Favorite Tie

One thing I never considered when I started working at an office job was the wear and tear on my ties. This tie in particular is my favorite. I've had it for well over a decade and its been to weddings, family functions, job interviews, and, I think, at least one funeral.

Now after two years at my current job I'm going to have to retire it. I never thought that ties could wear out before.

RIP Buddy Miles

Driving home from work today listening to NPR I heard that Buddy Miles died. Buddy Miles was one of the great drummers of the late sixties. He made his name as the drummer for the Electric Flag and for Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies. Later he formed the Buddy Miles Express and in the 80's he sang "I heard it through the grape vine" as a California Raisin. But really, all that aside, celebrate the man's life by cueing up Machine Gun from the Band of Gypsies album. Recorded during a series of new years shows at the Filmore East in 1969/1970 Machine Gun is still a funky wild angry ride. Hendrix dedicated it at live appearances to "...all the soldiers fighting in Chicago and Milwaukee and New York.. and, oh yes, all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam." Check out Miles' singing somewhere around the ten minute mark as well as his drumming throughout the whole piece with its staccato 'machine gun' bursts.

Popeye

When I was 3 years old my favorite cartoons were the old black and white Popeye ones. They showed them every morning on WPIX ch. 11. There is something about the Popeye cartoons made by the Fleischer bros. studio in the 1930s, an energy, a rough and tumble , held together with baling wire kind of energy that is very appealing. As I grew up I moved on to Loony Toons and Bugs Bunny. As time went on the old black and white cartoons stopped being shown and were replaced by the later color ones (not as good imho, less energy, less funny too generally.) But the original ones still have a special hold on me that others do not.

Here is a nice example, I'm In The Army Now, a sort of clip show cartoon. Not only does it show off some really weird wonderful early Popeye moments but Gus Wickie (Bluto) and Jack Mercer (Popeye) recorded/improvised new dialog for clips where they had not originally done the voices. Great stuff.

Snow

White stuff falling from the sky seems to be a favorite theme of the northeast in winter. Today was no exception with a late February snow storm mucking up most of the day.

Driving in snow takes a lot of care. If you are not used to it you are apt to go too fast, to take turns too sharply and to not know how to pull out when you skid. The latest driver's ed instructions on this are to steer in the direction you want to go. Years ago it was to steer in the direction of the skid. Front wheel drive now being standard on almost all cars may have something to do with the change.

What amazed me, driving home from work this afternoon, was the number of trucks barreling down the New York State Thruway at near the posted speed limit. Granted, this was slow for them since they usually go at least ten to fifteen above but its still a bit much for me. They have an advantage in having much more mass so they tend to stay in motion in the direction they are going much better. Still given the number of overturned trailers I see every year (they seem to like the toll plaza I usually use in particular. Either side of them too; once on an overpass just after the tolls that has a particularly tight curve that should not be taken fast by anything much less a tractor trailer.)

The Japanese word for snow is 雪, Pronounced 'yuki.' 雪 が 降って います (Yuki ga futte imasu) is how you would say "It is snowing" in Japanese.

credit

Talking with a representative of a credit card company on the phone tonight. The end result is that I feel depressed, used and abused. I don't know if it was the hard sell on the features that I didn't want to pay extra for every month or the pushy manner of the representative or just my dislike of talking with telemarketer types in general. Here is a rule of thumb that I wish I'd followed earlier in my life... don't get into debt with credit cards. Thankfully there is a way out of this, with some hard work, belt tightening and debt consolidation. Doesn't mean I'm feeling happy about it right now though.

Hillary, Barack and John

Hillary Clinton has really run a poor campaign during this primary season. I'm really not sure what she and her staff have been thinking. Lately her campaign seems to have two personalities. One personality seems cool, collected... presidential. This personality was in play during the debate the other night and seemed very cordial and likable. Then the second personality of her campaign jumped in with the 'xerox™' line and got booed. This weekend the second personality has been on the attack and its not been a pretty sight to see. The more she does this the more ground she cedes to Obama.

Maybe there is nothing else for her but to go negative but the real problem for her is that she's never really sold a lot of people on why, beyond her name recognition, she should be president. The experience that she's been delivering for the past couple months does not really hold up. Obama has pretty much the same amount of experience if you really look at it and if she does get the nomination John McCain certainly has several times more experience than both of them. Experience is a non starter for the Democrats for the fall campaign. 'Change' would seem a much better message to sell against McCain and a failed Republican party.

I hear a lot of her supporters echoing the charge that Obama is all rhetoric and no substance. This seems to me to be a weak argument. Presidential campaigns are often all about rhetoric. Clinton herself uses quite a bit of it. 'Ready on day one' is the one that comes to mind. Can she actually back this up? How can you prove that you'll be ready on day one. As far as I can tell the only presidential candidates that are ever ready on day one are the ones that already have the job, that are already sitting presidents running for their second terms.

