Revolt in 2100 and revolting 2007 politicians
I am currently listening to "Revolt in 2100" by Robert Heinlein on my Ipod as I drive around and go for morning walks. I came across a passage today that reminded me of Dick Cheney and his wimpy-ass reasons for not going to Vietnam followed by his gleeful support of war as a tool of foreign policy.
"...the man who buys the meat is brother to the butcher. It was squeamishness, not morals...like the man who favors capital punishment but is himself too "good" to fit the noose or swing the axe. Like the person who regards war as inevitable and in some circumstances moral, but who avoids military service because he doesn't like the thought of killing.
Ethical infants, eithical morons - the left hand must know what the right hand doeth and the heart is responsible for both." (Page 52 of the Signet paperback version of this book)
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Monday, February 12, 2007
Howdy
Over the weekend I went to the Comet Grill on Friday and saw Lenny. I saw someone there I didn't expect to see and it was not nearly as awkward as I thought it might be. I reckon that's a good thing? No? Yes? Maybe?
Saturday was the Budweiser Clash at Daytona. It was a decent restrictor plate race with a great pass by Tony Stewart near the end. Typically of restrictor plate races when the first of the fastest three or four cars gets into the lead near the end that car usually wins, Tony Stewart won easily after he air bumped Busch out of the way. It was a heck of a lot better than the wreck fest that was the ARCA race earlier in the day.
Sunday was an exeptionally lazy day until the evening when I did dishes, made a nice dinner and watched "Flags of our Fathers" with a couple of buddies. It's an impressive unconventional war movie that plays out a bit like "Unforgiven." I don't know if I would call it an antiwar movie but it is a movie that sure as hell doesn't let you forget that sending men into a war, if it does not kill or mutilate them physically, will at the very least alter them mentally for the rest of their lives.
Saturday I finished up "You suck" by Christopher Moore. It is a sequel to the book "Bloodsucking Fiends." Like most of his books, it really pushes the envelope between farce and story. What keeps me going in his books when the plot goes a little into left field are his characters. He creates a teenage character named Abby in this book and some of the later chapters are excerpts from her personal diary and those chapters feature some of the funniest writing in the book. I still need to read "Lamb." I am going to put it on hold today. Funniest line from the book: "Well, you look like 300 pounds of cat vomit poured into a cheap suit." That's not an exact quote but close enough.
Over the weekend I went to the Comet Grill on Friday and saw Lenny. I saw someone there I didn't expect to see and it was not nearly as awkward as I thought it might be. I reckon that's a good thing? No? Yes? Maybe?
Saturday was the Budweiser Clash at Daytona. It was a decent restrictor plate race with a great pass by Tony Stewart near the end. Typically of restrictor plate races when the first of the fastest three or four cars gets into the lead near the end that car usually wins, Tony Stewart won easily after he air bumped Busch out of the way. It was a heck of a lot better than the wreck fest that was the ARCA race earlier in the day.
Sunday was an exeptionally lazy day until the evening when I did dishes, made a nice dinner and watched "Flags of our Fathers" with a couple of buddies. It's an impressive unconventional war movie that plays out a bit like "Unforgiven." I don't know if I would call it an antiwar movie but it is a movie that sure as hell doesn't let you forget that sending men into a war, if it does not kill or mutilate them physically, will at the very least alter them mentally for the rest of their lives.
Saturday I finished up "You suck" by Christopher Moore. It is a sequel to the book "Bloodsucking Fiends." Like most of his books, it really pushes the envelope between farce and story. What keeps me going in his books when the plot goes a little into left field are his characters. He creates a teenage character named Abby in this book and some of the later chapters are excerpts from her personal diary and those chapters feature some of the funniest writing in the book. I still need to read "Lamb." I am going to put it on hold today. Funniest line from the book: "Well, you look like 300 pounds of cat vomit poured into a cheap suit." That's not an exact quote but close enough.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks
The The One Big Loud Guy chuckles quietly to himself whenever I mention Was (Not Was) because I am the only person he knows that likes the band. I'm not sure where I first heard of the album called "Born to laugh at tornados" but I did subscribe to Rolling Stone in high school and it may have been this review that introduced me to the album. Being a teen in the woods of northern Michigan maybe it was the smart, weird and from Detroit that caught my eye.
I bought the album on cassette. I remember it was white with black lettering and, since this was the time before automatic reverse play the lettering was eventually rubbed away from the top of the cassette from all the times I flipped it over. I remember spending a lot of time at school with this album blaring in my headphones.
