I first heard this song at the Kalamazoo show on January 27, 2011. At the end of the first chorus, when Seth sang, “If I live the life I’m given, I won’t be scared to die,” we all realized this unfamiliar song was not a cover, but a new Avett song.

It has since become one of my favorite of their songs. Find a discussion of this song on forum at the Avett Brothers website here, and my PDF of the lyrics and chords here.

I recorded this video with a Flip MinoHD (older version at 30fps), and the audio with a Zoom H2, and mixed them together with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 on a Macbook Pro. My guitar is a 2004 Santa Cruz D/PW (Dreadnought Pre War).

I stumbled on this awesome widget for figuring out what guitar chord you’re playing.

I’ve used this both for figuring out chords I’ve come up with when composing, and for determining how to annotate chords figured out when I’m laying out songs, as in my Avett Brothers Archive.

Check it out:

You’ve got what it is (a postcard). You’ve got what it’s about (a protest). You’ve got where it’s happening (Chicago). And when it’s going on (July 2010).

At least four different “folders” you could put it into. But why have to put it in just one? Or better yet, why not just one—one folder for everything, with user tags to make it all accessible?

If every file, no matter what file type, could be user-flagged—if in fact the OS made it a point to gently ensure each file at least gets presented for tags (along with contextual suggestions), none of us humans would ever have to think about directory structure again. We can leave that to the robots; they seem to like that kind of thing.

I could tag that postcard as “postcard,” “protest,” “Aurora” and so forth. I could add tags for “picket” (the kind of protest), “activism” (the larger category of which protest is one kind), “two-color” (the print method) and on and on. The OS will also do as it already does and tag every file with a filetype and datestamp. Then just search for anything you want by tag.

Having everything heaped in one box is messy and confusing for a human being, but robots couldn’t care less. Let the robots search by tags for us, and we can forget all about folders.

No band has inspired me to play so much, and I can credit the Avett Brothers’ music with helping me to improve my guitar playing dramatically. I hope my arrangements will be helpful for others Avett fan guitarists. Check out the page here.

I am what you might call a recipe “aggregator”—when I decide to try a new recipe, I look at a half dozen or more recipes online at favorite sites like All Recipes and the Food Network, and then mix them together on the general principle of putting in the largest amount of each ingredient given across all the recipes—especially the ingredients that are butter.

The tricky ingredient is salt, which is almost always underused; a good rule of thumb is “double the salt,” but you have to take care not to do that if you’re using a recipe by a cook who has already doubled it.

When I first developed this recipe about a year ago, I used the maximum amount of lemon juice and zest I found out there, and then some. But that meant a lot of painful zesting with a ratty old grater. Today I’m trying out a new Microplane Ultimate Citrus Tool. The entire household is giddy with excitement (my wife tells me that’s because it’s Christmas Eve, but I think it’s the new zester).

Crust

• 1 C butter (2 sticks)
• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 C confectioners sugar
• 1/8 t salt

Filling

• 4 beaten eggs
• 2 C sugar
• 6 T flour
• 1/2-2/3 C fresh lemon juice
• 3 T lemon zest
• 1/8 t salt

Process

1. Mix the crust ingredients into a meal-like dough—crumbly and fine, just barely sticking together when pressed.
2. Spread crust mixture in 9″x13″ greased (buttered!) pan lined with wax-paper and then press down firmly and uniformly (the bottom of a cup can help with this)
3. Chill crust for about 30 minutes
4. Bake crust at 350°F for 15-20 minutes
5. Mix the filling ingredients together and pour over hot crust (careful not to let eggs separate out before your pour—whisk before pouring)
6. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until surface is firm

For example, he asked us to believe that what Barack Obama meant when he said he wouldn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby” if they made a mistake was that he wouldn’t want to see them deprived of all the joy that comes from learning that you’re going to become a parent when the time is right. “Punished with a baby” seems like a strange way to put it, but that’s what Obama told Kmiec, and Kmiec bought it.

