The Explorers Club
No. LXXXII - The Berlin Blockade, Part I: The genocidal Morgenthau Plan; the drift from alliance into the Cold War; and the sneaky, fully legal beginning to the blockade of West Berlin.






The ball got rolling with the closing of the Autobahn on 12 June 1948, sixty years ago this month.

Special Request
There are plans for a house guest and I to watch the new Futurama movie, The Beast With a Billion Backs Tuesday evening. He'll be staying from Tuesday until Thursday. It all will be wonderful, but expect me to be in a dark humor next week as I ruminate on the recent unpleasantness, about which I am damnably constrained from writing freely. Still, new Futurama! Woot!

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Fountains of Wayne, "Stacy's Mom" from Welcome Interstate Managers (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: I'll always remember attending a Fountains of Wayne show at The Shelter in Detroit mere months before the release of "Stacy's Mom" and Welcome Interstate Managers. The Shelter is literally the basement of St. Andrew's Hall (a former name for The Shelter was The Bassment) and accommodates a crowd numbering in the scores. Not hundreds or thousands of people, scores. And before "Stacy's Mom," that's the kind of crowd F.O.W. attracted.

Also of note: that remains one of the only shows I've ever attended in which I was one of the youngest members of the audience. I didn't start attending shows until I was 19, and by then I was already older than a lot of the kids in the pit. The folks at The Shelter, though, they were clearly old school Fountains of Wayne fans, some of them surely stretching all the way back to the debut album, Fountains of Wayne, released in '96.

Plus, let us not forget, "Stacy's Mom" is a great song.

Samstag, 21 Juni
Reel Big Fish, "Cannibal" from Money's For Nothin' and the Chimp's For Free (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: Upon first listen, I thought they were singing "Cannon ball." Not nearly as embarrassing as when I believed, for years, that the They Might Be Giants song "Don't Let's Start" contained the words "Donut star." Then again, with T.M.B.G., "Donut star" isn't all that far-fetched.