My other favorite album around this time in my life was Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones and if you listen to both albums they have some similarities. Both are experimental lyrically and musically and they are nice and weird. It's pretty amazing to me that I was able to find them back before there was the wide ranging music press that came later and the internets. I guess that comes from reading Rolling Stone's reviews closely back when it was the only decent music magazine I could find. Back in the early 80's it was Rolling Stone magazine and a local college station, WNMC, that were the two windows I had onto the world of good music. Sure, the local rock station played good stuff now and then but it couldn't touch WNMC.
(Speaking of WNMC, I would like to know whatever became of a dj called Dennis Sophie (sp?) that had a show on Wednesday nights called the Mondo Radio Show. He introduced me to Tom Waits one night and he deserves a hug just for that. The week before Swordfishtrombones came out he played three solid hours of Tom Waits. I've been hooked ever since. I remember he announced he was going to do this special show and I recorded ninety minutes of it because he had played some Waits before and I was more than a little intrigued. I mentioned his show about three years ago on this blog and no one has stepped up. I was every college DJ's cream dream, a teenage kid that listened to your show every week and recorded it on occasion.)
Today I provide in MP3 format one of my favorite songs from the 1983 Was (Not Was) album, Born to Laugh at Tornados. The song is called (Return to the Valley of) Out Come the Freaks. It's a good example of what the band could produce. The sound is crisp and clean, it has a nice groove and smoothness that sounds like a traditional R&B song with vocals by Harry Bowens that would be fitting in a nice slow love song. The lyrics are about people getting their freak on. The initial incongruousness of the lyrics and sound just defines Was (Not Was). I guess this is what happens when you combine two stoned songwriters/producers and a couple of solid R&B singers from Detroit.
Was (Not Was) (Return to the Valley of) Out Come the Freaks
The The One Big Loud Guy chuckles quietly to himself whenever I mention Was (Not Was) because I am the only person he knows that likes the band. I'm not sure where I first heard of the album called "Born to laugh at tornados" but I did subscribe to Rolling Stone in high school and it may have been this review that introduced me to the album. Being a teen in the woods of northern Michigan maybe it was the smart, weird and from Detroit that caught my eye.
I bought the album on cassette. I remember it was white with black lettering and, since this was the time before automatic reverse play the lettering was eventually rubbed away from the top of the cassette from all the times I flipped it over. I remember spending a lot of time at school with this album blaring in my headphones.
My other favorite album around this time in my life was Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones and if you listen to both albums they have some similarities. Both are experimental lyrically and musically and they are nice and weird. It's pretty amazing to me that I was able to find them back before there was the wide ranging music press that came later and the internets. I guess that comes from reading Rolling Stone's reviews closely back when it was the only decent music magazine I could find. Back in the early 80's it was Rolling Stone magazine and a local college station, WNMC, that were the two windows I had onto the world of good music. Sure, the local rock station played good stuff now and then but it couldn't touch WNMC.
(Speaking of WNMC, I would like to know whatever became of a dj called Dennis Sophie (sp?) that had a show on Wednesday nights called the Mondo Radio Show. He introduced me to Tom Waits one night and he deserves a hug just for that. The week before Swordfishtrombones came out he played three solid hours of Tom Waits. I've been hooked ever since. I remember he announced he was going to do this special show and I recorded ninety minutes of it because he had played some Waits before and I was more than a little intrigued. I mentioned his show about three years ago on this blog and no one has stepped up. I was every college DJ's cream dream, a teenage kid that listened to your show every week and recorded it on occasion.)
Today I provide in MP3 format one of my favorite songs from the 1983 Was (Not Was) album, Born to Laugh at Tornados. The song is called (Return to the Valley of) Out Come the Freaks. It's a good example of what the band could produce. The sound is crisp and clean, it has a nice groove and smoothness that sounds like a traditional R&B song with vocals by Harry Bowens that would be fitting in a nice slow love song. The lyrics are about people getting their freak on. The initial incongruousness of the lyrics and sound just defines Was (Not Was). I guess this is what happens when you combine two stoned songwriters/producers and a couple of solid R&B singers from Detroit.
Was (Not Was) (Return to the Valley of) Out Come the Freaks
An essay on criticism
The last page of the New York Times Book Review always features an essay on some, uh, book related topic. It allows writers to let their muse free as they muse upon some topic. Sometimes it reads more like a blog entry than a literary essay. In the February 4th edition the editor, Sam Tananhaus, reflects on the futility of reviewing a truly great writer.
