Sippican Cottage

Are You A Q Head?

2012-01-28T14:15:00.001-05:00

The New Rhythm and Blues Quartet, or quintet, depending on how old you are. You probably know them as plain old NRBQ. What's that? You don't know them at all?

I always think of them as Massachusetts folk, even though they're from all over. The bass player, Johnny Spampinato, still lives on Cape Cod, and his brother Joey -- a sometimes member of NRBQ -- is a member of The Incredible Casuals, who played at the Beachcomber in Wellfleet every Sunday for thirty years or so.

The music business seems trivial on its face, but it's as grim as the Cosa Nostra on the back end. You can never get really famous unless you're as serious as a heart attack about getting famous all the time. Some people are just too good-natured about the whole thing to ever become a household word. They just become household words in other musicians' households. Exhibit A: NRBQ

Ten Somersets He'll Undertake On Solid Ground

2012-01-27T14:56:00.001-05:00

Larry Griswold was the co-inventor of the modern trampoline.

How To Rattle That Stick In The Swill Bucket

2012-01-26T12:29:00.000-05:00

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
-John Wanamaker

I lived in Los Angeles back in the early eighties. I have a soft spot in my heart for Fred Rated. Fred Rated is semi-well known as Shadoe Stevens, a disc-jockey game show host voice-over dude. According to Wikipedia, he's currently the announcer for Craig Ferguson's late night show.

He'll always be Fred Rated to me. LA TV and radio was fun just then. Cal Worthington and Elvira and Fred; The Plimsouls and Oingo Boingo and Wall of Voodoo. It was all cheesy garbage and I loved it. I loved the west-coast flavored The Gong Show just as I had adored the execrable east-coast Community Auditions because it was crap and didn't pretend to be anything else, and you could just watch the fat majorettes drop their batons while jitterbugging to disco versions of Sousa marches and enjoy the hell out of it while nursing a hangover.

Fred Rated became a sorta star by making those commercials. If the purpose of advertising is to make the public aware of the product then Fred was a smash, if I'm anything to go by. It's thirty years later and I remember him, and fondly. If the purpose of advertising is to get you to part with money, I make it a miserable failure, because I never set foot in a Federated store and never got the urge to, either.

Advertising has gotten very, very creepy. The Stasi crossed with a peeping tom keeps track of you, online and elsewhere, and mines it for all its worth. Funny that guys like Fred played a creep, and yet their appeal was simply to amuse while barking out the phone number.

This blog is advertising, I guess; I try to be charming, and let you know I exist. I know the charming part is thin on the ground now and then, but I try to exist as hard as I can. Maybe it's the only half that matters, anyway.

Bleak House

2012-01-25T15:24:00.001-05:00

The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart

ALL things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

--William Butler Yeats

I'm Fairly Certain My Sweet Baby Would Still Go My Bail

2012-01-24T14:47:00.001-05:00

If she had it, which she doesn't, because she's married to me.

Albert The Rumba King Presents: Eric Clapton

2012-01-23T16:58:00.001-05:00

Dios Mio, Mang

2012-01-22T05:00:00.000-05:00

So you wanna be a roofer, huh?

I was once at the top of a forty-foot ladder, laden with tools, with the ladder leaned against a house where one rake board transitioned into another rake board at the spot an addition met the main house. Forty feet is plenty high to be lethal, and give you the feeling it's lethal, too. Without any warning, a bat -- one bat -- came out of the seam and hit me square in the face, thrashed around a bit, and fluttered off.

In theory, no matter what, you're never supposed to let go of the ladder. Earthquake, fire, gunshots, surprise parties, whatever -- your natural inclination to wave your hands around must be countered. It's hard to override a bazillion years of fight or flee, but it's easy to see who can manage it. They're not blogging just now.

The bats are just a lark for these fellows. Watch out for the histoplasmosis, guys! It's more painful than marriage, but less deadly in the long run.

Fairly Sure I Used To Play With This Drummer

2012-01-21T09:56:00.000-05:00

And his brother the drummer. And his friends the drummers. And another guy that looked like him that was a drummer. And seven other guys that don't look anything like him but pretty much are his doppelgangers. They were all drummers, too.