Now I find this sentence in a National Catholic Reporter article on Obama’s Sotomayor Supreme Court pick:

Frankly, that’s a tough issue in knowing where the government is wrongfully using its funds to penalize you for your point of view differentiates from where the government is expressing its own opinion is often treacherous territory.

Wow. I think I know what he’s trying to say here, but I see at least three different sentences all wrapped up around each other in there like Siamese triplets—what I described to my students at a “mixed construction” when I was a teacher of English composition.

A “mixed construction” is what happens when you start out expressing an idea with one sentence pattern and somewhere in the middle switch to a different, incompatible sentence pattern. It happens all the time to people in live interviews, but it’s not what you expect from a supposedly brilliant scholar writing something for publication.

Kmiec starts off with the wordy and awkward “that’s a tough issue in knowing”—which we could streamline as “it’s tough to know”—but switches to a different construction at the word “differentiates” and then again with the clause “is often treacherous territory.”

He’s losing his place in this sentence just like he does over and over again in the debate with Arkes. You think he’s building up towards a point, when he just veers off into something else. I give Arkes a lot of credit for being able to find points to debate over; I found Kmiec so rambling that I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

Now, for anyone who thinks I’m picking on Kmiec unfairly for one badly-written sentence, there’s also this, the concluding paragraph of the NCR piece:

Of course, this woman is from New York, and at the risk of enormous stereotype of the Empire State, those of us on the West Coast have always noticed a certain—well, curt efficiency—in the New York personality. This is not likely to play as well as the bon vivant boyish charm of John Roberts, but hey, we can’t all smile pretty. And as we say in Malibu, Have a Nice Day!

“At the risk of enormous stereotype”? He sounds drunk. And what’s with the “Have a Nice Day!”? What does that have to do with anything? He really sounds like he’s gone mad.

That’s a very sad thing. I heard Kmiec speak at the Rose Dinner after the 2004 March for Life and was impressed. Along with the whole pro-life movement, I was dismayed when Kmiec came out in favor of Obama. “What can he be thinking?” we all asked.

Now it’s looking more and more like he isn’t thinking at all.

But don’t take my word for it. Kmiec will debate Robert George at the National Press Club this evening at 5 p.m. EDT on the topic “The Obama Administration and the Sanctity of Human Life: Is There a Common Ground on Life Issues? What is the Right Response by Pro-Life Citizens?”

The event is being hosted by the Catholic University of America and will be  moderated by, of all people, Mary Ann Glendon, the Harvard professor who declined to accept Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal this year in protest of the honors being confered on Barack Obama.

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek is attending the debate and will be live-blogging it, as so will Thomas Peters of American Papist. Afterwards the video will be posted on the CUA website, here.

I’ve never seen Robert George speak, but I’ve read his stuff in First Things. Smart guy. Should be an interesting debate.

Slow Joe has apparently forgotten about Aaron Burr, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson in his first term, 1801-1805.

Burr is most famous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, during which Hamilton reportedly shot wide; Burr shot to kill.

Had he done nothing worse to harm his country than that, he’d still be in the running for Biden’s “most dangerous VP ever” award. As the first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton saved the young republic from economic catastrophe through a federal “bailout” of the states’ Revolutionary War debts. He had more to offer the nation he helped found.

But Aaron Burr is also notable for conspiring with General James Wilkinson—who was in the pay of the Spanish—to seize land in the west and create his own empire. Wilkinson was also guilty of encouraging settlers in Tennessee and Kentucky to secede and join the Spanish American Empire.

Burr was a scoundrel of scoundrels—there’s no comparison between him and Dick Cheney, however much you may hate Cheney.

But sadly, few Americans know their history these days, and guys like Biden can get away with ridiculous statements like the one tonight about holders of the office he is seeking.

