Shots in the Dark

Neil Young has a new album, Americana, coming out, his first with Crazy Horse in nine years. It’s a record of classic American folk songs.

This is their version of “Oh, Susannah.”

The New Yorker reports that they’re likely to make several hundred million dollars from the Facebook IPO. And yes, they are still suing Mark Zuckerburg.

Alas, not between me and him—that’d be a dream for me.

British journalist Mark Cole interviews Gabriel, who really is one of the great musical geniuses of the past quarter-century or so….and also genuinely, interestingly weird.

…would have been 82 today. Wish he could have met his new grandson.

A friend sent me this inadvertently hilarious snipped from a customer service email he received from Amazon:

Sincerely,

Note: this e-mail was sent from a notification-only e-mail address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message.

Apparently 2 + 2 really does equal 5…

First, there was New York Yankees cologne. Now this, which came from a perfume maker and included a photo of a football in a glass case:

Football signed by Super Bowl champion New York Giant Antrel Rolle on display in our office. Mr. Rolle wore CREED’s Aventus fragrance in the Super Bowl.

They paid someone to wear their cologne…while playing in the Super Bowl?

New York magazine profiles Cornel West, with the emphasis on his growing disillusionment with President Obama.

…What West doesn’t say is that for the past decade, he has been wandering in an emotional and spiritual wilderness. At 58 years old, he has let old wounds fester. He nurses a personal beef with Obama, and he still smarts from the bruises inflicted upon his ego in a 2001 fracas with Larry Summers, in which the then-president of Harvard University queried West’s scholarly bona fides in public and West departed Cambridge in a red-hot rage for his second stint at Princeton. (“[Summers] needed to be the president of Harvard the way I need to be the president of the NHL,” he told me.) West is also a cancer survivor, having been diagnosed and treated for late-stage prostate disease just as the Summers debacle was unfolding. He is thrice-divorced and still pays alimony to his last ex-wife.

I think there’s some truth to this idea that West is, well, lonely. Which is a shame, because for all his failings—we are all human—Cornel West is an incredibly decent and generous man; his heart is very much in the right place. But I think he’s been so busy fulfilling what he sees as his mission, that he has lots of acolytes, but few who really know him…

The career of baseball’s greatest relief pitcher probably just ended, the result of a freak accident during batting practice. Heartbreaking.

“Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.”

—From a British Parliamentary report on the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed Murdoch’s media empire.