Major league soccer kicks boy scouts

Last month, after a two-year, super-secret study by a group of unnamed people, the Boy Scouts of America announced that their next hike would take them all the way back to the 1950s. The Scouts vowed to deny their own Law mandating values like courtesy and kindness by continuing to ban gays at every level of scouting, from the youngest Tenderfoot through the oldest administrator.

That portion of America not stuck in the 1950s reacted with outrage. Editorial writers tsk-tsked. Eagle Scouts returned their badges.

Major League Soccer acted.

Melissa Etheridge, Elle Varner

Melissa Etheridge, 4th Street Feeling

Fearless Love revisited Melissa’s song-kill mode when the feisty return-to-rock was released two years ago, but her latest album really takes the beloved icon back to her roots. All the way back, in fact, to Kansas City (the disc’s title is a nod to where she grew up). She’s road-tripping through her Missouri hometown on the opening cut, a roots song with a harmonica solo and the kind of rawness that elicits late-’80s Etheridge. She longs for the simple life on the title track, and after this past year—her nasty custody battle went public—who can blame her? That angst and frustration finds an outlet: “Shout Now,” referencing betrayal and a “bad dream” over an aggressive mix—a liberating shake-off. “The Shadow of a Black Crow” has her giving into temptation as a lost child; without going all Skin on us (remember how depressed she was then?), this is Etheridge at her darkest. The piano is a nice touch to “A Disaster,” and on the romantic “I Can Wait,” she’s the voice of reason. Whereas the arena-rock sounds of U2 and Kings of Leon spurred Fearless Love, Etheridge appropriately plays off the music of her early days: the Eagles, Bruce and Bob Seger. She’s as stripped-down as she was 25 years ago on her self-titled debut, when songs like “Bring Me Some Water” made her a household name. The bluesy “Rock and Roll Me” has her teasing the lesbians with an extended euphemism of horizontal fun: “I hope you understand what I mean,” she winks, all sexy sounding. Now where’s that water?

Grade: B+

Gaga carries a big Machete

Inspiring as her acting was in the long-form “Telephone” video (you know you watched it over and over, don’t pretend) and as ubiquitous as she’s been these past couple of years, you’d be forgiven for thinking Lady Gaga had already appeared on the big screen in somebody’s movie somewhere. But no, it has taken Planet Terror director Robert Rodriguez to turn Mother Monster into her generation’s Streep. The film? Machete Kills, of course. It’s the sequel to Machete, the Danny Trejo-starring festival of violence and awesomeness made even more memorable by a weird hair-taped-to-naked-breasts Lindsay Lohan cameo and even more so by lines like “Machete don’t text.” This time around, Gaga will play “La Chameleon,” a femme fatale who, at least in the teaser poster, is wearing at least some portion of a dead wolf (sorry, PETA, we just report the news, we don’t make it). No release date set yet but you’ll know it when it’s coming: the Gaga train makes a lot of pre-arrival noise.

In South Africa, workers were on strike at a Marikana platinum mine demanding better wages. Police shot their guns into the crowd. Dozens were injured and 34 people are dead. That’s in addition to the 10 people previously killed at the mine.

It’s like a folk tale created to tell around the campfires at the Republican National Convention: unions (the enemy), capitalism (King), race (Lonmin is a British company), money (platinum = major bling), guns (sacred), and homosexuality (wait, what?) all rolled into one.