In DRUNKEN GHOSTS OF BURMA, Music For Maniacs posts a couple cuts Music of Nat Pwe, the Folk & Pop Music of Myanmar (Burma). “It’s all fairly bat-shit crazy (to use the ethnomusicological terminology.)… Nats are spirits who met tragic or violent deaths, so I would imagine there’s a lot of them around Myanmar lately.”

This is Sein Moota peforming “Pay Kyaw Chit Tae Doe (Father Kyaw Loves His Son)” (3:56 mp3):

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Interviews gathered from Mae Sot, Thailand (same town from which all land-transported aid is entering Burma) with medical workers and Burmese migrant laborers who work in Thailand but sleep in Burma. From Jack Chance, aired this week on The World, “Burma Aid Efforts” (3:30 mp3):

And for the real story, see the previous post…

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Here’s Chance’s more accurate Cyclone report w/ the other story, not being told: the Burmese elections. No one would run this, so we’ll post it, “Irawaddy Delta Blues” (5:10 mp3):

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Testing Amazon’s new MP3 Widget clip-player with some Lemon Jelly trax:

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The massive audio empire that is North Country Public Radio has added the HV series to its roster of fine programming. You can now hear HV hours weekly, Saturdays at 4pm, on NCPR’s 7 station transmitters and 25 translators blanketing Northern New York.

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A few other fine pubradio stations have added HV’s weekly hours to their lineup. WEMC-FM 91.7 in Harrisonburg VA now runs our series Sundays at 9pm. WPTC-FM 88.1 in Williamsport PA has us on a couple times weekly: Saturday 5am & Sunday at noon. And Pittsburgh’s WDUQ-FM 90.5 starts airing HV in July.

Our station list has all the HV times, places, and frequencies, now broadcasting on 41 stations and 38 translators.

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Hearing Voices from NPR®:
011 Road Trip— Travelers’ Tales
Host— Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airdates— 5/14/2008 - 5/21/2008

Road Trip (54:00 mp3):

Host Larry Massett spends a “Long Day on the Road” with ex-KGB in the Republic of Georgia.

Scott Carrier starts in Salt Lake and ends on the Atlantic in this cross-country “Hitchhike.”

Lemon Jelly adds beats to the life of a “Ramblin’ Man.”

Writer/singer Willie Vlautin with his band band Richmond Fontaine sends musical postcards from the flight of “Walter On the Lam.”

And Mark Allen tells a tale of a tryst with a “Kinko’s Crackhead.”

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[Mr. Massett explains why the media explanations of the mortgage crisis explain nothing.]

When the US credit markets began to blow up last year, every newspaper in the country served up two explanations for the mess: “sub-prime mortgage” and “collaterized debt obligation,” or “CDO.”

A sub-prime mortgage sounds bad on the face of it, so no problem there. But CDO has no obvious meaning. Only a few days ago I watched an NPR journalist try to figure it out from the words themselves (”let’s see, ‘collateralized’ refers to ‘collateral,’ so there must be a thing like a house or a car someplace, and ‘debt’ means, well, debt, and an ‘obligation’ means, um, you have to do something, right?”) The usual fudge is to drape the riddle with adjectives like “opaque,” “complex,” and “hard to understand,” as if these were explanatory principles. The phrase “complex and opaque financial instruments known as CDO’s” doesn’t tell you anything, really, but at least it sounds bad. Dern near as bad as a sub-prime mortgage. Moving right along, in other news…

The trouble is CDO’s were never meant for the average investor, or the average journalist. They are Wall Street inventions designed for the big players, investment banks like Citi or Merill or Bear Sterns. To understand them you have to think like an investment bank. This is no harder than thinking like a Martian.

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