From Andrew Wolfson, The (Louisville) Courier Journal:

A mother is angry about a trip led by the head football coach at Breckinridge County High School took about 20 players on a school bus late last month to his church, where nearly half of them - including her son - were baptized.

Michelle Ammons said her 16-year-old son was baptized without her knowledge and consent, and she is upset that a public school bus was used to take players to a church service - and that the school district’s superintendent was there and did not object.

“Nobody should push their faith on anybody else,” said Ammons, whose son, Robert Coffey, said coach Scott Mooney told him and other players that the Aug. 26 outing would include only a motivational speaker and a free steak dinner.

Ky. school trip to church that included baptisms raises questions

Finally! Minge evolution tote.

(via Street Anatomy)

Chalk one up for civil society! We here at Dangerous Minds loudly applaud the decision of San Francisco talk radio station KNEW 910 AM to fire hateful, racist sociopath Michael Savage.  From the KNEW blog:

“Why did you take Michael Savage off the air?”

Here’s your no-spin direct answer; we have decided to go in a different philosophical and ideological direction, featuring more contemporary content and more local information.
The Savage Nation does not fit into that vision.

Again, nice one KNEW 910 AM management. This almost makes up for the fact that you’ve given this nasty asshat a platform for his cockamamie views for the past decade… Still it’s a step in the right direction and good for the country.

Michael Savage hangs up on us: “Why don’t you call Mao Zedong? He’s your boss”

 
While a mood of reflection descends upon on our nation, what better day than today, this 8-year anniversary, to reflect on something approaching its 50th?   Like many people, I have stacks of books by my bed, but beyond all the stacks, flat and visible on a nightstand, I keep a copy of The Americans, Swiss photographer—and Cocksucker Blues auteur—Robert Frank‘s epic, black-and-white meditation on what America looked like in the 12 or so months following the summer of ‘55.

Just eighty-three photos winnowed down from oh, twenty-seven thousand, Frank’s book winds up in my hands time and time again, and if, as Rod Stewart says, “every picture tells a story,” I’m by now pretty sure I’ve forged a story from each of its melancholy images.

But that’s what photos do—the good ones, anyway.  Reduced to two dimensions, stripped from time and place, photographs compel us to find the metaphor.  To search for meaning.  That freedom to look and think and wonder, it’s a large part of The Americans’ stark, open-ended beauty.  And for Frank’s subjects, too, contemplation shows up as a favored mode of expression.  As Anthony Lane writes in the current New Yorker:

Was there ever a book as full of looking as Robert Frank?

New on DVD, Stunt Rock. This film mixes footage from an Australian stunt man with onstage performances of an awful, idiotic heavy metal rock band called Sorcery.

Here’s a description:

Australia’s premier stuntman, Grant Page, is on a mission: filmmaker Brian Trenchard Smith has sent him to LA to work on a TV series. Here he meets up with fellow daredevil Cutis Hyde, who does stunt work for a theatrical rock band called Sorcery, and Page impresses the rockers so much with his daredevil antics that they hire him as well. While his first stunt lands him in the hospital, the reckless Page defies his doctors orders, escaping out of the ward’s fifth-story window to get back to the band. Page soon finds himself the focus of the ladies, attracting both a newspaper reporter (Margaret Gerard) and a television star (Monique van de Ven). Featuring non-stop action, a killer soundtrack and a bit of romance on the side, STUNT ROCK is an adrenaline-filled, cult classic that is sweeping the midnight circuit!

The good vs evil heavy metal number is really something to see. Once. Or as Harry Knowles would have it: “Stunt Rock is not a very good film, but sometimes a movie doesn?

Fifty years ago, an Italian photographer named Tazio Secchiaroli became the symbol of a new generation of photographers. His nom de guerre was Paparazzo and he was the photographic bounty hunter of the Via Veneto in Rome in the 1950s. Secchiaroli was the first of the paparazzi, immortalised by Federico Fellini in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita. Calling himself an ?

Terrific new essay by Dangerous Minds pal Douglas Rushkoff at John Brockman’s Edge website:

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

The scientific tradition exposed the unpopular astronomical fact that the earth was not at the center of the universe. This stance challenged the social order, and its proponents were met with less than a welcoming reception. Today, science has a similar opportunity: to expose the fallacies underlying our economic model instead of producing short-term strategies for mitigating the effects of inventions and discoveries that threaten this inherited market hallucination.

The economic model has broken, for good. It’s time to stop pretending it describes our world.

Economics is Not Natural Science by Douglas Rushkoff

Sign Obama’s petition to get your reps to back health care here, and win at life. And likely live a longer one.

Working state-run health care is the bare minimum for a functional, civilized 21st-century society. All you need to do is leave the U.S. for half a second to see how woefully, miserably behind the rest of the world we are, and just on bare minimum quality of life issues.

Also, all you have to do is take a quick trip to, say, Canada, to realize that state-supported health care, in general, produces people who are Fucking Hot. It’s not even funny.

Sign it, and strike a blow against ignorant Republican motherfuckers who want you to die young and live in misery while being dependent on corporations who don’t give two fucks about you or your life, and who also don’t want you to get laid by hot people! Help bring America up to speed with reality instead of regressive corporate troglodytism! Help your fellow wo/man!

Tell Your Members of Congress to Support President Obama’s Plan for Health Reform

_{(If you get why the above picture is funny, you really are going to hell.)}

Foreign Policy rounds up the world’s five worst sons; enfants muy terrible (to bastardize two languages) who make their evil dictator parents look even more foolish. Included are Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al-Nayhan, Kim Jong Nam, the improbably named Hannibal Qaddafi, Hu Haifeng, and?

 
Without making this the longer post I’m planning on Peter Kember and Jason Pierce, guiding lights, respectively, behind Spectrum and Spiritualized, and jointly behind my beloved Spacemen 3, it saddens me to read this about one of their artistic collaborators:

British artist Natty Brooker is debuting his life?