Doing Things Wrong

Steely Dan, but Paul Shaffer won't shut up!

This is the worst interview I have ever seen. Paul Shaffer never shuts up. Poor Donald Fagen can hardly get a word in edgewise. I am surprised Fagen didn't walk out. If he gives a two-word answer, Shaffer will interrupt it. Forget about finishing a sentence, or even starting one! Shaffer continually talks over his guest, and plays over him too. When Fagen finally tells him how much fun it wasn't (19:53), Shaffer doesn't even notice, just keeps blathering on. Incredible - that's narcissism.

Here's one of my favorites, that you've probably never heard unless you are a big fan.
A rollicking 2 minutes and 43 seconds.
At least here Shaffer stays in the background. I hope he was unplugged, Becker and Fagen don't need any help! Letterman gets it: "Leave the big stars alone, Paul, you're making them sick." (Josie)

Around the time of this video, I saw them live, and they were terrific, even without Paul Shaffer.

Artie Fufkin, Polymer Records

Update:

I tried to watch this "interview" a second time, but I couldn't. It's just painful.

Charlie Parker

It took me about half an hour * to reverse-engineer the functionality of thousands of lines of plugin code to make the little up-arrow bug you see at the bottom-right of every page. That bug is very useful because it shoots you straight back up to the navigation menu, no matter how far down a page you might be. Here is the entire code for it:

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