I like it when it rains because the paint on the buildings looks so much brighter and more uniform. The streets are all a darker black, like they just got a fresh layer of asphalt. The air smells cleaner and the trees look greener for the dust that’s washed off. It was only a quick one today. I missed it, in fact, while I was home for lunch. I ate my panfried Gardenburger unaware. I first noticed it on the street and grass leaving my house and heading back to work. And, instead of turning left, I went right. Right and then right again, towards downtown, away from work, past the more brightly uniformly painted strip malls, rolling over sleek black roads. To the local record store, where I walked the aisles a bit, admired the cute girl behind the counter, wondering what kind of stuff she might be into, maybe it was her who had put on the currently playing copy of Disraeli Gears. She had a longish buttoned-down overcoat on, it was tan with wide angled collars. She wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but she works at a non-chain record store and she smiled at me as I sung and hummed along to “SWLABR.” She easily topped that half-hour’s list. Still not feeling work I moved up a planned afternoon errand and moved towards the Post Office next. I hate the way the drying rain mottles the clean matte finishes it only minutes ago evoked. Now things look unfinished and patchy, the road spotted with sunbleached grey, paint on buildings dried in anemic streaks and spots, making them look sickly. After parking, I walk through the barely-falling rain and inside to stare at the locked doors and drawn blinds for a good thirty seconds before some kind stranger intones from over my shoulder, “It’s a holiday.” “Oh,” I say, “I knew that. Thanks.” I leave defeated, wishing I would’ve shipped that package Saturday when I instead did nothing, hoping it doesn’t mean negative feedback from my buyer. Then I feel guilty for not remembering it’s Martin Luther King day. The white man’s guilt. Work sucked for another few hours as I realized I’m going to be buried in annual-review work for the rest of the week; should be working on it right now, am not. The looming blocks of hyperbole I’d have to write are running after me in my head, a waking nightmare where I’m drowning in a sea of platitudes and sincerities. It haunts me even now. I took my 4pm from home, but gave up and put down the earpiece after Keaton woke from her afternoon nap with a 103° fever. You’d never know it from her attitude and wont for “play.” Sharaun was gone all night, cooking dinner for single-parent teenage moms up at church. She runs the show, like the boss of the teen moms thing, I admire her for the time and effort she puts into it. Came time for dinner and the supermarket deli people really should send undercover agents to surveil the chicken rotisserie-er people at Costco. So much more juicy and seasoned perfectly, and it doesn’t squeak in between your teeth as you chew, not to mention are at least a pound plus heavier and nearly cost-equivalent. It’s a win-win. Even Keaton enjoyed hers, along with the fresh green beans mom left dad to snap the ends off of, steam, salt, and accompany the bird. Played with Keaton, climbing couches and rolling on the carpet, bouncing her on tummy and hiding with her in blanket-roofed forts. Saved the day by replacing batteries in not only the stroked-out-sounding Chicken Dance Elmo but also the chopped-and-screwed hyphy rocking horse. Afterward, Keaton in comfy pajamas and safe in bed, Superdad watched the first part of the History Channel’s “Life After People,” before his loving wife made him turn it off in favor of the dreaded Friends reruns. It’s times like these when I turn to the internet, follow some dubious links and end up reading grotesque things I wish I hadn’t, yet being fascinated none the less. And thus ends another day, 738 words later. Goodnight friends and lovers, until tomorrow.
the yes bus & my prog hard-on
Sunday night and I guess I did another one about music. I offer advanced apology to all you straights.
Had the afternoon pretty much to myself, used the time to do a whole lot of nothing but for washing dishes and tidying up here and there. With my time, I watched a 1958 movie called “The Brain Eaters,” about little fury parasitic creatures that bore their way up from the center of the Earth to attach to the back of human heads and eat their brains, controlling them “as if they were robuts,” of course, while doing so. It was just plain awesome. When Keaton woke up, we turned off the TV (it rots your brain, you know) and turned on some music instead. We read some books and I fed her dinner, and we played rocking-horse and blanket-fort until Mom got home.
Well, that’s enough lead-in, here’s what I wrote for today.