I don't see how the latest negative line is going to help her on March 4. The youtube video of her latest attack on Obama where she compares him to the republicans is just out of line (Andrew Sullivan has it up so I won't bother to repost it here.) We are in a historic moment; the next president will most probably not be either male or white. Someone is going to lose this primary fight and Clinton is not looking like a winner right now. If she continues to attack Obama in this way I think she's running the risk of damaging herself for another run for the job. And make no mistake, after this year we are going to be seeing a lot more candidates for high office who aren't white males. I'm 100 percent sure there will be a woman president in my lifetime but if Clinton keeps up the way she is going I doubt it will be her.

Frampton comes alive hair not so much

There are some people who are just identified with being hirsute. In a world where your image defines who you are losing a part of that image makes you someone else. Case in point, Peter Frampton,

Then:




Now:



I want to say 'who the hell is that old bald guy?' He looks like Murray from the old Mary Tyler Moore show. Still can play though.

ok, one more, live Do you feel like we do from 1980:

Obama's Left handed!

Most US presidents have been right handed. Only seven have been southpaws and all but one of them served in the 20th century. In fact the last 20 years of the 20th century had nothing but left handed presidents.

Where am I going with this? Check out this video of the debate the other night:



There is the man himself, pen gripped firmly in his south paw, taking notes during the date.

Want more?

Ok how about this: http://www.leftiesforobama.com/

and this: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=4326568&page=1

and finally this: http://www.helium.com/tm/763455/noticed-opponent-barack-obama

Disclaimer: I am left handed myself

Replacing Headlights

I wasn't sure if this was post was going to be humorous or just informative and it seems to be down right instructional and useful. I don't know how that happened.

There is a rule that most automakers follow during the design phase of any automobile; any non major part that will need to be changed multiple times during the life of the car should be hard to remove and replace. Take the headlights on the 1991 Jeep Cherokee for example.

The headlight itself is fairly cheap ($9.99 at your local parts store.) Now most normal people would think, ok, a few easy to reach screws should do the job. Ah but not the good people who make cars, no things are not done that way in Detroit (or anywhere cars are manufactured really.)

First the bezel surrounding the headlight must be removed (this is the silvery colored decorative trim enclosing the headlight and turn signals. To do this first remove two easy to find screws, one on the top right above the headlight and the other around the corner at the bottom left of the marker light (or side turn signal/reflector thingy.) You should notice that the bezel is now loose. Pull on it. Uh oh! its still attached somewhere. The repair manual does not include instructions on removing the bezel unfortunately.

After a ten minute search you should have figured out that it seems to be connected somewhere under the marker light. Certainly when you pull on the bezel it feels attached there. Unscrew the screws holding marker light in. Pulling the marker light out you will not see that the bezel is attached to the body with a hex head screw (and not the easy to remove flathead or phillips head variety.) So now you have to pull out your socket set. This will be in the back of the car and will have come open sometime in the past spilling out the sockets and making it damn near impossible to find the right one. After finding the right socket and removing the two screws the bezel will finally pull off with ease.

The headlight itself is held in by a bracket with four screws, two on the top, two on the bottom. Remove those and you can remove the headlight. Be forewarned that the headlight is covered in road salt and grime and your hands will now be covered with that as well. Gently wiggle the connecting plug that the headlight is plugged into. And the headlight will now be removed.

The new headlight can now be easily connected to the plug and everything else just goes in reverse, bracket, four screws, hex head screws (lose one though and give up trying to find it after a couple minutes, one will work well enough), screw the marker light back on, replace the two original screws and you are done.

For some reason I've done this twice in the last couple years to the same headlight. Go figure.

(The tail lights are even harder to do and if you you have a cracked lens forget about it, you will need to spend seventy bucks on a whole new assembly for them.)

Sleep

The past few days I've been going to bed quite late and, of course, getting up early. The result is that I am fuzzy all day long at work and come home and get nothing done that I need to have done because I'm too tired. Last week I was on vacation and I had the luxury of sleeping in every day. I was well rested and felt great. This week I'm back to work and feel like crap.

Studies have been done on sleep deprivation and its effects on the human body. An Australian study I remember reading about years ago tested the effects of sleep deprivation vs alcohol consumption. The study showed that lack of sleep caused greater impairment of cognitive ability and reflexes than alcohol consumption.

So to get to the point I'm going to go to sleep now. Good Night.

My favorite Bugs Bunny Cartoon

Slick Hare (1947)



I'll write more about my love of cartoons some other time. This one played on the NY station WNEW (Channel 5) all the time when I was a kid.

