Last Friday, the creator of Treme and The Wire brought the genres together in a much more impressive way.

Coincidentally, this week saw the passing of Brown. Rest in peace, and thanks for the tunes (RIPATFTT).

The ratio of hyperlinks to actual text in this post should be adequate to make this look like a spam blog, so my apologies to anyone who found his way here looking for a simple way to enlarge his penis.

First of all, here’s Florence and the Machine, as promised.

My second selection this week is inspired again by the conversation about music on Mad Men. This week, the news was about the show paying $250,000 to license The Beatles’s “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It worked great in the episode, although I think “Eleanor Rigby” from the same album would have been better. Aside from being a better tune by a long way, think about the lyrics:

Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice
In the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream

Waits at the window, wearing the face
That she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Does any of that sound like any characters on AMC that you’ve run into?

Here’s where I reverse direction on you. No Beatles for you this morning. The tweets about Mad Men just got me thinking about shows that did a good job on their music.

There was a show on HBO called How to Make It in America, which got no buzz, and probably wasn’t watched much. It was a good show — not a great one — but the shining star was whichever producer whose job is was to pick out music. Week after week, they pulled music that matched the show and was awesome. I’ve burned Shazam bandwidth like I did when that show aired.

Here’s the theme from that show, which I really dig.

At Jazz Fest last week, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny came up with the idea for the Jazz Fest Julep: buy a mint-flavored sno-ball, add smuggled in whiskey. It’s actually pretty good. Not as good as a real mint julep, but a long, long bit better than the canned Miller Lite that you can buy at the tents.

	A Jazz Fest Julep

The smuggled in whiskey is a piece of cake when you’re traveling with a baby. Suff it in a bag covered with bibs and diapers and other random baby shit, then tuck that at the bottom of the stroller, where it’s a pain to get to anyway. They didn’t even bother checking in there.

The funniest part of that is that Mrs. theskinnyonbenny left a half-drank bottle of Makers Mark in the bottom of the diaper bag, and then left the diaper bag in her mother’s car. It will look to her mother like it’s in there for the occasional belt while watching the kids at the park. And if she notices it’s there, and if she asks about it, I’m totally pretending that it’s news to me.

The big act that we caught at Jazz Fest was Florence and the Machine. The family enjoyed the show, but I was — and I continue to be — bitter that she didn’t do “Kiss with a Fist.” It’s one thing if Springsteen doesn’t get to one of his hits. He has a 30 year library of tunes. Can’t get to them all.

I know that “Kiss” isn’t in the style of all of her other songs, but it’s her best. In fact, part of my rationale for heading away from the Jimmy Buffet stage was that the average Buffet song might be better than the average tune from Flo, but none of his would be as good as “Kiss with a Fist.” Listen to it without any preconceived notion about Flo’s music, and you’ll just think a random punk rock band came up with the perfect punk rock song. I’d post it now, but I’ll save that for Music Friday this week.

When we left, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny mentioned that she hoped to find a place to eat on the way back to the car. I replied that she must have been sitting too close to a pot-smoker. No way the small little places near the Fairgrounds would have a table as 100,000 made their way out of the festival at the same time.

So of course, we get to the little Italian place on Esplanade next door to Cafe Degas, and their patio is full of empty tables.

We sat down, and through a gate at the back of their patio, we hear and kind of see a little local brass band cranking out tunes. There seemed to be a lot of people back there enjoying the show, so I took the kids back there while we waited for our food.

The video I made over there is one of my favorites. And it explains better than I ever could why I wouldn’t want to live too far from New Orleans. I don’t think a scene like this would happen anywhere else.

I noticed that without any real discussion or plan, both of the adults here have made a footwear change in the house. I think it’s more a mental sacrifice to the floor gods rather than anything that makes a marked difference, but it has happened.

While Mrs. theskinnyonbenny has started ditching her shoes at the door and going through the house barefoot, I’ve come to cover my bare feet with socks when entering the clean floor area.

I find wearing socks in the summer about as comfortable as having sex in a raincoat. I don’t mean that as a euphemism for condom-wearing. It’s really like a sweaty grind in a coat. Not a breathable one either — more like a plastic poncho you buy at the union before a rainy LSU game.