Until the bizarre gardening accidents, of course.

RIP Jimmy Castor. It Was A Stone Groove, My Man

2012-01-20T14:13:00.001-05:00

Jimmy Castor passed away this week. I dearly loved this novelty song when it came out of the transistor radio back in the day:

Jimmy Castor, a singer, saxophonist, percussionist and bandleader whose novelty songs and funk grooves brought him wide popularity in the 1970s and were later sampled for hip-hop records, died of cardiac arrest Jan. 16 in a hospital in Henderson, Nev. He was 71. The death was confirmed by his son, Jimmy Castor Jr.

As leader of the Jimmy Castor Bunch, the elder Castor combined funk and adolescent humor with such novelty songs as “Troglodyte (Cave Man),” a No. 6 Billboard pop hit in 1972, and “The Bertha Butt Boogie” two years later. Mr. Castor’s records featured a recurring cast of characters, including a caveman who chants the mantra “gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman,” and the irrepressible, full-figured dancer Bertha Butt.(Washington Post)

You can see him perform it himself, too, if you prefer:
Lotta greezy bass playing back in the seventies. Thumb and slap sorta ruined it in the eighties. Hope there's lots of cavewomen in heaven for you to dance with, Jimmy.

I Stretch Out My Arms and If I Don’t Feel Any Wood On Either Side, Then I Know I Can Get Up

2012-01-19T05:00:00.000-05:00

Lathe turning is my kind of work. It's quiet, and contemplative. Most all the other machines in the shop shriek and bark at you. The lathe hums and whispers. It feels more like art than heavy lifting. My little son says "daddy is sculpting again" when I do it.

And Maurice Franklin, woodturner, is my kind of guy.

If you were to rise before dawn on Christmas Eve, and walk down the empty Hackney Rd past the dark shopfronts in the early morning, you would very likely see a mysterious glow emanating from the workshop at the rear of number forty-five where spindles for staircases are made. If you were to stop and press your face against the glass, peering further into the depths of the gloom, you would see a shower of wood chips flying magically into the air, illuminated by a single light, and falling like snow into the shadowy interior of the workshop where wood turner Maurice Franklin, who was born upstairs above the shop in 1920, has been working at his lathe since 1933 when he began his apprenticeship.In the days when Maurice started out, Shoreditch was the centre of the furniture industry and every premises there was devoted to the trade. But it has all gone long ago – except for Maurice who has carried on regardless, working at his lathe. Now at ninety-one years old, being in semi-retirement, Maurice comes in a few days each week, driving down from North Finchley in the early hours to work from four or five, until eight or nine in the morning, whenever he fancies exercising his remarkable talent at wood turning.Make no mistake, Maurice is a virtuoso. When rooms at Windsor Castle burnt out a few years ago, the Queen asked Maurice to make a new set of spindles for her staircase and invited him to tea to thank him for it too. “Did you grow up in the East End?” she enquired politely, and when Maurice nodded in modest confirmation of this, she extended her sympathy to him. “That must have been hard?” she responded with a empathetic smile, although with characteristic frankness Maurice disagreed. “I had a loving family,” he told her plainly, “That’s all you need for a happy childhood, you don’t need palaces for that.”

Read the rest of the story of Maurice at Spitalfields Life. Great pictures, too.

(Thanks to reader Rob W. from Rowe for sending that one along)

I'm In Danger Of Gettin' Fatigue

2012-01-18T14:13:00.000-05:00

de fixer les objets longtemps sans etre fatigue (from 2008)

Genius.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I think it's hilarious that if you want to swap a battery out of an Apple product, you walk up to a counter called a "Genius Bar" in one of their stores. Apparently the Fuhrer of Lake Wobegon has gotten his enabling act, and has annexed the whole United States now. I don't have an opinion one way or another on the gaudy overpriced stuff they sell; but I'm not sure I could stand to be patronized in that fashion and keep a straight face. "Who's the genius -- you, or me? Both of us, of course!" I worked for many years with my younger brother, who is possessed of a sardonic wit. Whenever he was presented with any extravagant claim of the usefulness or value of any item, he'd pause for effect and say: "Yes, but is it premium?"