I always consider myself to have “grown up” or “come of age” during the years I spent in Florida. The town we lived in wasn’t really a “small” town, but it wasn’t a sprawling metropolis either. As I’ve mentioned before, sometime around the tender age of thirteen or so, I began throwing myself headlong into the music, ideas, and culture of a time two decades before the one I was presently teen-aging in. You’ll need these two bits of information together to appreciate the story of the “Yes bus,” which I’m writing to both plain-out tell the story and also as a nice segue into a piece on the band.
Seeing as, at the time, we (myself and the crew I ran with) were busy prototyping ourselves after the teenagers of twenty years past (making sure to temper with plenty of 90s-style teenage sneery-middle-finger-disdain), we were super sensitive to all things “summer of love.” And, in our town, there happened to be a fine rolling example of the nouveau-hippy never-let-go attitude: the Yes bus.
The Yes bus was, as you might expect, a Volkswagen bus (from the cherry pre-’68 T1 years) which had been (fairly skillfully) tricked-out with a full psychedelic paintjob. And, while the entire body of the vehicle was covered in multicolored swirls and flowers, the true “coolness” of the thing came from the two huge band logos decorating either of the broad sides.
One one side, it was the Doors logo, font-perfect down to the two-half Os and four-piece S; on the opposite side, the Yes logo, also skillfully copied in its familiar Roger Dean toothpaste-squirt glory. As self-proclaimed students of the 60s, we were of course drawn to this glorious machine like bees to honey (nevermind that we likely didn’t realize Yes’ career was nearly entirely 70s-based).
Surely the guys piloting this bus were some of the coolest people our midsized burg had to offer, we thought, as we tried to surreptitiously follow them around on our bikes to find out where they “crashed.” Maybe we were hoping to find a tucked-away Utopian society that never quite made the mental move off the muddy fields of Yasgur’s farm, and was still championing our storied image of the decade: free love, fun drugs, philanthropy, and the communal celebration of great, great music.
At the time, it was fairly chic to be “into” the Doors, as, for some reason, it is during those early sights-set-on-stoner teenage years. The band had recently been given the Hollywood treatment, and the girls we hung out with were requesting volumes of Morrison’s “poetry” for Christmas, convinced he was surely an overlooked-Laureate denied by a generation too square to “tune in.” Which, as an aside, is I think a big part of why I sometimes poo-poo the band’s output as having a not-insignificant element of novelty/frivolity to it… but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, the point is that The Doors were hot (well, amongst us proto-burnouts, at least). I always thought it was cool that these guys had put the Doors logo on the bus. The Yes logo, on the other hand, was something a little less familiar to me.
It would be at least another summer or so before I’d have my great prog-rock awakening, dabbling toes first with things like ELP’s “Lucky Man,” “Knife Edge”, moving onto the wonder of hearing Fragile for the first time, and finally even coming to appreciate the more hardcore stuff (ahem, Tarkus). (For whatever reason, I didn’t get into King Crimson until just some years ago, shame on me for not following that family tree back to its roots long ago.) I always thought it was a cool logo, I just kind of wondered why they hadn’t chosen a more “suitable” band to display opposite the Doors. And, at the time, I would’ve likely meant “suitable” as The Beatles.
Now then, over the past few years, I have become a complete nut for nearly every scrap and tear of Yes’ “classic period” output. I’ve come to be in awe of their post-Fragile catalog, up through about Relayer, and have decided they likely made some of the most ingenious and enjoyable music of the early 1970s. And now, looking back, I bet those Yes bus guys were even cooler than I figured them for. Yes is kind of like Rush, or maybe Dylan, in the super-binary love/hate dichotomous followings they inspire. Typically, you either hate Yes, or you love Yes (allowing, as any discerning fan must, for favoring one incarnation, period, or lineup over others). Me, I learned only recently that I’m a lover, not a hater.
So, Yes bus guys, I’m sorry I naively thought you’d chosen the wrong rockband logo to adorn your vehicle. In the end, I was wrong. In fact, were you erased from my memory and I saw you drive by for the first time tomorrow, I’d likely silently nod in approval at your decision to proclaim your identification with the difficultly dense Yes, while simultaneously chuckling inside at the obviousness of you’re being a Doors fan. What? You like Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols too? Man, you must be cool. Ahhh… how I’ve grown. Age truly does bring with it wisdom.
