For whatever reason I’ve just never gotten around to recording music on the computer. I finally got around to it this week. After waiting on some other software packages to materialize from a friend, I gave up and dug up an old copy of CoolEditPro that Chris gave me back in 2000 or so. A one-track evaluation version apparently. The simpler the better for me, I guess. Plus I have a loop machine to work things out on beforehand. So I threw together some random bits and bobs, and then put them on a myspace music page. Because well, why the hell not?
Cue The Strauss And Monkeys
Once in a generation an invention comes along that truly changes your life for the better. Every day new inventions come and go, promising that slice of pure joy that only Real Ingenuity brings, but so few ever deliver. Today I discovered a technological breakthrough that will forever reshape my very existence. It is simple and elegant, a fusion of two concepts so elementary I am amazed that it has not come to pass sooner. It removes one more layer of suffering from my life, and of how many technological advancements can we truly say that?
Ladies and gentlemen…I give you…Glad Trashbags with Odor Shield®
Seriously. It has forever altered the catbox-changing experience. What was once a despicable, nigh unbearable task has become a significanly less unpleasant experience. For all the useless crap that corporate America puts on the shelves, sometimes – not often but sometimes – they do something right.
Semi-Clever Title/Allusion: Expanded Description to Explain Semi-Clever Title/Allusion
I just wanted to write something like that as a title. It’s such a popular format for essays, theses, and conferences.
All I wanted to say today was that I have reached a new plateau in office spam. Because my spam box at the office is so enormous, I don’t trust my skimming skills so I skim the spam box, then move everything to another folder for a couple of weeks before I delete anything forever. I like to keep my deleted items around for a long time just in case I need something, but I don’t want a massive spam buildup in there. My spam-to-actual-mail ratio is about 3,720 to 1 or thereabouts [1].
So here’s how I know I’m truly on the spam frontier. I have about 1300 spam messages in the box right now, and I wanted to fish out some nice spam poetry because I haven’t posted any in awhile. Trouble is, the good stuff is hard to find and I’m not about to go dumpster diving in the spam box. You never know what might get lodged in your system down there. So I did the next best thing: I thought of the first word that popped into my head and did a search on it.
The word? “Wombat.”
Two results. Here was the better of the two:
see broomcorn try peaceful , bibb some albuquerque it’s collimate it’s insane ! homemake may scalar in captor a bodice but glenn it hindu ! elisha and intrusion in woodland a since or picojoule and prance be mutter a barre may echo it’s wombat it’s despite be biennium but diebold or pair the audience it federate on magistrate but irreplaceable but assent and fate try trestle the brock not desegregate it unital in dryden see shamrock it candidate , tuberculin see autopsy , courtesan some camera in scat a blat Naw email hier
So then I tried to stump the spam box. The next few words that popped into my head were “equestrian,” “circumvent”, “reindeer,” “semaphore,” “lozenge,” and “doorstop.” Only “doorstop” produced no results. My spam box is 1 for 7. But obviously if I choose to I can get super weird (factotum, blepharospasm, treacle, simulacrum) so the game starts to lose its appeal. So I asked Quentin, the graphic designer in my office, to say the first word that popped into his head. He said “corks.” This brought 1 result, which turned out to be taken from The Hobbit:
dwarves only started to sing:
Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
Thats what Bilbo Baggins hates-
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!
Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!
This fascinated us for several minutes before we gave up and went back to work.
1.) If you know why I used that particular ratio, you’re as big a nerd as I am. Congratulations.
Take My Cat…Please
Stinkfoot was wounded in his latest battle some weeks ago, and I had to get him fixed up at the vet ($80) and keep him on some antibiotics while his wounds heal. He has two shaved spots, one between his ears and another above his left eye. Naturally I’ve been keeping him indoors while his wounds heal. He hates this. His constant attempts at escape are not nearly so annoying as his whining by the door. And when I’m sleeping he sits outside my door and paws at it and complains. I yell at him to go away and he comes back in two hour intervals. I keep a squirt gun by my bed so that I can shoot at him under the door.
Fed up at this morning’s 4AM wakup call, I put him in the utility room out back. This worked well. Perhaps as a protest, or perhaps because he’s retarded and sometimes forgets to chew, he threw up on the kitchen table while I was in the shower.
After cleaning that up and eating my breakfast, I had to contend with Billie’s constant puddle-making as she attempts to grab fistloads of water from her bowl, pulling it off its mat, creating puddles. Three times we went through the process of me repositioning the bowl and her moving it.
CATS.