In politics, the word genius gets used quite a bit, but I notice that what the word they really mean to use is shameless. I really don't know why they keep getting those two mixed up. The last two political geniuses I can think of are Hitler and Churchill. Thank god we got both at the same time. Other than that, for 75 years it's been all workmanlike or incompetent; take your pick.

I've known my share of people equipped with plenty of raw intellectual horsepower. It mostly manifests itself on one side of the ledger, of course: words or numbers. Tremendous intellectual capacity at one thing is almost always accompanied by a loopy worldview and disastrous omissions in other parts of the intellect or personality. It's always amusing to see people with an IQ of 110 point out that since they have the same personality failings as Einstein or Feynman, they must be geniuses. Sure. Just take drugs and throw up on yourself. That will make you Hendrix, too.

Napoleon described it as: de fixer les objets longtemps sans etre fatigue. The ability to concentrate on objectives for long periods without tiring. Of course, many people think that because they hit Refresh four hundred times on an Elvis figurine auction on E-bay that that must apply to them. Sorry, no.

There is a kind of stubborness in any genius, of course, but any fool can be stubborn. You can't win fights solely by taking a beating. To couple insight with intelligence to see around a corner and identify things that are obscure to others -- that is genius. It's exceedingly rare, it seems, though many claim to see it everywhere, including while shaving. Any genius in a public school would be drugged to a stupor now, anyway. Perhaps it's a waste of time to talk of them any more.

Churchill was described as having "a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain." There, that's it. Trust me; you don't have it.

Crewmen, Set Your Teleblasters To Stun

2012-01-17T14:47:00.000-05:00

Yes, that's Nora Jones singing a Willie Nelson song, and in a band named after Willie hisself. The Little Willies. They're going too fast for the lyrics, but what the hell, they look like they're having fun. And doesn't Jim Campilongo spank that plank? Good -- extra good.

Nora's retired now, of course. She sold twenty million copies (!) of her first record, electrifying an entire generation of mopey girls and holding down the 'eat ice cream from the tub while weeping' fort until Adele showed up, and immediately started paging through AARP brochures, most likely.

By appearance alone, it's hard to picture that Nora Jones' father is Ravi Shankar. It's like finding a Faberge egg under a Colonel Sanders chicken. Life is full of such mysteries. I can't understand how my brother can look just like me, and still be so ugly.

Under The Boardwalk

2012-01-16T14:17:00.000-05:00

This is where I tell you that I've never seen Boardwalk Empire, but I'm going to write about it anyway, and you scratch your head like you do.

I found that showreel of special effects for the show fascinating. I think that the technical part of the production of movies, TV, music, and so forth has become so versatile and realistic, and engrossing effects readily achievable, that it's overshadowing the stories or music or whatever the locus of attention's supposed to be in the first place. The actors can't act, they're told to say ridiculous sentences and do unbelievable things while everything explodes, with deserts of filler in between the plastic oases of action. Singers barely mumble into a microphone and have it turned into a robotic melody while they hop around like second-string cheerleaders, all decided beforehand by committee. That sort of thing is driving me to the abandoned island of hardcover books, LP records, and David Lean movies.

Boardwalk Empire's coterie of participants hints that it might be better than your average teleplay, but I'm not that likely to go out of my way to look at it. I'm tired of gangsters. Do you know any crooks? They're deadly dull, generally, and kinda thick for the most part. I've known some really interesting honest people. Hollywood dug a shallow grave for honest people a while back and rolled them in. It's much easier to get conflict and action going if someone pulls out a gat from the get-go. But it's kinda lazy, and it gets old pretty fast. The pistol is the official deus ex machina of American entertainment. Got a plot hole? Fill it with a bullethole. Problem solved!

I suppose I should just enjoy The Old Man And The Sea And A Nine-Millimeter And A Shirtless Chick by Michael Bay like everyone else, but I'm having a hard time with it. I'm still interested in the process, and astonished by what the people that aren't in charge are capable of doing. Hardworking and talented people can put anything on the screen. It's not their fault if you hired Pauly Shore to play Sam Spade in a musical.

I'd --ahem-- kill to put words in these actor's mouths, surrounded by these visual wonders. First, you kill all the characters' fathers. Writes itself after that, really.

