Tues | Apr 10 Local bon vivant Snoop Dogg objects to finding himself and other hip-hop artists lumped in with Don Imus. Imus is under fire for calling members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” He’s apologetic, Imus is, says his comment was objectionable and wrong, even though it’s pretty much the same crap he’s been saying for the past 30 years—you know, when he isn’t having that stroke of his. Snoop, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, doesn’t like being associated with Imus, whose real name is Dipwad McZombie, because while they both denigrate women, they, uh, how’s that go again? “It’s a completely different scenario,” Snoop said. “[Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about hos that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things.” Well, duuuh.

Wed | Apr 11 Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away Tuesday, not only lived his art, he died it, too. Slaughterhouse-Five’s point that all of life is some tawdry circus that barely notes the passing, let alone suffering, of people was driven home in how Vonnegut’s death was reported. Yesterday evening, it was the subject of a big red banner headline on the CNN website. By early this morning, his death had been relegated to one of about a dozen “Top Stories” along with still more stuff about Imus and a piece about stolen wedding dresses. By 10 a.m., Vonnegut’s death had ceased to be a Top Story—Imus and the wedding dresses remained—and had been placed in the “Entertainment” section alongside an article about Danny Bonaduce’s wife filing for divorce. So it goes. And what does a guy have to do to have his death mentioned on the front page of the LA Times, above the fold? (Above the fold is that area that is visible when a newspaper is laying flat. It’s where the day’s most important and significant stuff runs.) Vonnegut is one of the most important and significant Americans of the last 40 years—am I going to get an argument on this?—yet news of his death was played below the fold by the Times in favor of the usual horror out of Iraq—so it goes—and a presidential poll story running nearly a year before the primaries. What does a guy have to do? Be a Chandler? A Zell? God’s more successful older brother?

Thurs | Apr 12 Will Swaim checks in from the streets: “There’s a thin line between parody and tribute, a line that blurs to a smudge when No Duh headlines Tecate Thunder Thursday on Pine Avenue—an event which falls just one week after Holy Thursday on the liturgical calendar (hooray, Catholicism!). The No Doubt tribute band plays to a crowd of a few hundred, including Tony Kanal, Tom Dumont and Jesse Robles. Kanal and Dumont are, of course, members of the real No Doubt; Robles was a guy who bought us a beer at Hooters next door. We (and by ‘we,’ I’m not talking about that part of my bifurcated personality that thinks it’s a British royal and uses ‘we’ when it means ‘me’) ask Kanal what it’s like to see his band—what: honored? memorialized?—parodied on stage. ‘It’s actually a lot of fun,’ he says. ‘The fact that this can happen [and here he indicates the entire performance, including kids singing the lyrics and skanking like it's 1994] shows just how deeply the band has penetrated popular consciousness.’ He actually speaks like this—deliberately, thoughtfully—and when I use the word simulacrum, he doesn’t pretend he knows what the word means: he asks me what ‘simulacrum’ means. Quite a guy. And then I admit that I have no idea what ‘simulacrum’ means.”

Fri | Apr 13 A national study concludes that abstinence-only sex education programs do not keep kids from having sex. The study, which looked at kids in both abstinence and non-abstinence—i.e., Catholic school—programs found that half the kids in each group had engaged in sex before they were 17. The other half was ordering Proactiv.

Sat | Apr 14 Vroom.

Sun | Apr 15 Happy Jackie Robinson Day! Sebastien Bourdais wins his third-straight Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, dominating the field by leading 58 of 78 laps with an average speed of 91.432 miles per hour. Thrilled fans take time to hoist their cocktails and proclaim, “There’s a race?”

Mon | Apr 16 Happy Tax Day, that special time of year when our hard-earned dollars go to fund the homosexual agenda. Of course, they also go to defend people’s rights to bear arms. One such bearer walks onto the campus of Virginia Tech and kills at least 33 people. A spokesperson says our President Bush is “horrified” by the events, adding, “The President believes there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed.” See what His Toolness did there? His main concern wasn’t the 33 dead or their families, his main concern was that people would blame the gun. You know, that guy is all for people having the right to tote their guns, which I guess is easy when you travel with the self-satisfied confidence of someone who doesn’t leave the house without a full security detail, metal detectors and the force field-like protection that springs from Karl Rove’s Gentleman’s Agreement with Satan.

Tags: abstinence, karl rove, snoop dogg