Why can’t I have normal pets? Is that so much to ask? I have three animals in my house and I only asked for one of them. They’re like roommates who don’t pay rent and just make messes. If anyone wants an afffectionate, retarded orange feline, let me know.
My Weekend
It started off poorly. Saturday morning the weather was terrible, and I dropped off Zoe at DeLaine’s house, unaware that she already had a total of three dogs in her house, one of which was a belligerent yappy little bastard who did not like the looks of Zoe. I drove from Little Rock to Russellville in an unrelenting torrential downpour. Around about Alma the sky cleared up and I drove up 540 to Fayetteville under sunshiney skies.
Arriving around noon, I wasn’t set to meet up with anyone until 3, so I did my usual stops: Blue Moon Music, Ben Jacks Music, Hastings, and Le Maison de Tartes. At Ben Jacks I received bewildered compliments for rocking out on a Fender Hello Kitty guitar. They’re awesome. Not many people pick them up and go bananas, apparently. At Hastings I was the beneficiary of some pricing errors: I got the Supreme Beings of Leisure‘s self-titled CD for $.02 and Neil Diamond’s Stones CD for $2.50. I also picked up some early Genesis, 12 Rods, Shane Theriot, and Prokofiev for $.99 each. After that I chilled out at Maison des Tartes with a sausage and egg tart and coffee.
At 3 I met up with Nica and her boyfriend Trey at Hugo’s. I haven’t seen her in I don’t know how long. We caught up for a few hours before they had to go. I went upstairs and checked out Sound Warehouse, which is a place that has a remarkable ability to show me things I didn’t know existed and must immediately buy. In this case it was the DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist Freeze DVD, and a live record from Praxis (featuring Mixmaster Mike, DJ Q-Bert and Shortkut). Life is good.
After that I was off to Margot‘s place, and we jetted out to La Hacienda for her birthday dinner with a largish group of people. Interestingly Margot’s boyfriend is also named Trey. Afterward the weather was getting weird so I opted to crash on Margot’s couch rather than go on over to Harrison, which turned out to be a very good choice, as Sunday morning was ecstatically beautiful weather for a country drive with the windows down. After breakfast at Arsaga’s (the newer one at Mission & Crossover), I set out east. The occupants of the car in front of me were apparently smoking weed because I smelled it for several miles. My soundtrack was the Hoops McCann Band Plays the Music of Steely Dan – all instrumental jazz arrangements of Steely Dan tunes. A fine way to spend a Sunday morning.
I made it into Harrison in time to have lunch with my mom and vist with my grandmother. She’s doing very well in her fight against cancer, I’m very happy to report. I brought her a lunch and we chatted and watched Come Blow Your Horn, an old Sinatra comedy/musical. After that I went over to dad’s and showed him the wonders of IMDB.com, which will definitely be a primary source for his research as he prepares for the Film Classics course he’s set to teach in the fall at the community college. We looked up Blade Runner and High Noon. Beyond that, he’s still thinking.
Heading back to Little Rock, the weather continued its excrutiatingly beautiful behavior. I nearly got a sunburn from driving with the windows down. The traffic was light, and much of my soundtrack was the 3-disc The Otis Redding Story I borrowed from dad. I let him borrow a CD of early Elvis tunes in exchange.
All things considered, it was as fine a weekend as could be had with little to no planning.
Turtle Doves: Nature’s Little Procrastinators
I’m endlessly amazed by the lackadaisical attitude of turtle doves. They appear to be smaller, less bright versions of pigeons, and yet they have a remarkable ability to get out of the way at the very last available second. On the one hand they appear to be too stupid to realize when danger is approaching, yet have the phsyical reflexes to preserve themselves.
On a completely unrelated note, the mystery jar is gone. For the last week or two, there has been a shopping cart in the parking lot next to my office. This shopping cart contains only one item: a jar. A jar of what I had no idea, until I decided to investigate Wednesday on my way out. It contained a thick red substance I could only presume to be barbecue sauce. I wasn’t about to open it just to satisfy my curiosity. That’s how cats across the world get killed. The lid of the jar said “Joe.” Well apparently Joe or perhaps one of his agents came for the jar because now it’s gone. We have an old guy who digs around the dumpster sometimes; maybe he took it, although I’m not sure why he waited so long. Perhaps out of respect for Joe, wherever and whomever he may be.