From The Foot Of Mount Belzoni

2012-01-14T15:14:00.000-05:00

The most influential guitar player I know of, and a very nice fellow. Albert King, the "Velvet Bulldozer."

Melodius Thunk

2012-01-13T17:09:00.000-05:00

Just a little high and outside.

I Got A Gypsay Woman, Givin' Me Agvice

2012-01-12T12:17:00.000-05:00

Like holding a bus station microphone up to a Hiroshima bomb. It's a Rocket 88 running from the law of averages with the lights off. A hive of angry bees sliced thin with a meat-packer's blade. Mount Vesuvius with the knob set to simmer. A club of off-duty arsonists lighting a Lucky Strike with a flare. A Big House rent party supreme. A Buddha made from a bucket of mud, a gallon of process, and a half-ton of lightning.

Muddy Waters!

Stop-Motion Murmansk

2012-01-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

Murmansk is an interesting place.

It's an ice-free port in a cold place. Murmansk is the largest city north of the Arctic Circle. It is the last city founded by the Russian Empire, made to accept ships filled with Great War supplies, then to make their way by rail to Russia proper. One world war later, the Soviets successfully defended it from attack from the Nazis, and Murmansk continued as the USSR's link by convoy to the Atlantic west. Then it was a Cold War submarine base. When I think Murmansk, I think "cold."

But wait a minute. Murmansk isn't much colder than where I live in western Maine. Average daily lows in Murmansk in January and February are slightly warmer than here, and their record low for January of -38.9F is less than 3 degrees colder than ours. February and March lows are only about 3 degrees colder, too. Their daily highs are about 10 degrees lower on average, year round, than ours, though. All the loons around here turn on their ceiling fans if the temperature hits seventy, so maybe they'd like Murmansk better.

Holy cow, I'm comparing my local climate to Murmansk. I may have moved too far north.

Hey, Maybe I Found A Drummer For My Badfinger Tribute Band

2012-01-10T08:47:00.002-05:00

"Maine mom drummer" does a terrific job sittin' in on the extra-lame-o Wipe Out.

The rest of the band deserves to be taken out back and beaten. Since they appear to be out back already, they need to be taken out front and beaten.

Daddy, Where Do Hit Songs Come From?

2012-01-09T10:27:00.001-05:00

1972. Huge hit for the Staples Singers:

1969. Lunch money for the Harry J. All Stars:

Gotta love a guy like Harry Johnson. African, Sicilian, and Scottish descent. Shaka Prima Braveheart.

People love to seize on stuff like this, and not just in music. So and so didn't really invent such and such.

The machinery of popularity, like less trivial pursuits, is not about fairness, or pedigree, or seniority. It doesn't matter that Henry Ford didn't invent the auto, or the assembly line. It doesn't matter that Bill Gates didn't do much of his own source code. It doesn't matter that the Staple Singers used Harry J's riff for their hit. Your job, if you're going to enter the big arenas and triumph, is to put the thing that everyone needs or wants in front of everyone at the right time and place.

Visionaries deserve credit. I hope I just gave Harry J. some. But practical syncretists are just as important. They generally don't require any extra credit, as they are sitting on piles of money and hate to reach down to receive their praise.

Joe Bonamassa Has Friends In High Places

2012-01-07T12:22:00.001-05:00

I Know Rob W. From Rowe Is My Friend Because He Sent Me This Video

2012-01-04T12:40:00.000-05:00

Mama's Got A Squeeze Box She Wears On Her Chest

2012-01-03T12:47:00.002-05:00

My advice to aspiring entertainers has always been pretty straightforward: Give any audience a compelling reason to pay attention to you. It's really just that simple. A trainwreck is as good as a Traviata in this respect. Cut a fart and stick out your hand and say ta-daa. But don't just stand there.

If all else fails, you can always buy one of those pianos with emphysema, and a plus-size bustier.

Those Darn Accordions
(Thanks to that deaf, dumb, and blind kid, Vanderleun, for sending that along)

Big Hair, Bad Eyesight, And Tube Tops

2012-01-02T12:13:00.001-05:00

That's Woonsocket, Rhode Island's own Duke Robillard, trying to get as many time zones between him and Woonsocket as he can.

