To date, Dick Cheney is the only person who has been able to watch Matt dance the world without smiling.

Watch embedded below, or click this link: Where the hell is Matt?.

Who the Hell is Matt?

Matt Harding was a video game developer, originally from Westport, Connecticut, who ended up working for a game company in Brisbane, Australia.

After the popularity of shoot-em-up video games led to him working on a game called Destroy All Humans (no, this is a different game than the real-time game currently being played by George Bush and Dick Cheney), Matt decided to spend his savings and six months out of his life doing something more upbeat and positive, and so he set off to see the world.

Fate and synchronicity and chance led from one thing to another, as they often do in this particular dream, and the rest is viral video history.

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Michael Berliner of the Ayan Rand institute reminds us of the original reason we celebrate Independence Day: Freedom from servitude to empire.

Click this link, or watch embedded below: Michael Berliner on Independence Day.

From Garrison Keillor at The Writer’s Almanac:

Today is Independence Day. On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the United States officially broke from the rule of England. The colonists were trying to persuade other nations of Europe to be on their side, so they included a long list of complaints about the king. The document said of the king, in part, “HE is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with Circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.”

Twenty-four years later, in 1804, the explorers Lewis and Clark had the first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. They were traveling through a part of the Midwest that is now Kansas. They stopped at the mouth of a creek on July 4th, and named it Independence Creek in honor of the day. To celebrate, they fired their cannon at sunset and distributed an extra ration of whisky to the men.

There were unofficial celebrations of Independence Day from its first anniversary, but it really became a popular holiday after the War of 1812. On the frontier, it was the only time of the year when everyone in the countryside gathered together in one place. There would be parades and speeches, and the prettiest and most wholesome girl in the village would be named the Goddess of Liberty. Politicians would get up and call the king of England a skunk and challenge him to a fight. Drunk men in the streets would get into fights and call each other Englishmen. Soon, events like groundbreaking ceremonies for the Erie Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroads were scheduled to coincide with July 4th festivities.

And now, for some fireworks, to the tune of a couple of my favorite songs: 4th of July Fireworks.

Read More: 4th of July, Independence Day

Note: Because La Sirena said her entire blogroll should consider themselves tagged by the Five Favorite Songs meme (after she was tagged by ParisianCowboy, who was tagged by Indie Rocker Revolution, who was tagged by…you know, keep following this and you’ll find the pot of gold at the end of the Internet…), and because I’m bending the rules too, here are five of my favorite Beatle songs…

Lady Madonna

When the Beatles entered Abbey Road Studios on February 3, 1968, Paul McCartney had recently read a National Geographic article featuring a picture of an African woman suckling her kid with the caption “Mountain Madonna.” McCartney was also nursing an itch to write something with a Fats Domino boogie-woogie piano feel to it. What emerged was Lady Madonna, and yes, that IS Paul singing the lead on this one.

A few nights later, Paul, John, and George all stood around the microphone and recorded the horn solo in the middle of the song, except instead of playing real horns, they cupped their hands and immitated a three-part horn arrangement with their own voices. Later in the evening, on the spur of the moment, they called up a few real saxophone players to add the final touch to the record.

Lady Madonna was released as a single a little over a month later. And later in the same year? Fats Domino recorded the song he helped inspire, and had his own hit with it.

Listen: Lady Madonna.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun

Famous for its ambiguous lyrics, both Lennon and McCartney have claimed it as their favorite song from The Beatles (the white album.) Scores and scores of fans agree.

But…what to make of the lyrics? Are they an extended metaphor about sex? Or shooting heroin? Or are they literally about a guy who feels happy when he’s holding a warm rifle in his arms, who feels safe when his finger is on the trigger of that firearm he so dearly loves?

John Lennon wrote the song — actually three separate songs he’d merged into one by the time he brought it into the studio. As if three different songs weren’t enough to cram into a 2 minute - 43 second track, John arranged the music to frequently switch between 4/4, 3/4, and even 6/8 time signatures. It sounds like a mess on paper, but through the speakers, it’s a concise piece of genius.

As for the lyrics: in the book, The Beatles Anthology, John Lennon says it’s a story of three people:

The lilting first section is about an old woman. According to Beatles PR man Derek Taylor, when Lennon was stuck for lyrics for this section, he asked everybody to shout out random things in the studio. Taylor supplied the line, “a lizard on a windowpane,” which made it into the song. The line about the man with “multicolored mirrors on his hobnail boots” referred to a real newspaper account of a pervert who wore mirrors on his boots to look up women’s dresses. The man whose hands were busy working overtime referred to another news item about a pickpocket. And those in England know what most Americans don’t: “making a donation to the National Trust” is a euphamism for taking a dump in the park.

The anxious, fast-paced second section is about a junkie. And what of “Mother Superior”? Well…whether it’s a religious dress, or needle marks, nuns and junkies both wear their habits, don’t they?

The 1950s doo-wop sendup third section is about a man who loves his gun (no metaphor intended.) The boys stayed in the studio from 7 PM till 5 AM finishing off the track, and adding the hillarious “bang, bang, shoot, shoot” backing vocals, sung by John, Paul, and George.

