George Lowe was the voice of Space Ghost in the Cartoon Network mini-talk-show SPACE GHOST: COAST TO COAST, and he was funny as fuck, and a brilliant comedian and a really good guy, but he has died, and I hate it.
Let’s ignore everything else horrible in the world for just two hours tonight and play tunes about SPACE and GHOSTS. Friday 7 Mar 2025 from 6pm Central US time at slipmat.io/phoole, mixcloud.com/live/phoole and twitch.tv/phoole!
I really love tonight's playlist. It includes a lot of Cartoon Planet Band cuts from their two albums, SPACE GHOST'S MUSICAL BAR-B-QUE and SPACE GHOST'S SURF & TURF, and a lot of songs about space and about ghosts. I crave space, and I feel like a ghost.
And that fucking guy's spaceship just blew up, its flaming wreckage nearly hitting tons of commercial aircraft, so that's...everyday life in 2025!
Many episodes of SPACE GHOST: COAST TO COAST are currently viewable on the Adult Swim site at https://www.adultswim.com/videos/space-ghost-coast-to-coast.
This micro-show launched so many other shows, channels, and comedy forces, as well as causing me to say "I'm having a big head day!" every day since 1997, when the show's first album, SPACE GHOST'S MUSICAL BAR-B-QUE, came out. I fondly recall how Dorkus and I would guffaw over SG:CTC episodes we'd watch over at the apartment of the Milkshake Kid, William T. Garver, when I lived in DeKalb, Illinois in the 1990s.
The theme tune for the show is "Hit Single" by Sonny Sharrock. Sonny's SPACE GHOST EP appears to be out of print in all formats! But if you still use what Mr.B the Gentleman Rhymer terms One's Tube, you can at least give the EP a listen here.
The last time we did a show with a space theme was all the way back in February of 2022! At the time, a US politician who is a complete waste of genetic material tried to say that people who want social justice are "Gestapo police," but she is very, very dumb, so she said they're "Gazpacho police" instead. That same moron had previously said that wildfires in California were caused by "Jewish space lasers," so I did a show about both Jewish Space Lasers and Gazpacho Police. You can rewind the show with or without the talking parts below.
How are you holding up?
Historians are moving away from comparing the state of US social collapse to 1933 Germany and toward comparing it to 1999 Russia.
And, yeah, I can see that! Russia's collapse in 1999 was characterized by society normalizing every step of descent. That checks out. I don't know anyone near me who is fortifying their home, stockpiling provisions, and planning for dastardly contingencies the way we are. And of course that's part of it, isn't it? No one's going to let on that they're prepping. It's a lonely business, trying to support community, but being less sure of whom one can trust as one's demographics get demonized more and more devoutly.
The megacorporation pharmacy chain where we normally get some of Tiffany's medications and all of her mom's medications has just been acquired by a private equity firm - within a year, it will be shut down. The upside is we'll be learning who our local independent pharmacists are, and we'll be spending our money with them instead of funnelling it to a too-big-to-fail-but-failed-anyway fascism-supporting monster corporation. But it's just another meteor-strike of economic and social collapse, just another deadly thing to sidestep.
It continues to feel overwhelming.
I hope you can take a little time to prepare for greater hardship every day, and I hope you can take a little time to escape every day.
Web censorship seems likely - so this Blague may decline, and you may feel hesitant about getting email newsletters. I understand. Keep in touch if you feel it's safe to do so. Otherwise, I will just keep streaming Phoole & the Gang for as long as I can, and we can meet up there, if you like. I don't think the baddies are likely to be smart enough to read this far down in a post, or spy on DMs through Hearthis.at or MixCloud, so those might be ways we can express solidarity and connect in the even-darker times that loom. I know the first rule of struggle against fascism is "Don't Obey in Advance," but I have other rules for keeping my family and I from getting on lists that get us sent to "Wellness Farms."
I know it can appear cowardly and selfish.
But if 1999 Russia is the history blueprint for what we're going through, spectacular protests, designed to attract the attention of Western media, are...not going to do a fucking thing, because we're it. We're the West, and we're compromised. We are not coming to our rescue, and neither is anyone else. So we keep preparing for Tuesday, as the saying goes.
Take care of you. Tune in if you can. If you feel an affinity with us, know you're not alone. We're still here.
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