Important Blogging Discoveries

Believe it or not, I read blogs that don’t involve Mission history, food, and maps, shocking as this may seem.

One blog I greatly enjoy reading is “40 Going On 28” by TK (a Mission man who appears to be in his late 30s but is actually 40 and complains about things). WARNING: Do not read this blog while drinking fluids, as there is a good chance you will laugh and spew a beverage over your keyboard (generally not covered by AppleCare).

While TK’s blog covers widely ranging topics, you may not realize that he is in a band and is in fact one of America’s great music researchers.  Just today, during a lyrical deconstruction of Steve Miller’s Take The Money and Run, he made a significant music discovery — there is a discontinuity in Steve Miller’s story line!

We have the criminals and the crime:

They headed down to, ooh, old El Paso / That’s where they ran into a great big hassle
Billy Joe shot a man while robbing his castle / Bobbie Sue took the money and run

We have the crimefighter:

Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas / You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain’t gonna let those two escape justice / He makes his livin’ off of the people’s taxes

Go Billy Mack!  (Maybe he can find DB Cooper too.) But suddenly, we jump to the conclusion:

Bobbie Sue, whoa, whoa, she slipped away / Billy Joe caught up to her the very next day
They got the money, hey You know they got away / They headed down south and they’re still running today

What the hell!  Clearly something happened between Bobbie Sue and Billy Mack, but what?  I prompted TK on this critical gap of the criminal history of Texas, and thankfully he was able to make updiscover the missing lyrics.  Read his blog to discover the details of the epic battle between Bobby Sue and Billy Mack.

Another blog I greatly enjoy reading is Mock Duck, by Dan, a Mission expat living in Prague. He’s a design guy and comes up with many wide-ranging and excellent posts on wide ranging topics from lost urban artifacts to bacon.  He also has a musical bent and has written about Celine Dion (Canada’s Weapon of Mass Destruction) and more importantly multiple posts about Blues Brothers (what I consider the last, great American musical, never mind one of the best movies of all time).  Here we have a Polish Blues Brothers movie poster:

It so happens that I am also a sucker for well-designed posters and am particularly fascinated by communist/socialist poster art (something Telephone and Soup were kind enough to humor).  Dan has an entire post on Polish movie posters, describing how “the country emerged so devastated from WWII that it took much longer for TV and other communication technologies to make serious inroads, so the poster maintained this weirdly elevated status through the 60s, 70s and 80s.” These posters prove how constraints can inspire greatness.

However, I do require more posts about the pnuematic tube network that ran in Prague up until floods in 2002.

That is all.