Traffic Court

This is how Traffic court works.
First you need a ticket.
The nice police officer will give you one; you don't even have to ask!
Now be sure to read all the fine fine print on your ticket. Someone went through a lot of trouble to write all that and it would be insulting to them to not read it.
Done? Good.
Now you will have to wait two months. I know the waiting is hard but remember at the end of the waiting is Traffic Court.

...INSERT TWO MONTHS OF WAITING HERE...

Today's the Day, you are going to Traffic Court!

First make sure you show up at the right time. The ticket says five o'clock so you should get there a little early so that you are not late.

Once you've arrived you will discover that you will have lots of company, a couple hundred other people wanted to go to traffic court today too! You just know you will all become buddies and close pals!

The police officer at the door says "Empty your pockets of all metal" and "I have to x-ray your book." Oh what fun!

Take the elevator.. its slower, you can't enjoy things if you rush.

Now you can talk to the nice court officer. She wants to know who you are. Tell her and she will announce to the judge that you've arrived!

Now you must sit in court. The judge says "I don't want to repeat myself so everyone listen. You have the right to have a lawyer present. I cannot appoint one for a traffic ticket..." and so on.

The judge wants everyone to be happy so he starts taking traffic cases.

Old Man is first. He can't hear too well. The judge has to repeat what he said. Finally the judge suggests that the old man talk to the corporate council and work out a plea bargain, in fact he suggests that to everyone and starts calling names and people practically run out to the hallway. You do too. Thats where the fun is.

Ok, now you get to wait. The benches are too crowded so you'll have to stand. Now take your book out and start reading. Read. Read. Read. Every so often the nice court officer lady will come out and call names. Isn't this exciting.

After two and a half hours it will be your turn to see the corporate council.

Whats that? Adjourned until the end of March so you can get more paperwork to show him? Yay You WIN!!! You get to play Traffic Court again next month!

The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.

I've been reading a book called "Round Up The Usual Supsects: The Making of Casablanca :Bogart, Bergman, and World War II" by Aljean Harmetz Casablanca is one of my favorite films going back to when I was a teenager and would spend the evening watching old movies in the dark in my bedroom. Casablanca was almost always shown on Channel 11, one of the nyc channels of my youth, for some reason. Anyway after reading the book I was really in the mood to watch the movie again. However since my beat up old video tape was in deep storage (which would require half a day of unpacking my spare room to find) I decided it was time to upgrade to dvd. Luckily a beautiful two disk set has come out with the most gorgeous restored print I've ever seen.

Hannes Coetzee on a cloudy sunday

You know what, the weather has me down. But I always find that Hannes Coetzee playing tea spoon guitar always cheers me up.



This clip is from the documentary Karoo Kitaar Blues. More info on the film is here.

Jo-Ann Kelly

I went to the local used record store today. After dithering a bit over some lps I'd passed on last time I was in the store I decided to check out what they had in the blues bins. Thats when I found this record. At first it didn't look very promising. I'd never heard of her and the picture on the front looked like about a million others gracing the covers of singer-songwriter albums from the seventies. But it was in the blues section so I flipped it over and read the liner notes. A word of advice here, be careful when reading the liner notes of albums from the sixties from major labels they are headache inducing. These, written by Stephen Calt*, seemed obsessed with explaining that although the artist wasn't black she was a genuine blues singer. He even goes as far to quote Big Bill Broonzy who'd been dead about ten years when this album was recorded:

"There is even a few white men who can play the blues....Sometimes we blues singers would call them Negoes too, bu they wouldn't ind at all...they could play as well as a Negro, but they couldn't sing the blues. They could way the blues and words and some of the blus they could sing was the kind that we call big-city blues and dressed-up blues, but not the real Mississippi blues."

Got that? Good. Well check out this from the final paragraph:

"Or lay on Bronnzy's load of jive and call her a Negro. She wouldn't mind at all."

And, upon reading that, my head exploded. But the liner notes did say that she played guitar and was influenced by Memphis Minnie. So I figured it would be worth a listen so I bought it.

I have to say, weird slightly racist liner notes aside this is a great album. Kelly has a real blues voice. Calt compares her to Janis Joplin which for a female blues singer of the time was probably inevitable. Kelly though sings the country blues backing herself up on guitar, a different form than Joplin. All the cuts on this album were recorded live in various clubs in England where Kelly was performing. Her guitar playing here is propulsive, driving each song rhythmically so you can feel it in your bones.

Online references to her seem to be few but, aside from a wikipedia article, there is some good info available. Stefan Wirz's discography page on her is a thorough and includes a pdf of a 1978 article on her written by Stefan Grossman. In the Grossman article kelly is quoted talking about her career and the recording of several of her albums. She mentions being asked to join Canned Heat and how she regretted passing on that.