And, making for a nice transition from the above topic: Lately I’ve had a huge prog hard-on, and have been littering the still-has-so-much-room 160GB iPod with the likes of The Nice, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, Harmonium, Atomic Rooter, and early Genesis (sitting alongside the “first run” bands that already had a home thereon, like ELP, Yes, and King Crimson). That’s one good thing about the new humongous iPods… you can really delve deep into the multi-fingered rock ‘n’ roll family tree, keeping genre-representative playlists all the way.
Was that OK? Took me a while to write, so I hope so.
Goodnight my friends, goodnight.
the way to a man’s heart is through…
… that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door.
Well, at least to this man’s heart, on this night, it is.
Keaton had a friend drop by for a few hours this evening. At one point, he was pulling around Chicken Dance Elmo in the little wagon while Keaton followed close on his heels wheeling her baby doll in the stroller. They’d circle their little procession around the living room room a few times and then head for the front room. On their way Keaton would shout, “Going to our house!,” and her friend would echo, “Our house!”
Their house, such as it was, was that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door. They’d both cram in there with the wagon and stroller and baby doll and Chicken Dance Elmo, and be “home.” At first, Sharaun and I thought it was a fluke. But, after they did it several times, we decided they were really playing house. It was the coolest thing to watch. Where the heck do kids get this stuff?
Now I will tell a short story.
In fifth grade, our class went on a field trip to the town’s public pool. Somehow, a friend and I convinced one of the girls in our class to sneak a camera, which we provided, into the girls locker room. Her instructions, once inside, were to snap dirty pictures of a certain other girl in our class. I have no idea why she agreed to this, maybe she didn’t like the other girl. The boys and girls split and went to their respective rooms to change into swimsuits, and we were jumpy with anticipation. When she finally did return the camera, we hung on her every word. “Yeah, I took some,” she said passively, as if this weren’t the successful culmination of every fifth-grade boy’s best-laid plans. I don’t remember how we got the film developed without involving the folks, but we did. In the end, our mole only managed to take a single picture, which was extremely tame and unsatisfying, but which I still have to this day. Sorry Kristina, I was in fifth-grade-love with you, it’s what we did.
Goodnight.
you’re all in my chest
Wednesday night kinda crept up on me this week. I’ll be honest up-front tonight and admit that I’m not really in much of a blogging mood. It’s the first night in a couple weeks that I hadn’t already picked and mentally half-written my next day’s topic before sitting down with the laptop. I guess that’s bad, because now I’m here writing about not knowing what to write again. But, I’ve got the house to myself (Keaton’s sleeping, Sharaun out) and the iPod is on shuffle… so maybe the words will come.
Speaking of the iPod, I have this new obsession with my “Unplayed” smart-playlist. That’s the playlist where any song that’s never been listened to (at least, not since have to reset all my play-counts to zero) goes. Right now, it’s sitting at eleven-thousand some-odd songs, and I listen to it every day to try and reduce the number. I want to get that sucker to zero unplayed tracks. Today, the thing played a trick on my by shuffling up the near thirty-minute version of “Dark Star” the Dead played at Woodstock in 1969. The Dead’s entire mega-historical Woodstock set has been around for along time on bootleg, I even bought one back in college, but the sources were always really poor audience tapes that sounded awful. So, when the actual soundboard-sourced recording leaked a few years back, I was totally excited. Thirty minutes per track, however, don’t make for quick work on zeroing that playlist…
Anyway, I won’t bore you with all that. I might as well get to what you’ve been waiting for anyway… the one-week update to my month-long Enzyte Challenge. First, before I get to the results (which you can probably already see on the screen below anyway), I wanted to document some of my initial impressions:
- These pills do nothing.
OK, that’s done. Let’s move onto the results:
(Learn how to interpret this chart here.)
Yeah, those little Daves are both exactly the same height (and width). I’m serious. Print it out and draw lines on it to prove it to yourself if you doubt me. That’s a one-week total change of zero in both dimensions, not even a single centimeter (which I’d have chalked up to noise anyway).
