TheTurtles - Buzzsaw

TheTurtles - Buzzsaw by Paul 'Fuzz' Lowman
Have just discovered Soundcloud, which for those of you who are even lamer with this sorta stuff than I am, is just a very hip & user-friendly way of uploading and sharing music. To celebrate, here's The Turtles, with a stoopid-fresh fuzz instro, in a Booker T "stylee", as 90s kids TV presenters used to say in a postmodern ironic way. And which I'm now using in a post-ironic, ironic way. Or whatever. Enjoy!

Why The UK Should Hold It's Own Tea Party

So, The Tea Party movement. Another opportunity for liberal British commentators to 'play to their base' by taking lazy shots at white Americans. Our comedians and commentators are even more comfortable mocking Americans than they are mocking Christians. If they have a chance to mock Americans who are also Christians, as they do here, it's like all their secular winter solstice celebrations have come at once.

For what it's worth, I don't agree with the majority of what constitutes the Tea Party's incoherent, diffuse manifesto. Fuelled by a high calorie, low-brow diet of deep-fried fast food & deep-fried Fox News, most Tea Party activists seem misinformed & wrong-headed at best, deeply and dangerously bigoted at worst. But as dumb as their politics might be- and this is where the UK needs to think twice about knee-jerk reactions to the Tea Party - at least it proves that the American people remain fully engaged with their nation's political process. At least these people still care. They still believe that people have the power to alter the national political landscape. We shouldn't be sneering at a country that produces a movement like the Tea Party - we should be envious of a Western democracy whose citizen's are still motivated enough by politics to take grass-roots action.

The British public gave up on thinking they can make a difference through political action a long time ago. We are a compliant, jaded people. The coalition slice and slash away at public sector budgets, and we do nothing. We suffer, while City Bankers who caused that suffering continue to take mega-bonuses, and we do nothing. Thinking Obama is a muslim is stupid, but engagement with your nation's politics is admirable. Rather than ill, it would infact speak well for our country if we had our own UK Tea Party to ridicule.