Obama has 'Jesus' covered for talk at Georgetown...Didn't want his flesh to start burning off....

I'm going to have to agree with the good Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, this was a cowardly act...check this action out...from Fox News.

Georgetown University hid a religious inscription representing the name of Jesus during President Obama's address there Tuesday, FOXNews.com has confirmed, because White House staff asked the school to cover up all religious symbols and signs while the president was on stage.

The monogram IHS, whose letters spell out the name of Jesus, and which normally perches above the stage in Gaston Hall where the president spoke, was covered over with what appeared to be black wood during the address.

"In coordinating the logistical arrangements for the event, Georgetown honored the White House staff's request to cover all of the Georgetown University signage and symbols behind the Gaston Hall stage," university spokesman Andy Pino told FOXNews.com.

Click here for photos.

The White House said that the backdrop, which included blue drapes and a host of American flags, was standard during policy speeches and other events.

"Decisions made about the backdrop for the speech were made to have a consistent background of American flags, which is standard for many presidential events," said White House spokesman Shin Inouye in a statement released Thursday.

Georgetown is a private Catholic institution founded by Jesuits in 1789. The auditorium where the president spoke Tuesday is adorned with religious imagery, but only the symbols directly on the stage -- those likely to be picked up by a television camera -- were obscured.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, accused the university of "cowardice" for acceding to the White House, and criticized Obama's team for asking a religious school to "neuter itself" before the president made his address.

"No bishop who might speak at the White House would ever request that a crucifix be displayed behind him," he said.

The White House insisted that the move was made only to provide a proper setting for the speech -- and said that "any suggestions to the contrary are simply false."

Though his advance team asked that the religious signs be veiled, the president himself took up religious discourse and discussed a passage from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount as he outlined his plans for an economic recovery.

"We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand," he said during his remarks, which came two days after Easter. "We must build our house upon a rock."

It was Obama's first visit to Georgetown since being elected president, but he also spoke at the school on Sept. 20, 2006 about the need for energy independence. A photograph of the event does not seem to indicate that parts of the stage were hidden during that address, which Obama made while still a U.S. senator.

Another Catholic university, Notre Dame, came under fire in late March for inviting the president to speak at its May 17 commencement. Obama supports abortion rights, which are considered anathema by the Catholic Church.

Carbon Leaf...Check them out...Now.

A magical band, hailing from Virginia mixing classical folk, jazz and rock and coming together in 1996.

Alan Sculley, North County Times, San Diego has this to say about the band:

Plenty of longtime Carbon Leaf fans will notice that on the group’s two most recent CDs, 2004’s “Indian Summer” and the newly released “Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat,” there’s an obvious absence of the sound that once got Carbon Leaf labeled by some as a Celtic/bluegrass band.
It’s not that Carbon Leaf wanted to abandon its Celtic roots or had forgotten about that influence. It’s just that the last time the band got its “Irish” up, the results were less than enthralling.

“The albums are decidedly non-Celtic,” Carbon Leaf singer Barry Privett saidin a recent phone interview. “They weren’t intended to get us out of that
(Celtic) box so much that we had kind of grown tired of that box. For‘Indian Summer’ we had written probably 22 songs to see which ones would make the cut. A lot of the songs had that Celtic influence, but we had already kind of been mining that territory for a few years. The songs that we had written that had that influence just didn’t feel inspired anymore.”
As a result, “Indian Summer” and especially “Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat” have emphasized Carbon Leaf’s rock and pop influences.

The direction is apparent with tracks such as “Learn to Fly,” “A Girl and Her Horse” and “Under the Wire,” which all feature strong pop melodies. The rootsier side of Carbon Leaf, meanwhile, shows on acoustic-leaning tunes such as “The War Was in Color” and “Block of Wood,” while on “Comfort” and “Texas Stars,” the group rocks a bit more briskly.
The more pronounced rock and pop influences surfaced on “Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat” ---- the band’s seventh CD ---- for a variety of reasons, Privett said, including the fast pace that surrounded the writing and recording of the CD.
After spending January writing material for the CD, the band faced a tight schedule for recording. The band, which also includes Carter Gravatt (guitar/mandolin), Terry Clark (guitar), Jordan Medas (bass) and Scott Milstead (drums), had only three weeks for the session and a couple of weeks for overdubs.

