The Junk Drawer

I read at CNN today that at Steve Irwin’s funeral, murners heard a song titled “True Blue” by “Australian Country singer John Williamson.”  I didn’t even know Australia had a Country and Western music industry, but I suppose it makes sense in some way.  Both Australia and America were once rural, frontier nations, and former colonies of England.

So I went to iTunes and looked up the song True Blue [link will open iTunes].  The music isn’t bad.  The album is rather humorously titled for a “country” album, Old Man Emu.  To me, it sounds more like folk.  Even so, it’s not to my taste; however, I’ll be interested to see if sales of the song or album improve as a result of the publicity.  Right now, there are no customer reviews of the album at iTunes or at Amazon.  Amazon does not even offer a picture of the album cover.

This is an interesting news item I stumbled upon first via Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing: Karl Rove’s step-father was gay. Author James Moore outs the elder Rove in his new book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.

Although the title sounds sort of Kitty Kelly-ish, the excerpt published at the HuffPo has the ring of truth about it. What I particularly liked, in the context of a story about Rove’s gay family ties, was Moore quoting Karl’s passionate description of the first time he met George W. Bush.

Rove said once, “I can literally remember what he was wearing: an Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, complete with the - in Texas you see it a lot - one of the back pockets will have a circle worn in the pocket from where you carry your tin of snuff, your tin of tobacco. He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have.”

Homoerotic? Or is it just the admiration of a geek for the jock?