The last page of the New York Times Book Review always features an essay on some, uh, book related topic. It allows writers to let their muse free as they muse upon some topic. Sometimes it reads more like a blog entry than a literary essay. In the February 4th edition the editor, Sam Tananhaus, reflects on the futility of reviewing a truly great writer.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
MP3 Blog
One of my favorite singer/songwriters is Mojo Nixon. Oh sure, you're saying, "Ed, Mojo Nixon? Singer/songwriter?" Yes, he sings and he writes songs. He's not in a band and when he tours it's all about him. That is the definition of singer/songwriter to me. Most people think Mojo is the guy who wrote the immortal song "Elvis is Everywhere." They are correct but there's more to Mojo than just that craziness. He has written quite a few songs that are just meant to entertain and/or gross you out but he does have a serious side and I like when he shows that side of himself. The following song is from an album he did with Jello Biafra called "Prairie Home Invasion." This song is called "Hamlet Chicken Plant Disaster" and it's about this terrible event.
Hamlet Chicken Plant Disaster by Mojo Nixon
One of my favorite singer/songwriters is Mojo Nixon. Oh sure, you're saying, "Ed, Mojo Nixon? Singer/songwriter?" Yes, he sings and he writes songs. He's not in a band and when he tours it's all about him. That is the definition of singer/songwriter to me. Most people think Mojo is the guy who wrote the immortal song "Elvis is Everywhere." They are correct but there's more to Mojo than just that craziness. He has written quite a few songs that are just meant to entertain and/or gross you out but he does have a serious side and I like when he shows that side of himself. The following song is from an album he did with Jello Biafra called "Prairie Home Invasion." This song is called "Hamlet Chicken Plant Disaster" and it's about this terrible event.
Hamlet Chicken Plant Disaster by Mojo Nixon
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Deja Vu
"Given the often horrific nature of the old regime, and the common interest that the people, including the peasants, might have had with the more or less benign new regime, or at least with the promise of modernization, why did they resist so fiercely? Bell argues that the insurgency was fuelled by the extraordinarily tenacious hold of religious culture. It seems to have been not so much religious faith as the whole, enclosing framework of Catholicism, which, whatever its faults, gave order and meaning to the great mass of Spaniards, and which they were not about to surrender. “O happy gothic, barbarian and fanatical Spaniards!” one Spaniard exclaimed. “Happy with our monks and with our Inquisition, which, according to the ideas of the French Enlightenment, has kept us a century behind other nations. Oh, if we could only go back two centuries more!” It was as if, to take the terrible dialectic one step further, the dream of total peace that had produced the fact of total war threw the bleeding and bewildered masses back on the only fixed point left: an absolutist religiosity, made more fanatic by persecution. During the siege of Saragossa, which began in 1808, a miraculous apparition of a palm tree with a crown raised the morale of the entire population. At a time of complete disruption, the Church represented cultural continuity."
Has anyone gone ahead and made of list of situations similar to Iraq? Vietname is the easy one and now you've heard about this situation in Spain. There must be dozens of similar wars that failed. God, George Bush is a piece of garbage.
"Given the often horrific nature of the old regime, and the common interest that the people, including the peasants, might have had with the more or less benign new regime, or at least with the promise of modernization, why did they resist so fiercely? Bell argues that the insurgency was fuelled by the extraordinarily tenacious hold of religious culture. It seems to have been not so much religious faith as the whole, enclosing framework of Catholicism, which, whatever its faults, gave order and meaning to the great mass of Spaniards, and which they were not about to surrender. “O happy gothic, barbarian and fanatical Spaniards!” one Spaniard exclaimed. “Happy with our monks and with our Inquisition, which, according to the ideas of the French Enlightenment, has kept us a century behind other nations. Oh, if we could only go back two centuries more!” It was as if, to take the terrible dialectic one step further, the dream of total peace that had produced the fact of total war threw the bleeding and bewildered masses back on the only fixed point left: an absolutist religiosity, made more fanatic by persecution. During the siege of Saragossa, which began in 1808, a miraculous apparition of a palm tree with a crown raised the morale of the entire population. At a time of complete disruption, the Church represented cultural continuity."
Has anyone gone ahead and made of list of situations similar to Iraq? Vietname is the easy one and now you've heard about this situation in Spain. There must be dozens of similar wars that failed. God, George Bush is a piece of garbage.