But folks, I’ve only been on the pills for nine days now, so it’s probably a little premature to be calling results already. In fact, when I made the call to Enzyte “nutraceuticals” headquarters the other day to ensure my free sample doesn’t conveniently auto-renew for another $60 month, they told me I was too early to cancel – that they wanted me to at least “experience the solution” for a couple weeks, and that my no-charge grace period actually lasts until such-and-such a date (I made a reminder on my phone so I’ll remember to call back).
As an aside, I’m fairly certain Enzyte-HQ call center (at least the “discontinue me” ward) is staffed by females only. It didn’t bother me, but I bet some men would have a hard time answering the “And may I ask why you’d like to discontinue use of the product, sir?” question with, “Uhhh… my wang is just as small as ever…” Good psychology Enzyte, bravo.
Anyway, I’m not gonna be too rough on this particular nutraceutical just yet. I’m willing to give it a fair thirty-day shake. So, stay tuned… and we’ll see. Hopefully this one-week update wasn’t too terribly anti-climactic.
Goodnight my friends, you’re all in my chest.
you’ve been sacked
Hey hey Tuesday night. Glad you could join me again today for another installment her at sounds familiar. I seem to be on a roll as far as the posting-regularity goes this month, so here’s hoping I didn’t just jinx it by saying as much. Should be a chuckle of a blog today, if I did my job right. So let’s get right down to it then, shall we?
OK, before I do this next bit, I’m going to ask, dear readers, that you either cast your memory back a couple days, or go quickly read this post from Thursday last week.
Done reading and/or refreshing your memory? OK, good.
Now, if you weren’t lying when you responded in the affirmative to that last sentence, you’ll remember that, when I was sharing the “hotlink prevention” story with Ben, he suggested that I take screen-captures of all my “victims.” Well, bored the other night, I started paging through my referrer logs and doing just that. Turns out, it was a great time looking at all the surprised people out there who’d previously been “borrowing” bandwidth from my site when their intended image got “sacked” with my new script. I had such a good time, in fact, that I wanted to share with you some the various places my new “hotlink stopper” image is showing up in cyberspace.
For your convenience, I’ve pixelized the NSFW image in the screencaps below, but you can always take a peek at the real-deal right here if you’ve forgotten the hilarity/horror of it all.
Let’s start off with a relatively low-impact MySpace profile picture. Looks like “mumu” might want to update his-or-her profile…
A lot of people seem to link my pictures in forums, here are some examples. (That last guy was attempting to link to a picture of a middle-finger-salute from my site. Funny enough, I think the same sentiment is conveyed even with the image-swap):
A tad more embarrassing, some people even used hotlinked images from my server for their forum avatars. Sorry Soda Popinski:
Looks like that hotlink-replacement image transcends the barriers of language as well! Here are some Spanish and what I think might be Finnish forums where I got the drop on unsuspecting hotlinkers. (I especially like the English reply in the Finnish thread, “Mmmmm.. sexy….” Anyone read Spanish?):
Switching gears, a lot of MP3-blogs hotlink to my Question Mark & The Mysterians album covers to accompany their posts about the band’s classic 1960s output. Funny, I didn’t realize genitals were featured this prominently on a rock album cover before Lennon did it:
Sadly, most of the threads that get “sacked” with the image-swap are long-dead, and thus aren’t impacted much by the hotlink-hijinks. I saved the funniest bunch of screencaps for last, however. These are the ones where the “sacked” thread is still “alive” enough that people notice the image-swap. I love the response in the below thread:
My absolute favorite of them all, though, has got to be this very-much-alive thread over at the “306 GTi-6 & RALLYE Owners Club” forums, where the poster is off-topic and asking anyone if they’ve ever had their back waxed (the original hotlink was referencing the picture of an extremely hairy back which accompanies this post). As a bonus for this one, you can click that link above you here to read the actual thread, complete with hilarious responses and one stymied poster who eventually asks this:
Oh man… good times. Thanks for the suggestion Ben. Funny thing is, I steal 99% of my blog-accompanying images myself, I just have the decency to actually host the pilfered images on my own server with my own bandwidth. C’mon you other unscrupulous web-types, get some scruples…
And, before I go I should acknowledge that I bet some of you came here today looking for my week-one Enzyte Challenge update. Well, it’s coming, it was just a bit of rough night and I had this entry pretty much canned and good to go – so I left the thing on auto. You’ll get your update soon enough, don’t fret.
