Yesteryear’s Music, Last Week’s Quake, Today’s Storm, and Dogs in Bars

•For all the NYC evacuees out there, here’s one of my favorite songs of last year, “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, sounding for all the world like a Johnny Cash/June Carter duet for retro-hipsters (not all of whom are evil).

•I face the hurricane armed with a sturdy, nightwatchman-favored, unadorned-metal, vintage Everready Captain flashlight filled with a pair of big D batteries, just like Grandpa before me (he would have liked “Home,” I think).

•Grandpa might also have liked this awesome 90-sec. trailer for the classic spaghetti Western Death Rides a Horse (noted by Franklin Harris).

•Fittingly, I'll be reading the punk encyclopedia Destroy All Movies! and the historical sci-fi novel Doomsday Book during at least part of the storm.  More about the former tomorrow and more about the latter (and other UK-themed books) next week or so.

•On another old-timey-sounding music note: UK Orthodox Jews apparently worry that Amy Winehouse will not be resurrected at the end of the world because her body was cremated, and your body must be intact for the resurrection to occur.  I would think God could get around that, especially for the Jews or at least for a prominent musician, but what do I know of theology?  (I will have to ask Dawn Eden.)

•Musicians everywhere may have reason to fear, thanks to environmental-regulation-inspired raids on guitar fretboards, as noted on Drudge.  Yeah, you keep on rockin’ for green causes, rock people.  But vote for smaller government, please.  Please.

•I am not completely retro: I always found Shirley Temple annoying, even when I was a kid myself, and I still do.  Is that just me being the anti-children guy, or is pretty much everyone with me on this?

•But I do like dogs.  Alas, a dog-related NYC tradition has been ended by government, which is always and everywhere an evil engine of social destruction: Dogs are no longer allowed in bars. 

•The New Yorkiest tweet I saw during the hurricane may have been this one from John DeVore:

"Am I afraid? Fuck Bloomberg. Fuck Irene. I am not afraid and fuck you." -- Guy who sells me my coffee and cigarettes

You can read the dozen or so #FakeSurvivalTips I tweeted yesterday, too, and follow my tweets in general.

•Stormy though it may be, today is the twenty-fifth birthday of Florence Welch of the band Florence + the Machine, apparently the daughter of a Renaissance studies professor and an ad exec who liked the Ramones and other early punk.  Apparently, if you cross medieval tendencies and a latter-day Mad Men character, you get a woman who, as a teenager, was inspired by a violent and dysfunctionally-combative couple to write the disturbing song “Kiss with a Fist.”

•Speaking of frightening natural phenomena felt in NYC, DC, North Carolina, and elsewhere, last week’s earthquake (which is so five days ago now that we have the hurricane) caused me to feel a slight vibration at my left elbow while I was eating lunch – making me think someone’s cellphone was vibrating – and I did not find out until about an hour later that there’d been a quake.  Let us hope that experience has left me with the emotional reserves necessary to face today’s storm.