Oh holy sweet Mother of the 8 pound 4 ounce Baby Jesus, Clarence Clemons can play a saxophone.

He had a stroke today.

Get well, Big Man. We want to see more of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e4-20tqC4A

Some of us who are members of the Stinque Legal Eagle club may experience (or remember) on a daily basis the lovely hell that is known as “doc review” — where you are sitting in a cubicle with five bankers’ boxes full of pieces of paper and you’re supposed to read every single page (which hopefully has been Bates-stamped) in the next 8 hour shift and stick a post-it pad on any paper that looks like it might help your side of the case.*

One normally is paid anywhere between $15 and $100 an hour to do this drudgery. Well, now the New York Times is inviting you to do it for free with the Palin Papers! And you don’t even have to have a J.D. or a bar card!

Read more »

David Mason, a classical trumpeter best known for his piccolo solo in The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” died today at the age of 85. He got the gig after Paul McCartney heard him play the piccolo trumpet in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto.

Here’s a short clip from the Beeb where he talks about the experience:

[The Guardian]

If I see one more hot dog, I’m going to hurl. Time for a late night musical palate cleanser.

Sweet 8 pound 7 ounce baby Jesus, Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt can each play a guitar like there’s no tomorrow. Put them together and it’s magical. If their acoustic tour is coming to your town, run – don’t walk – to get tickets. The show is two incredibly talented and funny musicians with deep songwriting abilities sitting on stage with nothing but their wits and their guitars, chatting, jamming, picking the hell out of their guitars, and singing back up vocals on each other’s songs.

Most of the videos on the tubes of them are of crappy quality, so here is a clip from the Beeb of them playing to the Brits, with Joe Ely joining in. This doesn’t capture the improvisation they do in concert:

After a chase involving a helicopter, Santa Ana police arrested two men and a kid who allegedly stole money from a tip jar in a Costa Mesa Starbucks.

I will never understand the SoCal obsession with police helicopter chases. Nor why the po-po fixate on a few punks stealing 20 bucks instead of  the hedge fund managers in Newport Beach ripping off billions.

In any event, I couldn’t decide which illustration to use for this post, so I’ll put up both. Vote for your favorite in the comments.

[LAT]

A federal grand jury in North Carolina has indicted Johnny from the Mill on six charges of violating campaign finance law for accepting large campaign donations and using them to keep his alien girlfriend baby-mama Rielle Hunter living in style.

But the trial should be a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and pundits and late night comedians rejoice.

Stinquer Benedick weeps.

[NYT]

Researchers have for the first time successfully recorded sound waves emanating from a trombone.  They used a technique known as schlieren photography, which captures the refractive index of air, in order to record the shock wave.

[BBC]