Wearing socks in the house does make it easy to wipe up spilled or tracked in water.

The album’s opening is arguably one of the best ever recorded. To this day, when I get a new speaker, piece of stereo equipment, car, or pair of headphones, the first test listen is to “Where the Streets Have No Name.” The song us ushered in with a low rumble that will be background noise in most settings, but can be floor to jaw rattling bass if played properly. Then, the quick high notes of the guitar get added, letting you hear whether your new setup will play them crisply, or whether the sounds sort of bleed into a poppy mess (like they do in my kitchen, unfortunately).

The opening isn’t as audibly pleasing in the video, as voices and crowd noise lay on top of the original music, but it’s a great video; it’s one that I distinctly remember watching on MTV in those lazy summer days when MTV played videos all day long, and I was still a year or two too young for the freedom afforded by a driver’s license.

That quesiton is as magnificent and as this video, and it makes almost as much sense. You’ll want to turn it off at 30 seconds, but if you give it a full minute, you’ll stick around for the whole thing.

I wasn’t one of the viewers that was very upset with the fact that they didn’t solve the murder on the finale to season one. In fact, I stubbornly continued to think that despite the forged evidence, they had the right guy. But of course, they didn’t. We had to set up a whole season of tail-chasing so that we can finally find out who the murderer is at the end of the second season.

And that’s the jist of the problem with this show. Two seasons is too long to solve one crime. Especially since it’s a run of the mill murder that every other show would have knocked out in an hour, with time left to spare for witty banter and a clueless lieutenant who spends his time demanding that his star detectives turn in their gun and badge.

There are no star detectives in this show. And there is no shining light guiding this fictional version of the Seattle police either. Linden was supposed to move away, didn’t, and now she gets to work side-by-side with her replacement. Is there no one who looks at the homicide department personnel budget? Perhaps they’re well under budget, given the competence of our two main characters. It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the holes that they step around week after week. Victims father has mob connections? Ah, we’ll look into that next season. Employees who worked in the house where they live? Can’t interview them all right away. Councilman Richmond gets emails from the victim’s prostitute email? Well, doesn’t matter — we cooked up evidence against him, so he couldn’t have any new information to add, right?

So, yes, the police homicide department is the worst in the world, which is fitting for a family that has the worst parents in the world. If your daughter lives under your roof, goes to high school by day, and is a prostitute on weekends, you’re about 15 years too late for the parenting course that you badly needed to take. When a tragedy strikes your family, it’s best to show a smidgeon of attention and caring on the remaining children. And also, disappearing on your family to boink strangers in seedy motels for some number of days is hardly the way to nurture even the best of families.

But besides the world’s worst homicide detectives and parents, what’s so wrong with this place? How about the world’s worst school? Remember the sex dungeon in the school’s basement? As I recall, the principal knew it was there, but assumed that it had fallen into disuse. I can’t even think of anything to add.

Let’s not forget the worst doctor in the world. Sure, Richmond looks pretty good for a recent gunshot victim fighting for his life, but I don’t think most medical schools recommend letting your patients figure out for themselves that they’re paralyzed.

And to top it off — and this one is obvious if you’ve watched — we have the worst weather in the country. It’s usually dark, almost always raining, and if I see one more second of bulky wool sweater, I’m going to scratch my skin from the psycho-sympathetic itching.

Heard this one on one of the satellite radio stations this weekend. Catchy tune, and you can say, “I knew it when.” There are only 815 views at the time that I’m posting this.

The video is very weird, by the way.

We had a huge flash and bang. I don’t know if it was the lighning or the sound of the thunder, but I literally felt it shake me. The inside of my mouth felt weird.

It was kind of scary.

Lily started to temble, snugged in against us.

Vanya and I talked a little bit about how the lound thunder really scared her, and how the trembling is just something that natually happens when you’re really scared.

“I know!” he chimed in.

“Her can share my kahki, so she won’t be scared.”

And then he spread out his little blue security blanket, stretching it from his chin to down over Lily’s head.

It was the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.

And you know what?

Lily stopped trembling right away.