Legend has it they ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.

The story behind this band is actually pretty crazy. The Shaggs were sisters who grew up in a house where there really wasn’t any music. Then their father was told by an astrologer (or some kind of fortune teller) that his daughters were going to be famous and influential musicians, and he got completely obsessed with the idea. He bought them all instruments and forced them to play (but for some reason didn’t bother to spring for actual music lessons). If I’m remembering correctly, he even pulled them out of school at some point so they could focus on music full-time.

So basically these sisters were basically locked in a basement and forced to invent the concept of music from scratch. It’s like some crazy thing an anthropologist would study.

The only reason we still know about them is because people (not the least of which being guys like Kurt Cobain and Jello Biafra) found the record in thrift stores and bargain bins and began passing copies around, and it became kind of an underground obsession among punk, indie, and experimental musicians. So they did actually end up being famous and influential in a way, but not in the way that makes anybody rich, which is probably what the dad was hoping for.

Not even a year. It’s only his first fiscal quarter.

If it’s a person at all, and not one of those shit-disturber bots that get unleashed on non-MAGA spaces to start arguments over innocuous things and just generally sour the vibe. BlueSky was infested with them last month. They tend to swarm around celebrities, and posts about celebrities. Either way, a quick glance at their post history shows they’re only here to start shit with people.

There’s going to be a lot of that. I live in the Southwest, and the number of Trump-voting Latinos is shockingly high. There are a lot of conservative Latinos who straight up consider themselves to be white. Gonna be a real shock for them when it finally sinks in what the rest of their party thinks about that.

Got suspended in 8th grade for “smoking on school grounds” because I stood outside the front door finishing my fruit snacks before I walked into the school (we weren’t supposed to have snacks outside designated food areas). Some rocket scientist of a teacher saw me standing by the door with my hand occasionally going up to my mouth (I think it may have been cold enough outside to make my breath steam) and said, “AHA! This child is smoking!”

She literally grabbed me by my collar and dragged me to the assistant principal’s office. Multiple other kids, and an adult who must have been someone’s mom, told her I wasn’t smoking, but she wasn’t having any of it. And the assistant principal just believed her out of hand. Wouldn’t even let me finish a sentence to say something in my own defense.

They had the security guard escort me off school grounds. And I just stood there for a while looking back at the school, still holding my fruit snacks, trying to figure out wtf just happened.

I pretty much checked out mentally after that. That kind of stuff ended up being pretty much par for the course. I hung out with the metal/punk/skater/stoner/goth crowd, and that was some kind of unforgivable sin at that school. My friends and I were constantly being singled out for minor or imagined infractions and never believed or given the benefit of the doubt. I went from a 3.8 gpa to something like 0.6 that year. I’d have to sit through all these meetings about how I was “so smart,” and how “I could go so far if only I would apply myself.” And I’d straight up tell them what was going on, and they’d be like, “It’s just a mystery why you won’t apply yourself.”

It’s been like 30 years and I’m still mad about that shit.

As much as I dislike Orange Man, and would like to praise Gibson here, this probably doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with politics… Gibson has spent the last decade suing fucking everybody over IP infringement. They’re particularly fond of going after small independent luthiers who don’t have the means to fight a giant corporation in court.

It’s part of Gibson’s multi-decade plan to cary out any wacky dumbass scheme they can think of to boost profits, just so long as it doesn’t involve them making high quality instruments again.

Yeah, I’ve read a bunch of articles over the last few years about how a lot of law enforcement agencies are finding that instead of getting a warrant and doing a bunch of surveillance they can just buy people’s private data from a data broker and get more info than they would have been able, or allowed, to gather if they’d gotten the warrant.

Sounds like a rejected lyric from a Leonard Cohen song.