This meant there wasn’t time to be too fussy with the basic tracks for “Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat” or to do much additional recording during the overdub sessions ---- a situation that led to a leaner, more rocking sound on the CD.
This more direct sound, though, wasn’t unplanned. The group went into “Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat” wanting to create songs that were shorter and more tightly constructed than on its first several albums.
They found an ally in that mission in Peter Collins, a producer whose resume includes projects with Bon Jovi, Elton John and Rush.
“He’s kind of pop oriented (in his) approach to song structure,” Privett said. “We tend to write long intros and a solo and a bridge and maybe a second bridge. We’ll add lots of pieces to songs. He kind of is the opposite. So we had to work with him (on arrangements). And we were in agreement. We wanted to try something a little different, shorter songs and little bit more focus on getting more into a smaller time frame.”

The shift toward more of a rock-pop sound should help Carbon Leaf further expand its audience.
For about a dozen years, the Richmond, Va.-based band has been used to earning fans the hard way ---- one show at a time. For the first nine years of its career, Carbon Leaf was a do-it-yourself band in the purest sense of the term. The group self-released its first five CDs and was self-managed, self-booked and self-promoted.
But things began to accelerate for the band in 2002 when it won the Coca-Cola New Music Award for the song “The Boxer,” off of the band’s fifth and final self-released CD, “Echo Echo.” Part of the prize was the opportunity to become one of the rare unsigned bands to ever play on the American Music Awards.

The exposure from the award and the AMA performance enabled the group to attract a manager, booking agent, publicist and lawyer, while extensive touring coupled with the increased media attention from the group’s AMA performance and some scattered radio play for “The Boxer” helped raise Carbon Leaf’s profile.
Eventually record labels started to check out the group, and after once again funding the recording of “Indian Summer” itself, Carbon Leaf signed to Vanguard Records, which released the CD in 2004. Privett said it was time to put the distribution and marketing capabilities of a record company behind the band.

The move so far seems to have worked. The song “Life Less Ordinary” off “Indian Summer” became a modest adult radio hit and gave Carbon Leaf its first taste of mainstream exposure.
“You probably end up making less money (than) the setup as an independent band, but you get more exposure,” Privett said. “So we were ready to take that risk, knowing there’s not a whole lot to lose. You can always go back to being independent if it doesn't work out."

I found this band while listening to a Pandora station I created around another great band; Moxy Fruvous . I was immediately impressed by their fresh, clean sound and witty word-play.

Coming up on May 19, 2009 they are dropping a new album enltitled: Nothing Rhymes With Woman.

Jamie Foxx...A High-Five, Miley Cyrus...Welcome to Celebrity

Here's a sample to kick things off...



Jamie Foxx had some not-so-nice words for Miley Cyrus during his weekend Sirius radio show "The Foxxhole," judging by a audio posted on YouTube and heard below.

During a discussion criticizing Miley, 16, for being upset at not getting to meet Radiohead backstage at the Grammys, Foxx, 41, told her to get a gum transplant and to "make a sex tape and grow up... Get like Britney Spears and do some heroin... get some crack in your pipe... Catch chlamydia on a bicycle seat."

Someone else is heard calling her a "white bitch."

Foxx has a teenage daughter.
And if you want to read it for yourself: Huffington Post


I'm sorry to all of you who have kids...because you have kids, not because I'm about to offend you.

Everyone is getting all up in arms about comments Jamie Foxx made about Miley Cyrus' Radiohead ordeal. What the uninformed public doesn't realize is that our dear Miley threatened to "ruin Radiohead."

Zimbio.com

Radiohead refused to speak to Miley Cyrus.

The Hannah Montana star is "obsessed" with the alternative rock band, but when she saw them at the Grammy Awards last month they wouldn't acknowledge her.

Miley said: "My manager asked and said, 'Miley, she's really obsessed and she'd really like to meet them,' and they were like, 'Yeah, we don't really do that.'

"I left because I was so upset. I wasn't going to watch!