Oh hey Pat’s got some pictures up from their New Year’s Eve party, check ’em out.
And, with that, I’m gonna cut this thing loose. Have a good night folks, and, to those of you with difficult days ahead – we’re here for you. Love you all and goodnight.
snack-a-cheerios
Mondays mean I have to go back to work, so normally Mondays blow. This Monday, however, was quite pleasant. I got a ton of work done, hung out with friends at lunch, and came home to a big “Hi Daddy!” and hug from Keaton. I got home a little late (meeting ran long and I hung around talking to Ben a little bit), and we had leftovers for dinner (which I like, honestly, since I do dishes and leftovers mean less cleanup).
Tonight Keaton and I called Grammy and Grandpa together, we do that sometimes. Keaton likes to use the phone, and can actually hold something of a conversation (well, a two-year-old talks to an adult kinda conversation). Tonight, it went a little like this:
Grandpa: Hello?
Keaton (at Dad’s prompting whispers): Hi Grandpa! I love you Grandpa!
Grandpa: Why, hi Keaton! I love you too! Want to talk to your Grammy? (Ahh… the classic dad-answered-the-phone handoff, “Hey there!… let me get your mom.”)
Grammy: Hello?
Keaton (more whispers from dad): Hi Grammy! I love you Grammy!
Grammy: Hi Keaton! I love you too! What are you doing?
Keaton: Snack-a-Cheerios!
Grammy: Oh, you had some Cheerios?
Keaton: Yeah.
Grammy: We’re they good?
Keaton: OK.
Keaton: Me hold-a baby Colton!
Grammy: Yeah! Did you see baby Colton?
Keaton. OK.
Awkward silence….
Dad: Keaton, can you tell Grammy what you did today?
Keaton: Today.
Dad: What did you do today?
Keaton: Slide-a-Krittal.
Dad: Oh, that means “Slide with Crystal,” mom. That’s the person at the gym’s childcare.
Grammy: Oh, you went to the gym?
Keaton: OK.
Grammy: Did you have fun?
Keaton: Had-a-Cheerios!
…
And on and on and on it went like that. But, Grammy never seemed to tire of the conversation.
Well then, I am going to paste in something I wrote a while ago… maybe it’s interesting, let’s see:
Did you guys know that, no matter how you cut it, there is a certain element of the earnable respect a person can have which is entirely age-based? Well, I’m telling you that there is, whether you knew it or not. Now, people may tell you that this is false, but they are either misinformed or lying. If you’re a young whippersnapper, no matter how much of a superstar you are at what you do, and regardless of the number of millions you make, you’ll be still deprived at least some percentage of the respect you could garner (from those older than you) because of your age.
Furthermore, I bet I can roughly quantify that percent-deprived by looking at the median age of your peers (those who do the same tasks as you in your chosen profession) and subtracting your age from that. For instance, if you’re a thirty-two year old middle manager at your dead-end warehouse job, and the average middle-manager at the warehouse company is actually thirty-nine years old, you’ll be deprived of about 20% of the respect you could earn were you seven years older.
Now I know there’ll be a lot of fast-trackers and young up-and-comers out there who’d completely disagree, and maybe even argue that they are, in fact, more respected than some of their elders. And I’m not saying that can’t be possible or doesn’t happen (because, in point-cases, I’m certain it does), I’m just saying that, in a general sense, they’d be wrong. Sure, if there’s a deadweight fifty year old who’s coasting along as your peer, you may indeed be more respected in comparison. But, in general, those who are older than you will still have it in the back of their heads that they’ve “been around” and you’re “fresh off the tit.”
Seriously, you’re gonna have to work around this. It’s just a simple fact that you trust people who are your age or older because your brain tells you they’ve had at least as much, or more, experience than you yourself have. Think about it, we inherently think of those younger than us as less-experienced than we are (and, because physics says that time flows forward, we’re probably right in doing so). Young people are expected to “earn and learn” their way to the top. Just look to the longstanding, pre-medieval, concept of apprenticeship, or the way lawyers and accounts log hours to win partner.
