Ted Nugent — rock guitarist, walking phallus and self-parodying right-winger — turns 59 today. He shares his birthday with the legendary Alvin York, who led a devastating attack on a nest of German machine-gunners during the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne in 1918; on more than one occasion, Nugent has expressed hope that Sgt. York might be “cloned,” in spirit if not in fact.
Ted Nugent also shares a birthday with Mary Todd Lincoln, who was gibbering mad.
. . . As perhaps the greatest chickenhawk in modern rock history, Nugent received a student deferment for enrolling in Oakland Community College; in 1977, however, he told High Times that he stopped bathing, soiled his pants deliberately, and took crystal meth in the weeks leading up to his physical. Given the opportunity to atone for his self-confessed cowardice, Nugent has traveled with the USO to Fallujah and to Afghanistan, where he was allowed to play with automatic weapons and defacate in one of Saddam Hussein’s toilets. He later offered his uninformed assessment that the United States’ difficulties in Iraq have resulted from an unwillingness to “Nagasaki them.”
Category: Simply Odd
The end of the beginning
Conversationally Impaired
* Aside: there are still plenty of white piles in my part of town. The temperature hasn’t even hit 30 degrees in the last three weeks. There’s no melting here. This video is from last spring. It just seemed appropriate somehow.
Spam Gate
One thing that always bothers me about the weekend is being forced to watch Fox to get local coverage. However, yesterday evening there was an interesting story about a local “meat sculptor” who entertains herself during the cold weather by making spam candles, hot-dog necklaces and such. I looked at the Fox web site to see if there was any mention of the story or web links and found that they do not update the site on weekends. So I googled around, and found the wonderful sculpture displayed above (completely unrelated to the story).
The spam sculpture of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate warmed my heart. It’s from 2005, the same year I presented a paper on the legal and social controversies surrounding public photography of this sculpture at the Sweetland writing conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The paper is supposed to be included in a forthcoming anthology. I wish I had known of this fabulous sculpture then; I might have included it in my presentation.