YouTuber “TheMouthPeace” links the current economic crisis to the Community Redevelopment Act passed under Carter and expanded in 1995 by Clinton, which required banks to increase their sub-prime lending.

Also shows that George Bush in 2003 and John McCain in 2005 tried to rein in Fannie Mae, only to be thwarted by Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and—yes—Barack Obama (who, incidentally, received 29 times as much cash from Fannie Mae as McCain.

I don’t know if this guy’s analysis is correct, but some of the facts he brings out are both stunning and maddening—maddening, because I’m not hearing anything from the McCain campaign about this stuff.

Check it out and pass it on.

That’s debatable to say the least, as is whether Obama can actually deliver on the particular campaign promises attractive to some, mostly liberal, Catholics. But aside from those arguments, there is entirely different calculus by which liberal Catholics would do best to vote for John McCain in 2008.

Let me first clarify that I’m speaking here of those liberal Catholics—a majority, I think—who believe with the Church that abortion is a grave injustice, even if they are of mixed opinions on what the legal status of abortion ought to be.

In a nutshell, liberal Catholics should vote for John McCain to take abortion off the national table. That issue, more than any other, stands in the way of the domestic and foreign policies liberal Catholics want to see enacted.

What liberal Catholics—liberals in general—don’t understand about conservative Catholics is that they are far more loyal to the vision of Pope John Paul II than that of Ronald Reagan.

They vote Republican because they were taught by John Paul II that protecting the lives of unborn children is their most important political task—”the most important work on earth”, as he said to pro-life leader Fr. Paul Marx—and far more often than not, the pro-life candidate is the Republican.

Now, I happen to be a fan of Ronald Reagan. I voted for him in my first election, in 1984. During a liberal phase in my twenties, I disavowed my earlier support for Reagan, even voting for Bill Clinton in 1992. I still opposed abortion then, but I reasoned that Clinton’s plans—like a national health care system—would dramatically reduce abortion.

I was wrong about that—as wrong as Obama’s Catholic supporters are now in arguing his policies would substantially reduce abortion—but in the mean time I’ve returned to espousing the conservative political views championed by Ronald Reagan.

But there are many other Catholics who are loyal to the Republican party, on the national level, not because they are Reaganite conservatives, but because they know the only way that Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned is if a Republican president appoints more justices to the Supreme Court in the mold of Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia.

And while it’s true that Reagan appointees O’Connor and Kennedy and Bush 41 appointee Souter proved to be tremendous disappointments to pro-life Catholics, Thomas (Bush 41) and Roberts and Alito (Bush 43) have restored the hope of one day overturning Roe v. Wade. One more constitutionalist on the court could mean the end of Roe v. Wade.

That, of course, would not mean the end of abortion in the United States—it would only be the beginning of the state-by-state battle over abortion that should have taken place in the 1970s.

But the reversal of Roe v. Wade could mean the end of abortion politics in national elections—or at least radically diminish the importance of abortion in presidential and congressional races.

And for liberal Catholics—especially those who are willing to describe themselves as pro-life—that could mean a new opportunity to join forces with the those conservative John Paul II Catholics who are sympathetic to traditionally liberal positions.

If liberal Catholics are really serious about advancing issues like these, they would to well to vote for John McCain on November 4, with a view to gaining future allies among those John Paul II Catholics who will never vote for a candidate who claims to seek social justice while condoning the legalized killing of 1.2 million unborn babies every year.

That injustice was paramount for John Paul II. Once that injustice is no longer being perpetuated by the federal government, John Paul II Catholics will gratefully embrace the opportunity to deliberate policies addressing the many other social injustices the late Pope spoke out against. Many of them will become allies of liberal Catholics on issues like immigration, a living wage and the death penalty.

But if liberal Catholics choose instead to vote for Barack Obama—in an election where Catholics votes will decide the outcome—they could be ensuring that abortion will remain on the national table, a perpetual hindrance to moving forward on the issues they really care about.