On a yet more unrelated note, Jamie (who has a new blog, by the way) posted this on myspace and I found it clever and “Magic 8 Ball” enough to present it for your amusement:
Rules: Turn on your media player of choice, turn on the SHUFFLE option. Answer these questions with the (RANDOM) song titles as they show up. I added the artists’ names because my collection is pretty obscure at times.
how does the world see me?
Glasses and Braces (The Semantics)
will i have a happy life?
Leave in Silence (Depeche Mode)
what do my friends really think of me?
Shh (Fleming and John)
do people secretly lust after me?
Okonkole Y Trompa (Jaco Pastorius)
how can i make myself happy?
Oh my Golly! (The Pixies)
what should i do with my life?
Texas Funeral (Jon Wayne)
why must life be so full of pain?
The 2nd Law (Michael Hedges)
will i ever have children?
Je T’Embrasse (Jan Cyrka, translates as “I Kiss You”)
will i die happy?
Presto Vivace and Reprise (U.K.)
what is some good advice for me?
Wichita Lineman (Glen Campbell)
what is happiness?
My Blue Heaven (The Preservation Hall Jazz Band)
what’s my favorite fetish?
Castles Made of Sand (Jimi Hendrix)
how will i be remembered?
L.O.V.E. (the Soft.Lightes)
My favorite was “The 2nd Law” which is a great answer if one considers the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is the law of entropy.
Radio Show #2
Retirement Dreams and Stranger Things
My dad has the best retirement gig around. He teaches at the community college in Harrison. He has taught Western Civilization, and I think another hstory class. Next fall he teaches a cinema class, “Great Films” or something like that. He’ll be busy all summer deciding what to show and what to say about each movie. And he’s not limited to older movies, either, nor is he restricted to some critical canon of motion pictures. Basically he’s free to teach whatever he wants (hello Young Farnkenstein). That would just be too much fun. We were debating options yesterday. I’ll let you know what he chooses.
I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. When I was in junior high, I asked my mom, a former 9th Grade English teacher, what she thought of that and she promptly replied, “Nooooo” with Sigourney Weaver-esque vigor[1] that I could almost hear her say “there is no Dana, only Zuul.” What a sad state of affairs the world is in when a teacher does not recommend her vocation to others. I knew it would be hard work – I’d seen the Ralph Macchio/Nick Nolte movie Teachers and I knew the job was somewhat akin to going to war against stupidity. I knew the battleground was the hell of other people. What better war to fight, I figure? Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for, supposedly.
Nevertheless I got in through a side door by teaching guitar for several years in Maumelle. That was fun. I miss hanging around kids and showing them how to be creative, and reminding them that adolescence is, for the most part, a cyclone of irrelevant social pressures, needless anxiety, and relentless psychological abuse/marketing. I like to think I helped some people.
If I won the lottery and didn’t have to worry about money, I’d start a pop music school, something like School of Rock but with more emphasis on different styles. I’ve actually thought about this quite a bit. The atmosphere would be more social, like Banjo Center on Saturdays where kids are having a musical community despite the commercial nature of the venue. We’d have a digital library where kids could listen to a massive selection of music, stacks of music books, tablature folios, and instruments to play. Maybe a few rehearsal rooms for jamming and lessons. Basically a larger version of my house, open to the public, with maybe a coffee bar/soda fountain or something suitably snacky. I’ve wondered about how it might financially sustain itself – subscriptions? donations? tips? Fortunately most of the “stock” I already have. I’d just need to pay rent, which would be considerable given the needs of the facility. Anyway, just another thing I think about before I go to bed.
1.) Or maybe Bill Cosby’s wife in that “YOUUUU GAVE THEM CHOCOLATE CAAAKE” voice.
Riverfest
Anybody interested in working the Triple S Stage with me this year at Riverfest? I did it last year and it was a barrel of monkeys. This year we’ll be driving vans[1] and fetching snacks for the Neville Brothers, Mike Huckabee’s band, Del McCoury, and Pat Green. We’ll also get local luminaries the Boondogs, the Rockin’ Guys, Chris Denny and the amazing Ted Ludwig. Who wants in on hiding twinkies from Aaron Neville?
1.) And golf carts. Did I mention the golf carts? Free food, backstage hangouts, and golf carts are what God intended the Good Life for us to be.
Improvements
21 years ago this week, Coca-Cola introduced New Coke. It burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp, but might I suggest something to the good people at Lay’s Potato Chips? A slight name change for better, more accurate marketing:
New Crack™
Seriously, Wesley Snipes could start a New Jack City empire on this sh*t. And apparently, for those who may live in the uncivilized wilds of Saskatchewan or Newton County, you can buy it on Amazon.