"I'd already texted all my friends, we were all freaking out. This is someone who I would have cried to have met. Stinking Radiohead!"

This is not the first rejection 16-year-old Miley has suffered.

She recently revealed her school days were "friendless, lonely and miserable".

Writing in her new book Miley Cyrus: Miles To Go, she recollects: "The girls took it beyond normal bullying. These were big, tough girls. I was scrawny and short.

"They were fully capable of doing me bodily harm."

Ruin Radiohead!? After a comment like that and America getting up in arms for one of the top grossing bands in the history of bands, snubbing an upstart artist whose fan-base's collective total of high school diplomas is hovering around, what? 3-ish?

All of this and Cesar Laurean is back in our great state of North Carolina. DAMN RADIOHEAD!

Her wash-up father weighed in with this response to Bonnie Hunt “It was hurtful, there wasn’t nothing funny about it, and quite frankly, I think if I said those things about his daughter he might not find it so comedic.”

"...Wasn't nothing funny..." That breaks my achy breaky grammar heart. BRC, your ignorance is showing, you might want to tuck that back behind your ear with your shaggy-cool-dad-do.

It's painfully telling about a society who wants to fight about a whiny-snot-nosed, 16 year-old who has already made more money than Onslow County will see in three generations.

Foxx doesn't owe her anything. It shows he is a gentleman by apologizing but, he's a comedian, a comedian who has a show on SIRIUS satellite radio. It's not like anyone could've heard it. Only paying customers heard it.

Get over yourselves people.

Jamie,

Keep on truckin, Man.

WP

The AXE Effect...

I'm sure you all remember when body sprays hit the mainstream and everyone was using them. By 'everyone' I mean guys who watched the commercials and actually bought into the naked chicks appearing in the rooms of guy who sprayed-on as he dresses.

I think AXE was by far the most popular, but then TAG got in the mix as did Old Spice. While each of the brands provided solid scents, they named them hard-core things like: Vice, Pheonix, Swagger, Live Wire, After Hours, Lucky Day. Well, Lucky Day is slightly less hard, but catchy nonetheless.

I'm a body spray fan.

What I'm not a fan of is the guys that think it's a shower alternative.

I looked at the three big names in body sprays or brays as I'm going to refer to them in this story because I'm tired of writing two words to describe one thing.

The guys who'll go for a run at lunch spray on some Lucky Day and put their work clothes back on. The makers of popular brays factored in preventing stink, not how good their scent smelled when mingled with overwhelming ball sweat-stank.

The reason this post is seeing the light of day is because i purchased some AXE Clix yesterday because I had forgotten my Arm & Hammer, all natural, stick deodorant at my house and subsequently had nothing to grace my underarms with when I was done showering after my workout.

I ran over to the store before class, dashed to the deodorant aisle and saw AXE Clix on sale. I sprayed some down the aisle and stuck my nose in it, like an old Warner Brother's cartoon with the visible scent waifs coming from a pie that Sylvester follows into the kitchen. I liked what I smelled, purchased and added some AXE to my life.

So, I condone the use of these products as cologne or in some cases deodorant, but never would I allow one to use any of these as a shower substitute. That is all.

Thanks for reading,
WP

The Car is Coming Together....Expect Pics...

So, my 1995 Volkswagen GTI VR6 is slowly coming together but it's going to start speeding up.
I bought new rims from J. D. down in Wilmington for next to nothing. The only issue was the offset of my stock rims was larger than the rims I bought. I went searching for a set of 10mm wheel adapters and 20 wheel bolts in a size 10mm longer than stock. Found the spacers on the 'tex for $80 and a couple weeks later I found all 20 bolts from a fellow dubber, also on from the 'tex. The bolts were never used and still individually packaged; I picked up the lot for $55. So all in all I spent $260 to get a sweet set of Avus rims on my car. I'm pretty stoked because EuroRennen 2009 is an annual european car show held this year in Jacksonville, NC and my car though not show worthy will be complete to ferry me to and from the show. I'll post pictures as soon as I can of the new rims. For now here is a photo before the new rims and when the rear spoiler was still on.