When we were young we used to make Woonsocket jokes. It was in Rhode Island, and we were in Massachusetts, but it wasn't very far away. Everybody there was of French extraction and had wonderfully mangled translated expressions for mundane happenstances.

Throw momma from the train a kiss.

Next time you go through my yard, you go round.

Is that to here, or for go?

My brother lived in a triple-decker in Woonsocket for a while when he first got married. Woonsocket is pronounced woon sock KETT! while using a Blaque Jacques Shellacque or Burglar Of Bampf...ff...ff comic accent, of course. We used to put lawn chairs out in his back yard and watch dead dogs float past in the Blackstone River.

No one much speaks French in Woonsocket anymore, or English, either, as time marches on. I'll never go there again, and haven't been there in 25-plus years, so it really doesn't matter what's going on there, does it? I can't imagine they spend a lot of time worrying about me, either.

So perhaps they'll forgive me if I forever immure them in amber, and imagine Woonsocket as the place where Duke Robillard plays in Chan's every night, and all the girls have big hair and bad eyesight and tube tops, forevermore.

[Updated: From their website, Chan's seems to have attempted to cut out the middleman, and produced a chimera of Duke Robillard in a tube top, with uneven results:]

Local musicians are never going to figure out that you need to learn to sing to be a singer, are they?

I So Very Much Want One Of These

2012-01-01T10:41:00.001-05:00

I feel a sort of affinity for this approach to making things for daily use. There is an acknowledgement of a lack of elegance in daily life. Searching for a kind of delight in using mundane things. A desire for at least a hat tip to continuity while not being a stick-in-the-mud about progress.

When I was young I had to type things on an ancient manual typwriter, and use carbon paper to save a copy for myself. I remember distinctly the first time I saw a Xerox machine. A Polaroid camera. A teletype machine. A fax. A cell phone. MS Office. I remember I was somewhat drunk at a party at my home, and some guests and I managed to get me on the Internet on dial-up on a lark. I remember loading Doom on a floppy and running it in DOS.

Sometimes it's not possible to say whether we've entirely shunned modernity or we're so far ahead of everyone else that we're the Jetsons and most everyone else is the Flintstones. We don't have cable TV. Our friends and family think we're living in 1965. You watch cable TV? And you get the newspaper printed and delivered? Send your children to school on a bus? Commute? Have heat fed by a big, rusty tub of carboniferous goo in your basement? Shop at a mall? How quaint you are.

I make things that are cutting-edge anachronisms. I like to see fellow travelers.

USB Typewriter

If I Had My Way, I Would Move To Another Lifetime

2011-12-31T10:36:00.000-05:00

I'm showing an affirming flame as hard as I can. It's all I have to warm my hands over sometimes.

Thanks to all my readers, and commenters, and everyone that purchases things through my Amazon links, and bought my book, and of course my furniture. I'd like Sippican Cottage to be an ironic point of light, where the just exchange their messages. It seems like it to me, though it is not my place to say.

Happy New Year to all.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.  

W.H.Auden --September 1st, 1939

The World Is A Wonderful Place

2011-12-30T15:44:00.001-05:00

Sue Foley. The world is a wonderful place because it produces things like female guitar gunslingers from Ottawa that perform in Sao Paolo, among other more likely things.

100 Years In 10 Minutes

2011-12-29T09:37:00.001-05:00

Some interesting orthography and grammar in there. Must be someone that speaks English as a second language, or was an honor student at an American public school.

Never Liked Old Beetle-Brow Much

2011-12-28T10:27:00.000-05:00

Most popular music is designed to annoy you. Raucous, maybe, or tedious, or teased into an undynamic drone. I cannot pass the time with it for long. I often have music going in the shop, quietly, to mask the buzz of the fluorescent lights, but I'm apparently not as interested in being told that everything sucks in 4/4 time by someone that's never gotten up before noon and has their M&Ms sorted for them as I used to be. Life does suck -- or at least sucks the life out of you. Why make it worse?

