Foo Fighters Wasting Light T Shirt

[Raguel Charrette]

That was the scene at the Black Cat Cafe Friday night, where the band premiered the D.C. episode of Sonic Highways, its HBO series documenting the group's cross-country tour of iconic American recording studios, and treated fans to a three-hour show that stretched until 2 a.m.

Sorry, scalpers: Some 700 tickets, made available Tuesday, were gone in minutes. Anyone lucky enough to nab a ticket had their name printed on the stub and had to show matching ID to get in. So scalpers and these creative CraigsList beggars were out of luck.

'Feast' on this: The Washington crowd was the first live audience to hear Highways' second single, The Feast and the Famine, which made its debut at the end of Friday's Sonic Highways episode. It's only fitting: Hometown hero Dave Grohl's lyrics refer to "down on the corner of 14th and U." That's the location of the Black Cat and the site of the April 1968 "Chocolate City riots" that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The song was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Va., where legendary local punk acts Fugazi and Minor Threat once laid down tracks.

Communicable disease fighters: Grohl loves his fans, but not enough to don their sweaty T-shirts. He regaled (and grossed out) the crowd with the cautionary tale of a singer from a supporting act who put on a T-shirt thrown onstage by a fan. "He got ringworm! With all the communicable diseases out there, I'm not getting ringworm from your Primus T-shirt. Sorry."

Sweatin' to the oldies: Here's how Foo shows tend to play out: "After about an hour, we feel warmed up. And then (expletive) gets weird." With that warning, the band launched into a string of '70s and '80s rock staples, including Tom Petty's Breakdown, the Rolling Stones' Miss You and the Queen/David Bowie classic Under Pressure. Grohl related the latter to the litanies of being a dad. "Every day, I get in my minivan and take my kids to school, with the lunches I packed at 5:45 a.m. The kids complain that I'm playing the wrong DVD and that I put oranges in their sack and they wanted apples. Then the teacher yells at me because I used Ziploc bags instead of Tupperware. I like to think Freddie Mercury and David Bowie were going through the same thing, because we all know what it's like to be under pressure."

The Taylor Hawkins Show: When you're a drummer who likes to sing, it's beneficial to have your lead singer be the former drummer of an iconic band. Grohl, who was enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Nirvana earlier this year, is always happy to step back and let his own drummer come forward. Hawkins took over the mic for the band's Cold Day in the Sun and a pair of covers, Cheap Trick's Stiff Competition and Van Halen's Ain't Talkin' About Love. But Grohl wasn't willing to listen to him complain about having a sore elbow and "feeling 42." He countered, "I'm feeling 45 and I feel good!" He meant it, too. At that point, it was 12:30 a.m., and he kept going for another 90 minutes. That's pretty hardcore for a minivan-driving dad.

The once dominant party hasn't elected a governor since 1994. It's more than a decade since a Democratic presidential candidate won the state. Republicans gained a supermajority in the Florida House and Senate in 2022, and the GOP made gains in the congressional delegation, too.

In a state where elections are sometimes decided by a mere percentage point, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won a commanding 20-point reelection last year. DeSantis, now moving toward an expected run for president, even carried the longtime Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County.

They aren't alone. Democrats in other states with strong GOP majorities are also facing challenges. Republicans in Tennessee's Legislature took the remarkable step this week of expelling two Democratic lawmakers for their roles in a protest that called for more gun control.

But the arrest of top politicians in Florida is especially notable because DeSantis, now courting voters nationwide, portrays his state as the freest in the nation. While he wasn't involved in the decision to arrest the protesters, the governor signed a bill two years ago targeting Black Lives Matter protests that increases penalties for participating in protests that get out of hand.

"This governor for four years has really done anything possible to restrict protests both on the streets and inside the Capitol," said party Chair Fried. "It makes everybody on edge when there are protests and making people feel that they have to either not participate in protests or at least be on extra guard."

"There are more people in front of Clyde's on a Wednesday than what happened yesterday," Book said, referring to a popular political watering hole three doors down from the arrests where crowds often spill outside with cocktails in hand. "This was a group of 11 individuals sitting in a circle singing 'Lean On Me.' This was a peaceful protest."

