Amanda Palmer is a twit. I met her after her Birmingham show and she seemed nice. She married a writer I’m quite fond of and otherwise has behaved as well as you’d expect despite some crappy political assumptions. Then she wrote this “poem.” The scare quotes are there because I want you, gentle reader, to understand that I don’t consider liberal use of the Enter button to constitute poetry.

At least one writer has called it the worst poem of all time. Well…

This is secondary. I mean secondary to Palmer as an intro to what I was actually thinking but first I want to point out, and that is neither first nor secondary as that honor has already been doled out so we’ll go with tertiary. Tertiarilly I want to point to a line from her Boston bomber elegy:

“you don’t know how to dance but you give it a shot anyway.”

That is dancing, right? That’s the fun of it.

Anyway, I got up this morning with a song in my head. The video as well. It was Palmer’s Leeds United and more than the song I had the image of a harmless thin little blond woman dressed like you’d imagine Alice from Alice in Wonderland was dressed and just thrashing to music. Full on headbanging.

I live in the future now with the fullness of all human knowledge in a little black rectangular thingy that I keep in my pocket. Everything is available right away, or at least within a day or so if you’re a Prime member. So I pulled up the Leeds United video on YouTube and there was the waif, head banging away, but the music was tinny.

That’s not how I remembered it.

I remembered a fun song; one you could dance to even if you didn’t have the requisite training. This was flat. It made me want to spring Phil Spector from jail until I looked him up in my little black rectangular thingy and saw he was dead.

That guy killed a woman by shooting her in the face. Right in the mouth. He got out after trial one. Hung Jury. He was convicted in a second trial, but in the meantime he spoke at the funeral of Ike Turner. He actually picked on Tina. His Eulogy was a hit job. Unbelievable.

Still… he was really good at making music not so Amanda Palmerly tinny. Wall of sound and all that.

Justice has a scale.