

18. Talking about how awesome Eugene, Ore., and the entire state of Colorado are
Athens would also be on this list, except everybody already knows how awesome it is. Even people who've never been there.

Yes, I've heard. Thanks.


19. Being from Tennessee
I have no idea why. Though I once knew a guy who lived in Memphis specifically because it was a convenient place to get to Panic shows from.

20. Text messaging songs as they are played
I don't know why everybody's cousin needs to know what songs are performed at at show they are not attending, but they do. See also: Holding their cell phones up and swaying back an forth during slow Talking Heads covers, posting shaky video of songs to YouTube and having hour-long conversations on internet message boards.

21. Becoming best friends with people they clearly will never see or talk to again
See No. 1.

22. Actually seeing those people at another show, and doing them some kind of favor
See No. 1 and No. 3.

23. Holding grudges
Largely because it gives them ample opportunity to exercise their right to No. 2. I once saw a band review that panned Widespread with more than 4,000 follow-up comments posted to it (I am not making that number up), including someone posting the reviewer's telephone number and address.
p.s. - i made that number up. It was 785.

24. Exagerating
You know, just for effect.

25. Despite it all, or possibly because of it, not wanting to leave
This town is nuts, my kind of place...














I don't know who this guy is, but the visor and Colorado sky are dead giveaways.

And then I lost my nerve

UPDATE: This post was initially titled "---- Racism." The idea was to make some sort of commentary about what we're offended by versus what we probably ought to be offended by.
---
Which one of those words do you figure is the ugliest?


I'm scared of what I won't become. And you're scared of what I might become.

Stop the presses, it's sort of sleeting in Macon

I think I'm going to go stand outside of Kroger tonight and just slap the ever-living crap out of anyone who comes out carrying bread and milk.

MLK, Boyz in the Hood, Iraq, Alexis de Tocqueville and Doonesbury

If it's not already obvious, I'm reading several books by Martin Luther King right now, and I'll just quote them all day long:

Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. I said on one occasion, "If ever Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way." Maybe this sounded like arrogance. But it was not intended that way. It was simply my way of saying that I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity. Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it til the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence.
- Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go From Here?, 1967

Boyz in the Hood was on Saturday night and, during the scene where Cuba Gooding Jr's friends are arrested for the first time, I wondered: Why don't we teach non-violence in kindergarten and elementary school?

I'm not talking about Jesus or other religions, most of which teach that love is the most powerful force in the universe. I'm talking about the political force that has enacted more positive change in this world than any other, without firing a shot.

I also thought to myself: Maybe if whites had been made to live as blacks for a few years in the 1950s the civil rights movement would have chugged along a little faster, but that's kind of irrelevant.

Back to King:

This is not to imply that the Negro is a saint who abhors violence. Unfortunately, a check of the hospitals in any Negro community on any Saturday night will make you painfully aware of the violence within the Negro community. By turning his hostility and frustration with the larger society inward, the Negro often inflicts terrible acts of violence on his own black brother. ...

Therefore I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and east away its vital unity.

And from an earlier portion of the book:

During a nonviolent demonstration for voting rights, the sheriff had directed his men in tear-gassing and beating marchers to the ground. The nation had seen and heard, and exploded in indignation. In protest, Negroes and whites marched fifty miles through Alabama. ... The Voting Rights Bill of 1965 was the result. ...

Mass marches transformed the common man into the star performer and engaged him in a total commitment. Yet nonviolent resistance caused no explosions of anger - it instigated no riots - it controlled anger and released it under discipline for maximum effect.

I know at least one person who would disagree with that, but I wasn't there in the 1960s, so I can't say.

I can point out a similarity between the King's nonviolent movement and the concept of civil disobedience, described here by Alexis de Tocqueville:

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

I can also wonder whether this same strategy, combined with a nearly limitless ability for forgiveness, could solve the problems in the Middle East. In fact, I wonder if it might be the only thing that will solve those problems.

By the way, this was yesterday's Doonesbury in The Telegraph:

MLK and 9.11

For some reason, you can get in a lot of trouble in this country by suggesting that the normal laws of cause and effect may have been in play when Islamic terrorists attacked this country on Sept. 11, 2001.

Or, to put it another way, that United States policy may have helped lead to that terrible day.

So let me go ahead and admit that, when I read this quote last night from Martin Luther King Jr.'s book "Where do we go from here":

Cries of black power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are the consequences of it.

I wrote "9/11?" as a note to myself in the margin. Please, no one tell Rudy Giuliani. A buddy of mine and I were drinking and talking a couple of months ago, and he said something that I thought was so well-put and simple that I wrote it down:

Let's just maybe stop and think for a second. ... Maybe something that we've done in the past is encouraging this behavior. ... The CIA knows about blowback.... If you piss somebody off, it's gonna cause a hatred. Doesn't mean it's your fault but tell me that doesn't mean s#@$. ... And of course if we leave (Iraq) that's another @#$% you.

Well put. And while I'm sounding like an unAmerican pinko coward of a commie anyway, let me share this quote, from the same King book, which King attributed to former federal Office of Economic Opportunity director Hyman Bookbinder:

The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.

I'm not sure that's true. But if it is, we should get on that.

Take that, Honolulu Star Bulletin!

