Great News! and Bad Music!

Everyone needs to take a break from arguing about genocide every now and then.

The great news: Brazilian scientists have sequenced the coffee genome. Their agriculture minister says: “We are going to create a super-coffee that everyone can benefit from eventually.” Many’s the time I have said to myself: Self, what I need now is a super-coffee; what a pity that none exists! Now science has stepped forward to fill this void. I can hardly wait.

The bad music is all from 365 Days, a wonderful website devoted to, well, very odd music. On it you can download Louis Farrakhan singing ‘Is She Is Or Is She Ain’t’ (you mean you didn’t know that the head of the Nation of Islam sang calypso songs about sex change operations?), and William Shatner’s grotesque cover of ‘Rocket Man’. Here are three of my favorites; if you click on the links, you will get mp3s.

Understanding Marx by Red Shadow (The Economics Rock & Roll Band), which one of its members describes as “an all-economist, political band that sounded as bad then as the idea does now.” The only one of these three songs whose badness is partly intentional. A takeoff of a 60s soul single.

My Bathroom is a Private Kind of Place. According to 365 Days, “It’s from the “The Bathrooms Are Coming,” an industrial-show musical produced for the American Standard Company to extol the glories of their wonderful plumbing fixtures.” Whatever the title might lead you to expect, this has no objectionable content, unless you object to the idea of a sort of Julie Andrews wannabe singing, about her bathroom: “I’m free, I’m free/I’ve closed out the world, I’m free/I’m free, I’m free/Now at last I can really be me.” Which, on reflection, I do. Still, it’s, well, amazing.

Even Squeaky Fromme Loves Christmas” by the Rev. Glen Armstrong. Words fail.