Anyway, I’m actually not criticizing the concept – it’s common sense. I’m just saying, if you’re planning on being number-one top-cheese in your chosen field by thirty-one, you may be surprised. You might even make it to CEO by that age, but you’d better bet some of the musty members of the board are looking down their noses at your unwrinkled brow and perky breasts. Hey, I’m OK with it… just gotta do the time (or get insanely rich, cash out young, and run for the hills).
Hmmm… I dunno if that was an entertaining read or not…
Hey, Keaton made Megan’s photoblog: check it out.
Love you guys and your unwrinkled brows and perky breasts. Goodnight.
youthwise
Sunday, Sharaun’s out shopping and Keaton’s asleep. So far, naptime sans pacifier has proven more difficult than bedtime – Keaton not seeming to mind its absence at all at night, yet having a hard time missing it during her afternoon naps. Yesterday I couldn’t get her to go down at all, and eventually brought her back out into the living room having caught nary a wink. Today, however, I decided to get serious, and, when she was once again playing and talking to herself instead of napping, went in and rocked her for about fifteen minutes in the glider. Once her deep, ragged breathing convinced me she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, I transferred her to the crib, where I’m happy to say she’s still slumbering peacefully. On the whole, I’d say operation pacifiers-be-gone is moving along quite well.
This weekend, I decided it was high time I worked a bit on all the more obscure BitTorrent downloads that’ve been piling up in my downloads directory, un-listened to and unloved. In line with my laziness, I often leave the “hardest” downloads for last. For my downloading habits, the “hardest” albums are the rare live stuff I love to collect, but hate to sit down and figure out the details on so I can properly organize it, tag it, and merge it into my general collection. It may sound easy, but tracking down the details of that live Jefferson Starship jam I grabbed one day because it looked interesting when the only thing I have to go on is a folder in my “unprocessed” directory called “starship73_SBD_matrix1” is sometimes hard to do. But, I persevered, and Saturday I used Keaton’s naptime to process I whopping ~15GB of rare live FLAC audio. In fact, I’ve snipped in the resulting anally-organized list is below for your perusal, because I know you value this stuff as much as I do, right?
I’m gonna do a general interest bit for nerds now, you can turn your head if you’d like to remain cool.
When I was a kid, I read with gusto a book called Big Secrets by William Poundstone. I’ve written about the book before here on sounds familiar, in the context of my youthwise obsession with backwards audio. The book, was filled with all sorts of cool stuff. One of the coolest, in fact, was the section on mysterious shortwave radio “number stations.” I think (dad, correct me if I’m wrong) that my pop used to mess around with shortwave, and I kind of remember this being partly why I was interested in that particular chapter.
Anyway, numbers stations are an “unexplained” global radio phenomenon, in which a string of random numbers and/or letters is broadcast on a given radio frequency with no explanation, the general consensus being that they are coded communiques intended for participants international espionage community. Some stations have been broadcasting these cryptic strings of numbers since back around the time of World War I. Enticed by the mystery, amateur hammers have, on occasion, turned armchair secret-agents and attempted to triangulate signals and hunt down the broadcast locations. Reading it all back then, I was fascinated. It was like some real-life Hardy Boys thing to me… and I dreamed about getting a radio, studying the signals, and breaking the code…
Anyway, if you’re interested in this type of “cloak and dagger” type stuff, Wikipedia has a great article on numbers stations here, and you can read about the “outing” of one of my favorites from Poundstone’s book, the “Russian Woodpecker,” right here (also via the great Wikipedia). For further reading, this page keeps a list of actively transmitting numbers stations (with sound samples), and even has some cool video of radio-nuts tracking down the transmitting antennas.
I’m sorry if that was boring, but I enjoyed writing it, so you, dear reader, can suck it.
Before I go, a tip of my babymakin’ hat to friends Erik and Kristi for the birth of their strapping young buck, Colton. Way to go guys, he and Keaton can be best friends until they’re around fourteen, then they’re forbidden from seeing each other until they’re twenty-three.
Goodnight.