Former NASCAR driver living in poverty
"Ard hasn’t raced since suffering severe head trauma in a 1984 accident at North Carolina Speedway. He had to learn how to walk and talk and feed himself, and did much of his therapy on an old sawdust pile near the woods behind his house.
“That’s where I learned how to walk again, I’d run up and down that sawdust pile because if I fell, it didn’t hurt,” he said. “I about wore that sawdust pile out.”
Before the accident, Ard seemingly had the perfect life. A job as a Ford mechanic and a four-year Air Force stint gave him the financial security to quit the 9-to-5 grind and focus strictly on racing.
In his early 40s, he had enough money put away for all four children to attend college and had the talent for a successful NASCAR career.
It ended the moment he hit the wall at Rockingham."
"Ard hasn’t raced since suffering severe head trauma in a 1984 accident at North Carolina Speedway. He had to learn how to walk and talk and feed himself, and did much of his therapy on an old sawdust pile near the woods behind his house.
“That’s where I learned how to walk again, I’d run up and down that sawdust pile because if I fell, it didn’t hurt,” he said. “I about wore that sawdust pile out.”
Before the accident, Ard seemingly had the perfect life. A job as a Ford mechanic and a four-year Air Force stint gave him the financial security to quit the 9-to-5 grind and focus strictly on racing.
In his early 40s, he had enough money put away for all four children to attend college and had the talent for a successful NASCAR career.
It ended the moment he hit the wall at Rockingham."
Sunday, February 04, 2007
MP3 Blog
One of the best live shows I've ever seen was at the Double Door Inn about five or six years ago. The band was the Backsliders from Raleigh, NC. They were supposed to have an opening band and that band didn't show up so the Backsliders started early and played all night and, according to what the lead singer said late in the show, played about every song they knew and a few they didn't know. What I liked about the Backsliders was how they could play different styles of music. They could play ballads, honky tonk and some smoking rock and roll. They seemed to really have a talent for balancing their shows well. They knew when to slow it down and they knew when to kick your ass. The highlight of the show that night was a song called "Hey Sheriff." I imagine that song was the highlight of many of their shows. Real good bands seem to have a show stopper or two in their repertoire and "Hey Sheriff" was the Backsliders crowd killer. Each time I saw them this song was played late in their set because no other song they had could equal the intensity of this tune. Each time I hear it the image in my head is of lead singer, Chip Robinson prowling the stage working himself, the band and the audience gradually into a frenzy. I love songs that have a slow burn that builds to a logical explosion and resolution and "Hey Sheriff" does that as well as any song you'll ever hear.
This version of "Hey Sheriff" below is off the live EP called "From Raleigh, NC" and it came out in 1999.
Back sliders Hey Sheriff
One of the best live shows I've ever seen was at the Double Door Inn about five or six years ago. The band was the Backsliders from Raleigh, NC. They were supposed to have an opening band and that band didn't show up so the Backsliders started early and played all night and, according to what the lead singer said late in the show, played about every song they knew and a few they didn't know. What I liked about the Backsliders was how they could play different styles of music. They could play ballads, honky tonk and some smoking rock and roll. They seemed to really have a talent for balancing their shows well. They knew when to slow it down and they knew when to kick your ass. The highlight of the show that night was a song called "Hey Sheriff." I imagine that song was the highlight of many of their shows. Real good bands seem to have a show stopper or two in their repertoire and "Hey Sheriff" was the Backsliders crowd killer. Each time I saw them this song was played late in their set because no other song they had could equal the intensity of this tune. Each time I hear it the image in my head is of lead singer, Chip Robinson prowling the stage working himself, the band and the audience gradually into a frenzy. I love songs that have a slow burn that builds to a logical explosion and resolution and "Hey Sheriff" does that as well as any song you'll ever hear.
This version of "Hey Sheriff" below is off the live EP called "From Raleigh, NC" and it came out in 1999.
Back sliders Hey Sheriff
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Winter's fury
Since it was so dangerous out today the library has wisely chosen to close for the day. Since there was so much freezing rain all day conditions weren't conducive to me going out for a stroll and getting a good picture of the snow but I do give you this panorama of my backyard.
Since it was so dangerous out today the library has wisely chosen to close for the day. Since there was so much freezing rain all day conditions weren't conducive to me going out for a stroll and getting a good picture of the snow but I do give you this panorama of my backyard.
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