A local Dawg fan has come to my defense in the Hawaiin press:

Dawg lovers wish no ill will toward Colt
Greetings from the warm climes of middle Georgia. In the last couple of days, we here have been treated to a few letters in our paper from some of y'all who have gotten the impression (false, may I add) that we want Colt Brennan's "head on a platter." Please allow me to explain that here in Georgia, passion for our beloved Dawgs runs very deep and has run deep for many, many years. We tend to take football very seriously here, and things can be said that perhaps folks who only in recent years have started up a football program misinterpret.

No one here wants any harm to Colt; as a matter of fact, I want him to have a career day against my Dawgs. That, however, will not change the outcome as he hasn't yet seen (oh, he will) a D-line like ours.

But I digress. To those of you who took offense at a local columnist here, lighten up, he isn't Kirk Herbstreit. I hope you all have great holidays, and to those of you making the trip, you are going to have a blast. 'Ceptin' for the game, that is. Take care.

Danny Hinton
Macon, Ga.

I want to thank Mr. Hinton for explaining things to these folks. The Hawaiin press has been villainous in its unfair, inaccurate and undeserved excoriation of my character.

Now back to thinking of new things to make fun of about Hawaii.

Colt Brennan and the worst mistake of my life

I've removed the name and contact information, but this is an actual letter to the editor my paper received late last week over this column, in which I said (figuratively) that I wanted Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan's head on a stick. My own smart-ass comments appear as appropriate.

Dear Sirs:

It was disappointing to learn that a person from your newspaper expressed his disappointment with the BCS process by threatening the life of Hawaii's quarterback, Colt Brennan. This was not ordinary banter between two colleges, two teams or two cities. This was the type of diatribe that is akin to inciting radical terrorists to assault and kill our troops, their own people and attack innocents around the world.

Um, OK.

Why, in a position such as his on your newspaper, was this sick, over-zealous sewage allowed in print?

The guy who writes the under-zealous sewage was off that day.

Colt is a college student who happens to excel in football.

He's also a plea bargain away from being a registered sex offender.

Why would he or anyone else for that matter, deserve that type of reaction? He never refuses a request for autographs, photo ops, or a simple handshake. He has so much respect for his other team members, the majority of which are of Samoan descent, that he actually learned to speak Samoan.

I hope he learned how to say "Someone please block Rennie Curran."

He is loved in Hawaii by its people and especially his team mates. Anyone who even looks at him the wrong way has just made the biggest mistake of their lives.

I honestly have no idea what that means. Is it a threat, or do guilt and self-loathing just ruin the rest of your life if you look at Colt Brennan the wrong way? Or maybe he's like an eclipse - if you look at him without one of those mirror box thingies you'll go blind.

Hawaii has been insulted to the extreme because of this attack, and our proud Warriors will unfortunately have to take it out on your team. Hawaii - 27, Georgia - 10.

You'd think fans of a team called "The Rainblow..." excuse me, "The Rainbow Warriors" would understand the concept of figurative speech. Are they really at war? Are they actually rainbows?

Also, Hawaii fans can feel free to lecture me on sportsmanship as soon as they stop attacking people from Fresno State.

By the way, Hawaii, stop putting that apostrophe between the two i's in Hawai'i. The rest of the country thinks it looks stupid.

Hawaii: Now with the Internet

Holy cow, I am moderately famous with readers of The Honolulu Advertiser:

Two days after UH capped an unprecedented season as the country's only undefeated team, en route to the Sugar Bowl, the Warriors yesterday also found themselves in new territory as the targets of taunts on a national scale.

Among the trash talk on blogs and other Web sites yesterday, Travis Fain, a columnist for The Telegraph newspaper in Macon, Ga., wrote "I want Colt Brennan's head on a stick. I want that pretty boy Hawaii quarterback driven through the Superdome turf. ... Destroy Hawaii."

(Hawaii associate athletic director of external affairs John) McNamara was hardly surprised.

"They only throw stones when you're on a pedestal," he said. "We've reached a plateau we've never been to before. There will be no shortage of critics."

McNamara welcomes "good-natured banter" and said UH officials "will certainly stay above the fray."

But McNamara hopes UH fans don't devolve into similar "mean-spirited" comments.

Seriously, folks, this is college football. There's no room for mean-spiritedness, particularly of the comment variety.

By the way, "columnist" is a bit generous. I'm basically a Georgia fan, who works at The Telegraph, who was asked to write a column this past Sunday. You can read it here.

And if John McNamara and the Hawaii faithful think that I'm a poor sport, they might want to stay away from Bourbon Street. I assure them, I'm a saint compared to some of the drunks we can throw their way.

Here's to a good game. And blitzing Colt Brennan until he's black and blue.

Injustice anywhere... blah, blah, blah.

Two thoughts on the ongoing situation in Burma:

1. Wouldn't it be nice if the people of Iraq were marching in the streets for Democracy?

2. Too bad Burma doesn't have oil and terrorists.

No, that's... that was Mongolia

I started out to show that pretty much every one can find the United States of America on a world map. That to suggest otherwise was ridiculous.

Sadly, I was wrong. This is the story. And here's the video, shot and edited by Ryan Gilchrest here at the paper.

Shirley I shouldn't share this

Last night I said a prayer for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss suggested we do this yesterday, during a speech in Perry. It seemed like something I should have been doing all along.

I opened my eyes and began to get up. Then I closed them again and said a prayer for the other side's troop's, too.

Anyone think Jesus would have just prayed for the Americans?