Folksinger and self-described "sophisticated hillbilly" (and born-again Christian) Michelle Shocked went onstage at Yoshi's in San Francisco Sunday night for what audience members assumed would be a traditional folk concert. Into her second set, she began an anti-gay rant that included her saying, "When they stop Prop 8 and force priests at gunpoint to marry gays, it will be the downfall of civilization, and Jesus will come back." She also reportedly told fans, "You can go on Twitter and say ‘Michelle Shocked says God hates fags.'" Most of the audience walked out, and the staffers at Yoshi's kicked her offstage and banned her for life.
posted by flyingsquirrel on Mar 19, 2013 - 333 comments

Singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked "used to be a poet." Who would "write, late into the night, by candlelight." But now, according to a statement [PDF] solicited by the US Copyright office about the current state of royalty payments for songwriters "I work in a candle factory. I scrape flesh from skins of carcasses and process rendered fat into lumpy bars with wicks." [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue on Dec 17, 2012 - 39 comments

Yams, yams, yams. Immortalized by Michelle Shocked's song about the Yamboree Queen. (Which I always thought was a joke, stupid me.) It turns out that most yams are really Sweet Potatoes although yam-sweetpotatoes are also different from regular sweet pototes. The confusion is much more widespread than my own Wabash Valley inflicted confusion between mangos and green bell peppers. Yam sweet-potatoes are a good source of fiber, beta carotene and vitamin C if prepared fresh. True Mexican wild yam was used as a raw material for birth control pills and is still claimed to useful for medicinal purposes.
posted by KirkJobSluder on Feb 18, 2003 - 16 comments