RIP: Owsley "Bear" Stanley

Owsley Stanley, known to Deadheads as simply "Bear", has died following a traffic accident at the age of 76. He was also known as a pioneer of the psychedelic drug culture and the producer of the highest quality LSD ever made, as a one-time financial backer and early sound engineer to the Grateful Dead and as the first of the "tapers", a community of music activists / deadheads who carefully chronicled virtually every note of every Grateful Dead concert on a myriad of private audio tapes that were always swapped or given away free.

Scottish Deadheads, a real minority

Roddy Woomble, a solo artist and lead singer of Idlewild, tells a very hippie-ish tale about Ripple.

Super Fat Tuesday!

Happy Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day and Super Tuesday, all in one!
It's Fat Tuesday in New Orleans, Super Tuesday lots of other places. (Louisiana's primaries are on Saturday.
In other Election 2008 news:
Deadheads and surviving band members unite for Obama.
Democrats Abroad this year are sending 11 delegates to the convention. Caucuses are being held even as I type in Oxford and London.
I guess you've heard about the endorsements of Obama by Caroline Kennedy, Senator Ted Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and from the other end of the spectrum, Susan Eisenhower, grand-daughter of Ike.
And in other Shrove Tuesday news:
An Anglican bishop wants us to give up energy consumption for Lent
The nearby (to me that is) village of Atherstone has its 810th ball game between the "serfs of Warwickshire" and the "serfs of Leicestershire".

On the suicide of Vince Welnick and depression in general

Nobody does elegaic quite as well as John Perry Barlow. On his blog Barlowfrienz, he gets by turns poetic, mournful, funny and piercing. Welnick's recent death, "the curse of the keyboardist", is linked up with Jerry Garcia's death and the spiritual malaise in its wake, with the deaths of earlier GD keyboard players and with that of one of Barlow's non-GD friends, the actor Spalding Grey. There is also a beautiful lyric that Welnick wrote, which Barlow cannot recall the melody of, and an excerpt from his writing on depression (Barlow's) which is one of the most insightful and compassionate things ever said on the subject.

Git yer Grateful Dead news here!

Bob Weir marries Natascha Muenter. Here's a chance to see Bob Weir in a kilt, John Barlow in a tux and Mickey Hart (surprise, surprise) in a sort of post-modern Hawaiian shirt.