Coming Soon: 'Life' By Keith Richards

Excerpt news:

Rolling Stone will publish an exclusive excerpt from Keith Richard’s long awaited memoir Life on October 15, eleven days before the eagerly anticipated book hits stores on October 26. The 10,000 word excerpt will cover the early days of the Rolling Stones, Keith’s trip to Tangiers in 1967 where he stole Anita Pallenberg from bandmate Brian Jones and tales of excess from the Stones’ infamous 1972 U.S. tour. "You can’t imagine that this book could be any better than it is," says Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana. "Keith holds nothing back. It’s funny, gossipy, profane and moving and by the time you finish it you feel like you’re friends with Keith Richards. Outside of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, it’s probably the best rock memoir ever written." Richards, who will appear on the cover of the magazine, also spoke with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke about the book and the Stones’ upcoming plans, strongly hinting that the band will be active in 2011.

To this day, I remain eternally pissed-off at a Norwegian named Andre, whose fight with his wife led to our subsequent late arrival at a Keith Richards in-store appearance at the old Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. Our group was queued up next and then a lovely lady--I think she was Richards' manager Jane Rose--walked outside and told us it was "time for Keith to go."

Several minutes later, there was the Human Riff himself, waving at us from the open window of a van, sunglasses on in the L.A. night, smiling and smoking with satisfaction plastered all over his face.

Those of us in the queue? Shadoobie....shattered, shattered...

Right-Wing Excess Lives In Texas.

Glenn Beckian history...

From the New York Times:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.
In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.
“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”
They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

JackRabbit Café was unable to confirm a rumor that Texas conservatives attempted to place Ronald Reagan at the Last Supper, penning the first draft of the Declaration of Independence while Nancy stared, dreamlike, busily powdering her crazy man's wig.