My wife likes the Pastoral Symphony. I never liked old beetle-brow much myself. He was having a resurgence back in the seventies when I played an orchestra instrument, and he rubbed me the wrong way. And what was that little shite's name in Peanuts that was always sawing away at him? Linux or Schroedinger or Sloppy or something. Who cares? Peanuts always sucked, too. Discerning grade-schoolers read B.C. .

But my wife wears me down in the most pleasant ways and I find myself softening on the old, deaf, dead Napoleon bumkisser. He sounds at least 14 percent better than the fluorescent lights to me now. That's a damn sight better than Looking Glass or Sugarloaf ever was.

The Rexall

2011-12-26T15:35:00.000-05:00

They had the Rexall for this sick society. The operation was a success, but the patient died.

Open Is A Time

2011-12-24T10:00:00.001-05:00

I WISH IT WOULD rain. No. Sleet. Sleet would finish the scene nicely. Rain is God’s mop. It washes away the dirt and corruption. I’ve got no use for snow, either; the fat flakes are too jolly. Snow makes a fire hydrant into a wedding cake. I want sleet.
    I’d rather pull my collar up and hunch my shoulders as if blows from an unseen and merciless boxer were raining down on me. I don't want a Christmas card. I want the Old Testament.
    Old or new - I knew it. Father and mother would open the Bible to a random page and place an unseeing finger anywhere and use it for their answer to whatever question was at hand. They'd torture the found scripture to fit the problem a lot, but it was uncanny how often that old musty book would burp out something at least fit for a double-take. But any Ouija board does that, doesn't it?
    It was just cold and bracing. No sleet. I didn't need to be clear-minded right now. Paul's tip of the hat to the season, a sort of syphilitic looking tree, hung over your head as you entered the bar like it was Damocle's birthday, not the Redeemer's. It was kinda funny to see it out there, because inside it was always the same day and always the same time. Open is a time.
    People yield without thinking in these situations. It had been years since I had found anyone sitting on that stool, my place. It was just understood, like the needle in the compass always pointing the same way for everyone. Paul never even greeted me anymore, just put it wordlessly down in front of me as I hit the seat. Some men understand other men.

    It was already kind of late. My foreman said for all he cared, I could bang on those machines until Satan showed up in the Ice Capades, but I didn't feel like working on Christmas Eve until the clock struck midnight. That's a bad time to be alone and sober.
    "I'm closing early tonight," Paul said, and he didn't go back to his paper or his taps. He just stood there eying me. I took the drink.
    "You've made a mess of this, Paul," I stammered out, coughing a bit, "What the hell is this?"
    "It's ginger ale. You're coming with me tonight."
    I could see it all rolled out in front of me. Pity. Kindness. Friendship.
    "No." I rose to leave.
    "You'll come, or you'll never darken the doorstep here again."
    Now a man finds himself in these spots from time to time. There are altogether too many kind souls in the world. They think they understand you. They want to help you. But what Paul will never understand is that he was helping me by taking my money and filling the glass and minding his own. It was the only help there was. A man standing in the broken shards of his life doesn't have any use for people picking up each piece and wondering aloud if this bit wasn't so bad. They never understand that the whole thing was worth something once but the pieces are nothing and you can never reassemble them again into anything.
    I went. Worse than I imagined, really. Wife. Kids. Home. Happy. I sat in the corner chair, rock-hard sober, and then masticated like a farm animal at the table.
    Paul was smarter, perhaps, than I gave him credit for. He said nothing to me, or about me. His children nattered and his wife placed the food in front of me and they talked of everything and nothing as if I wasn't there – no, as if I had always been there. As if the man with every bit of his life written right on his face had always sat in that seat.
    I wasn't prepared for it when he took out the Bible. Is he a madman like my own father was? It's too much. The children sat by the tree, and he opened the Bible and placed his finger in there. I wanted to run screaming into the street. I wanted to murder them all and wait for the police. I wanted to lay down on the carpet and die.
    "Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."
    He put the children to bed, to dream of the morning. His wife kissed him, said only "good night" to me, and went upstairs. We sat for a long moment by the fire, the soft gentle sucking sound of the logs being consumed audible now that the children were gone. The fire was reflected in the ornaments on the tree. The mantel clock banged through the seconds.
    "Do you want something?" he asked.
    "Ginger ale."