Ironically, if Book wants to go to Clyde's now, she has to stick to non-alcoholic beverages. As part of their release from jail, she and Fried were ordered not to drink alcohol and are banned from City Hall property, even for personal business.

The governor's office simply sent The Associated Press a link to Press Secretary Bryan Griffin's Twitter account showing a GIF of DeSantis in front of an American flag saying, "This is a stunt. If you want to waste your time on a stunt, that's fine. But I'm not wasting my time on your stunts, Okay?" It's the same response Griffin has provided on a number of issues.

No one is a greater asset to the Florida GOP's production than Nikki Fried," Ziegler said by text. "Every moment she is behind bars is a moment she cannot turnoff voters with her radical agenda, so I'm leading the charge to #FreeNikki."

Book, 38, has a years-long reputation as a fighter and someone who's earned the respect of the Republican governors that preceded DeSantis. A victim of childhood sexual abuse, she has spent her adult life working to create laws to punish sexual predators, help victims and raise awareness about the issue.

Even before she could vote, Book stood alongside Republican Gov. Jeb Bush as he signed a bill she pushed to protect rape victims. Before being elected senator, she led walks across Florida bringing attention to sexual assault. She ended one of the 1,500-mile journeys at the Capitol, where Republican Rick Scott, then the governor, stood with her and praised her work.

And Book isn't afraid of uncomfortable situations. She once sat face-to-face with a child rapist in Florida's high security facility for the state's most dangerous sexual offenders, intent on learning how to craft legislation to protect others from becoming prey.

Fried became the new party chair in January. As agriculture commissioner the past four years, she was the only statewide elected Democrat and used her Cabinet position to be a thorn in DeSantis's side. She lost the Democratic Party primary to challenge him for governor last year.

She's showing signs as a party chair of being more visible and combative. As a candidate, she used profanity on social media to describe DeSantis' personality. As party chair, she wore a black T-shirt that read, "JUST F(asterisk)(asterisk)KING VOTE." Photos of her in the shirt with her hands cuffed behind her back have been widely distributed.

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Jeff Bezos is the richest person on the planet. He started a small e-commerce company called Amazon, which appears to be doing quite well, and more recently has branched out into newspapers and spaceflight. He's a smart guy, who understands the power of transformative technologies, and I recently watched a TED talk[1] he gave in 2003 in which he described how rich early-adopters of individually-useful products fund the development of infrastructure which then transforms society. He described how this occurred with the electricity grid, and how the electricity grid is analogous to the Internet.

Electricity now powers everything in our homes, but to begin with there was one product which people wanted, and which rich early-adopters were willing to pay for: lightbulbs. Those rich early-adopters wanted bright, smoke-free light (that didn't involve harvesting whales nearly to extinction) so badly that they were willing to pay enormous sums of money for it - enough to allow Thomas Edison's Electric Light Company to build entire grids of cabling and the power stations to supply it. Lightbulbs were the "killer app", the must-have functionality of the day, and thanks to those rich early-adopters, it didn't take too long before even modestly-wealthy people could afford to be hooked up to the grid, and not too long after that before even the poor could afford to do so.

But at this stage, the only household use of electricity was still just lightbulbs! Until one day, somebody[2] invented the electric desk-fan, and the whole world changed. It had to be plugged into a light socket in the ceiling, because "wall outlets" didn't exist back then, for obvious reasons. But it got people thinking: what else can we do with electricity to make our lives richer or more convenient, now that every house has electricity in it? People are creative, and so were invented toasters, washing machines, irons, and electric frypans, and eventually "wall outlets" became standardised and you didn't have to pull a lightbulb out of its socket if you wanted to plug in your stereo. Society was transformed.

Electricity isn't just a technology to put lightbulbs into homes, even though that is how it started. Electricity is a platform for innovation which was leveraged to cool and heat our homes, wash and dry and iron our clothes, cook and freeze our food, open and close our doors, and entertain us - and we continue to innovate upon the platform every year, with our lives becoming richer and more convenient as we do so.

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