Random Awesome Song of the Day:

Dreaming by Blondie

Yikes! Liz McGrath had some adventures in her youth.

*****

W: I know your Dad. Sweet man, but with his own sort of odd Catholic guilt; sort of a prisoner of it in a way. So tell me about when you started hitting your punk rock phase, in your early pre-teens. How did your folks deal with this?

L: They sent me away to a southern fundamentalist Baptist Christian girls’ home, one step above Pentecostal snake handlers!

W: What was the girls’ home like?

L: Well, My first month there was spent in a four foot by foot sized room called the ‘Get Right With God Room’, an extremely bright light was on all the time, and they played religious tapes on max volume outside my door twenty-four hours a day.
The first week I had to use a bucket for my bathroom and they had groups of girls pray round the clock for me, I could see them through a crack in the door. They fed me only one meal a day and when they found out I was a vegetarian they fed me raw meat. A really fat lady named “Miss Judy” would come in from time to time to sit on me till I could barely breathe; she was trying to “save me from the devil.”
The second week they gave me a pillow and a blanket, and let me out twice a day to go to the bathroom and the third week they let me take a shower – the bathrooms were just a row of toilets and shower heads, no walls, with someone always there to watch you. They finally let me out of the room when I agreed to get “saved.”

Shortly after I was let out, a girl, Carey Dunn, got crushed by a pile of wood while doing her “chores” they would make us do all the construction on the “compound” because they didn't want outsiders to come in. The Palmers, because of their refusal to get medical help right away she died. This caught the attention of the local authorities and finally the FBI shut the school down, but the Palmers reopened it in Mexico calling it ‘Genesis by the Sea’. Mexican authorities eventually shut that school down as well. Then they reopened in a Jay Florida where the Palmers’s son and son in law both work for the sheriffs department, it remains open today under the name Victory Christian Academy.
Brother Palmer, after being accused of raping one of his students, has been court ordered not to be alone with any of the girls, but he still continues to run the school. They think they are doing work of the lord!

********

That's the kind of experience that might affect your art.

But she turned out all right.

Not music-related, but my book group read "Jesus Land" and it sounds a lot like that...

Yeah those Christian reform camps for rebellious teens sound insanely nightmarish. And kids just had no rights at all. It's like whackadoodle Kafka.

Here's a piece on Children's Gulags.

It boggles me that these things are still fairly common.

A lot of them have opened up in the Caribbean (Jamiaca, Domincan Republic) and off in the Pacific Islands (Samoa).

Okay, that is a sickening run down. I was getting ready to say that stuff happens to kids on the reservation, and then there was one of the towns where I work, right at the top. And if I`m reading it right, it looks like the tribe cracked down on them so they moved, but weren`t prosecuted. I`d guess the tribe lacked authority to pursue it and the feds opted not to because it wasn`t big or important enough. Classic. And that was in 2000. We started working there the next year. Any surprise that we were regarded with deep distrust? I don`t have words enough for how angry those people and their ilk make me. As if life weren`t hard enough already.

Random assertion: "Never Let Me Down Again" by Depeche Mode is the best gay song by a band that insisted they were not gay.

Discuss.

Let it Die by the Foo Fighters

Really? I had no idea. I love that song.

And "Innocent" by Our Lady Peace? Huh. "Fire Water Burn," really? (Oh, well, there's the one mention, but the whole song? Oh, the same thing applies to "Innocent." I think that is playing loose with "inspired by.") And "Malibu"? Ah, of course.

Random assertion: "Never Let Me Down Again" by Depeche Mode is the best gay song by a band that insisted they were not gay.

Well, not at THAT point. I mean, Early Mode *did* have Vince Clarke, after all.

I will say, I was SHOCKED, shocked I say, to discover that Martin and the gang like The Girls.