FBO: 'Liking'

Presently FBO is LIKING

AT LEAST HALF OF THE NEW BECK ALBUM 99-cent downloads and miniaturised album cover art that appears stamp-sized on your iPod has changed 'the album' forever. It's no longer necessary to keep a listener's attention for a full 45 or 60 minutes -- albums are dying. So for me I only need about five songs that electrify that inner cord from cerebellum to rectum to back a 'record.' The new Beck album, The Information has at least six worthy songs that make the album as good as any since his best, Odelay, from a decade ago. Songs are heavily percussed, with reverbed guitars and keyboards that give a spacey feel to his usual 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' three-word wordplays. He's trying harder than on Guero and the album comes with head-shot videos for each.

RIVERS The Burmese like to say you connect with earth by walking barefoot, but I find more power by drifting in a shallow canoe in rivers -- like the sediment-rich, chocolate milk-colored Mekong in Vietnam. Tiny canals shoot all directions, under arched bridges you have to duck for or get decapitated by. Bikes and motorcycles ride over them and onto sidewalk-wide roads meaning expanses of the rice-growing and fruit-growing Mekong Delta can't be reached by cars. We wouldn't exist without rivers -- no other body of water combines a place to transport people and things, bathe in, fish from, wash clothes and dirty saucers in, and send your defocate off with. A tip of the hat to rivers.

RUTGERS SCARLET KNIGHTS NCAA football's oldest Division I team, New Jersey's state school Rutgers, is undefeated and ranked for the first time in nearly three decades. Despite its history, Rutgers has struggled with personality. In the 90s, the put 'NJ' on their helmets to plug their connection with the country's most easily criticized state. Now they've switched to winning. Because of the Scarlet Knights' success -- and what exactly is a Scarlet Knight, something a kin to the Lavendar Gnomes? -- NEW JERSEY has been DE-LISTED from the 'watch list' for its curious urinal policy on turnpike rest-stops.

FBO Admin
Mobile HQ -- Cantho, Vietnam