According to the wikipedia article on her, Kelly died from the after effects of a brain tumor in 1990. This is a great shame as she was the genuine deal, a talented performer immersed the music.

*Calt appears to be one of those people on hand for the rediscovery of the old country blues musicians in the early 1960s. He's written several books including controversial biographies of Charley Patton and Skip James.

Cold calling

Tonight I got a call from a survey company of some sort. I don't know more than that as I stopped listening as soon as I understood that I didn't know this person and didn't owe his company any money. And really, at nine o'clock at night what should he expect. I'm on the do not call list but apparently there's a loophole large enough to phone a survey through that doesn't protect me against this sort of thing. I was nice, I told him what time it was and hung up.

Here's a tip: If its nine o'clock at night I really don't want to talk to you unless you are a friend, my parents or a beautiful blond with thoughtful conversation on your mind. Anyone else is just going to make me grumpy.

Links Bloggin

Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union to become a Coen brother's movie

Obama on the rise

LOLCats on the rise

Two new songs by Blind Blake discovered (ok, you have to like old blues records to be excited by this one.)

Studio 60 on the sunset strip redux

The following has been on my mind for quite a while. I know that others have tackled the subject better than I have and in a much more timely manner but sometimes things just need to be said. Even if they are almost a year too late.

The other day I noticed that Studio 60 on the sunset strip, Aaron Sorkin's follow up to The West Wing is out on dvd. Trawling the dvd section at Border's I noticed a clerk come up followed by an older man she was assisting. She led him right to the box set of Studio 60. He commented that it was his wife's favorite show. In one fell moment it had been shown to me that not only was the greatest train wreck of the previous t.v. season not being given a well earned burial on the bottom of the local Hollywood landfill, it actually had fans. Inconceivable.

For a show that had all the right elements for a being a big hit Studio 60 is an intriguing failure. Sorkin took Bradley Whitford from West Wing and Mathew Perry from Friends, both seasoned professionals and put them at the center of his new drama. He filled out the rest of the cast with similar high quality performers. The dialog would be his own highly crafted fast paced brew that had served him well in the past. As a subject he chose the medium of television itself and the late night variety show in the Saturday Night Live tradition in particular. This was probably his first mis-step.

The world of television, even behind the scenes television really has no bearing on the average persons life. Its fun to watch the trials and tribulations of the collision between the creative types and their corporate overlords. But, really, it does not have any effect on the quality of the bread on my t.v. tray. This goes right to the heart of why this show just did not work. In The West Wing even if the issues weren't real there was the conceit that this was high stakes in the highest office of the land of the most powerful nation on earth. When Sorkin's Walk and Talk™ dialogs took place in this setting political discussions were natural and expected. On Studio 60 they were just weird. (John Goodman reprises his performance as the conservative with the heart of gold that he did on West Wing in a two episode shaggy dog story with the punchline that one of the characters has a brother who's a soldier in Iraq.)

Studio 60 also seemed to exist in a world that had never seen the Dick Van Dyke show since it was assumed that Mathew Perry's character could write an entire sketch comedy each week by himself. Granted Sorkin was able to write much of West Wing himself but comedy with its strange requirement that it be actually funny usually is created by a group that can throw things off of each other. This lack of knowledge about the workings of comedy writing shows whenever a sketch from the show is performed as these are usually embarrassing to watch and painfully unfunny. It can't be an accident that on one show a character's mid-western parents are shown to have never heard of Abbott and Costello's Who's On First routine. Its a lot easier to take stuff like this if you pretend that Sorkin was writing a SciFi drama about a world that had only just discovered comedy... ok not really but it would explain a lot.

The Johnny Cash Show

This afternoon I gave in and bought for $10 the single dvd version of the Best of the Johnny Cash show. I know now that I made a mistake in not buying the two dvd set because these are some incredible performances. Well live and learn.

Just now I watched Ray Charles covering both of Cash's signature songs. First a short reading of I walk the line to get things warmed up and then a soul version of Ring of Fire that sent chills up and down my spine.

Also on this set are Country luminaries such as Loretta Lynn, George Jones and Waylon Jennings. But its the non country performers who get a lot of the attention here, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, I already menitoned Ray Charles, Creedence Clearwater Revival Derek and the Dominos.
Missing from this single disk set is a great duet of Cash and Louis Armstong. It is on YouTube however:





The Johnny Cash show was on the ABC network from 1969 to 1971. The history of recorded music wasn't even 100 years old yet. Many of the biggest stars and greatest performers of the early years were still alive so it wasn't unusual to see them on tv. Louis was at the end of his career and would die in 1971. It is so wonderful to see that even at that time when he was no longer at his prime as a performer he could still give a great performance.

Now I have to think of a use for this dvd when I eventually get the two disk version.