More from Lennon’s 1970 Rolling Stone interview:

I think [producer George Martin] showed me a cover of a magazine that said ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’ It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something.

Who knows…maybe Lennon thought somebody who finds happiness in a spent gun is more depraved than perverts or heroin addicts.

Listen: Happiness Is A Warm Gun.

Martha My Dear

Paul McCartney had a sheepdog named Martha. He wrote a song to his dog. Great song, fantastic arrangement. Nuff said.

Listen: Martha My Dear.

A Day in the Life

On December 18, 1966, Tara Browne, a young aristocrat and acquaintance of Paul and John, drove his Lotus Elan through South Kensington at high speed, possibly under the influence of drugs, and proceeded through a red traffic light at the junction of Redcliffe Square and Redcliffe Gardens, then slammed into a parked car and died instantly.

A month later, John Lennon recorded the first verse of A Day in the Life, loosely based on the newspaper account of his friend’s accident. To fill in the second verse, he referenced another article about potholes from the January 17th, 1967 Daily Mail:

There are 4000 holes in the road in Blackburn Lancashire, one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey.

There was another article about the Royal Albert Hall in the same paper.

Needing a middle to the song, Paul added a little reverie about his youth school days, waking up, sneaking a smoke on the bus to school.

But, they still couldn’t figure out how to connect Lennon’s two end pieces to McCartney’s middle. So, finally, they pretty much had an entire orchestra go crazy for 24 measures.

The masterpiece was capped off by all the Beatles humming an E major chord. But, then, they didn’t think it had enough punch, so they brought in 3 pianos and, at the same moment, Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr, and studio hand Mal Evans all played one of the most famous chords in music history.

Listen: A Day in the Life.

Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End

At his father’s Liverpool home, McCartney spotted sheet music left on the piano by his stepsister Ruth. The sheet music was for a lullaby-styled poem written by Thomas Dekker. McCartney couldn’t read music, so he put his own tune to the words.

Carry That Weight has been interpreted as carrying the weight of keeping the supergroup together, carrying the weight of being the one blamed for the breakup, and carrying the weight of being a Beatle for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps realizing it was indeed the end, the band persuaded Ringo to record his only ever drum solo to kick off The End, then launched into three rounds of successive guitar solos by Paul, George, and John. Although the Beatles came back to the studio to record individual overdubs, The End marked the last time all four of them recorded together as a group.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Listen: Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight / The End.

P.S. If you made it this far, consider yourself tagged; what’s your five favorite songs?

Read More: The Beatles, Lady Madonna, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Martha My Dear, A Day in the Life, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr

Remember when there was only one kind of spaghetti sauce on the store shelf. And now, there are, like, 36 varieties from traditional to extra chunky? How did that happen?

Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, wonders about these kind of things, too.

In the following talk, filmed at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in 2004, Malcolm explains how spaghetti sauce, and eventually the rest of the marketing world, was changed by the ideas of one Dr. Howard R. Moskowitz, a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics.

This talk covers everything from what we think makes us happy to how one person’s ideas can change the world in little ways that ripple into something huge.

To watch, click on the video below, or this link: Learning from Spaghetti Sauce.

Read More: Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Moskowitz, TED, spaghetti Sauce

Pssst. You gotta read this book: Iowa Terror , by Mike Palecek.

Go ahead, order it here: Buy Iowa Terror now. Share it with your friends.

Iowa Terror is categorically fiction, but it’s woven from many threads of truth, not the least of which concerns the official lie of 9/11.

Palecek’s tale begins in small-town Iowa, shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The once level-headed residents are soon besieged by paranoia and illogical fears. They jump to conclusions, commit hypocrisy, and are a bit too eager to damn the torpedoes in their rush to board the War On Terror bandwagon. They’re also eager to convict the guilty-until-proven-innocent in a court of rumor and wild speculation.

The story might seem a bit over the top as it gets started. But, as another reviewer pointed out, the real life quotes interspersed throughout the novel make the fiction seem much more tame than our current administration’s reality.

As the characters in the novel rush like lemmings to form terrorist watch groups, they learn all the wrong lessons from the 9/11 tragedy. As in real life, sometimes fictional characters can’t see the forest for the trees. Also, as in real life, sometimes fictional characters can’t see a black-op demolition for the smoke of nationalistic us-against-the-world propaganda being constantly blown up their britches.

I’ve often wondered if Mark Twain were reincarnated, what would his treatment of our modern times look like? Thanks to Palecek, I now have the answer. Tall tales steeped with irony that showcase humanity’s inclination for hypocrisy…tales that eventually work their way to the soft spot in your heart: that seems to be the forte of both Twain and Palecek.

As a bonus, Palecek’s Iowa Terror is illustrated with some gorgeous full-page artwork by Russell Brutsche, Allison M. Healy, Benjamin Heine, and Ian Ward.

Palecek is currently in the middle of a month-long book tour, travelling from Tulsa to the West Coast and back again, making stops almost every day along the way. Visit his website (www.mikepalecek.com) for updates and a detailed schedule, and if you’re lucky, maybe you can meet him along his journey.

Read More: Mike Palecek, Iowa Terror, 9/11, Iraq War, Bush, War On Terror, terrorism, fiction, Iowa