It’s April 15th. You sent some mail today, right?

That’s the front of the IRS building up there.  It might be a titch difficult to make out, but the inscription reads, “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.”  No less a personage than Oliver Wendell Holmes said that.  I’d probably disagree with Ollie and argue that taxes are what we pay for a wide array of things of varying degrees of utility and appropriateness (bombs = not so good, Pell Grants = good), but potato, potato.  (I guess that potato thing only works when you say it out loud.  Weird.)  All this to say that I kind of like that the IRS is selling this notion of taxes as a civic duty and so forth; it gives a pleasingly human face to an otherwise overtly mechanical bureaucracy.

In honor of tax day, we thought we’d drop some Mission of Burma on you.  The more obvious choice would be The Beatles’ “Taxman,” but posting that would be both hacky and obvious and, worse, probably result in a lawsuit from the Apple people.  (The last thing we want are nasty letters from Yoko; we’d prefer to stay on her good side.)  Rather, think about “Fame and Fortune” for a minute.  “Fame and fortune is a stupid game, but fame and fortune is the game I play.”  Sounds like my attitude towards my W-2s. Indeed.

“Fame and Fortune” – Mission of Burma – Live – 2004

In other news, our very own Kevin made his audio media debut today on the Hype Machine’s radio program.  It’s worth checking out, if only to hear Kevin boil our critical ethos down to the following sentence: “We still believe that people like to read words.”  We’re going to have that one emblazoned on the Citizen Dick coat of arms. Kevin goes on to intelligently and eloquently talk about life, blogs and The Thermals.  Give it a listen here.  This is the official beginning of our media onslaught; look for Citizen Dick on TBS this fall; we’ve also got a book deal in the works.

Lastly, since a couple of folks have asked, and since they mention it on the Hype Machine, we snagged our moniker from the fictional band, comprised of Matt Dillon and the erstwhile  Pearl Jam, in Cameron Crowe’s grunge era masterpiece, Singles. Two clips follow.  The first speaks more to being a critic (“A compliment for us is a compliment for you.”); the second is the funniest twenty seconds ever captured on film.  As a side note, if loving Pearl Jam is wrong, I don’t know how to be right, so get off my case about it.