(From my collection of flash fiction, The Devil's In The Cows)

Pure Pop For Now People

2011-12-23T16:10:00.001-05:00

Jellyfish

Stuff And Junk I Built

2011-12-22T15:04:00.000-05:00

A nice customer asked me to build them a game table.

I get asked all the time to build things I don't build. I take it as a compliment. People see things I do make, and like them, but need something else. They figure they'd rather give me their money than someone else. I'm grateful for the offer, but 99 times out of 100 I pass. I took a run at this one because it's a version of something I already make.

Because I make things, it doesn't follow that it doesn't matter what sort of thing I'm making. I can make most anything. I've built everything from birdhouses to football stadiums for money. But I'm not in those businesses right now. It's a bad idea for a business to take on work they're not set up to do properly, and do it simply because they want or need more money. Lots of businesses expand continually until they fail utterly. They cover the loss from the last ill-advised idea with the next ill-advised idea. All the while they're touted as good businessmen because --well, they got bigger, didn't they? Sure, until they got very small indeed. I'm a cottage furniture maker from Maine, working all alone for all intents and purposes. Who would you call a better businessman, me or the honcho of Maine Cottage Furniture, with their dozens of employees and millions in receipts and their factories and showrooms?

It's a trick question. You all answered Maine Cottage Furniture, but they went out of business. They were superior business people to me -- right up until the time the bank padlocked their door. Sippican Cottage Furniture is going on eight years old now.

People picture me as an artisan. They do not picture my business as a business in the true sense of the word, but it is. It's another kind of compliment, calling me an artisan -- they mean I don't strike them as a hack or rapacious -- but being an artisan alone could get me into trouble. I've been avoiding looking for trouble lately. Enough trouble has showed up at my door already without me looking for it. It tried jiggling the knob when I got tired of answering the door, and it climbs in my windows when I'm asleep if I'm not careful.

A business like mine is a kind of bet. It's a very big parley bet, actually. I'm making a lot of sequential bets, and all of them have to turn out perfectly, every time, or I'm dead on the spot. And there's all this stuff that goes into the process that's essentially invisible to the end user that looms like legions of Kongs over me all the time. I have to bet on a design and know how long it takes to make it and what kind of wood it will be made from and where I'll get that wood and how much it will cost and how it needs to be stored and how much waste it will have and how hard it will be on the tools and what kind of finish it will have and what kind of ambient temperature and humidity and ventilation all that will require and what sort of hardware to use and where to get it and what sort of lead time it requires and how to package it when it's done and how to ship it and how to display it online and how to find potential customers and collect their money and...

I could go on, but you get the picture. I don't cut down the trees. That's about it. Most businessmen pay other people to cover large swathes of the business landscape for them, but I can't. I have to cover every eventuality immediately out of my own exertions and remove food from my family's mouths to cover any loss. It leads to a profound kind of caution that people with lots of resources behind them barely recognize. Businessmen read self-help books and then cobble together a PowerPoint about the hedgehog strategy they think they should try, but they disintegrate into a weepy puddle if there are no bagels in the breakroom one day or their BlackBerry has an outage. It's a clinically obese hedgehog strategy they're talking about. My hedgehog's anorectic.

I had a good friend try to pay me another compliment a while back, telling me I was a bad businessman and should quit and be a writer. They meant it as a compliment about my writing, but I've turned it over in my mind a lot since it was offered. I at least consider what intelligent and pleasant people say to me. Sometimes I even take their advice or make the table they want. But there seems to be only one way the public measures business acumen now. Are you writing this essay from your yacht? No? Then you must suck at it, whatever "it" is. I take a different view. Who could do more, with less? It's a great way to keep score. Context.

No, I'm not a bad businessman. In many ways, I'm a spectacular businessman. I place into evidence Exhibit A: I'm still in business.

(Update: The Sippican Game Table)

Read The Meteor, Or You Won't Know What It Says

2011-12-20T09:32:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again. The time of year between January and January when I try to pass off dusty old writing as fresh one more time. Seeing as this is the Intertunnel, I have to add a Top Ten List, too. It's like a law.

But recycling isn't enough. I need to kill at least three birds with one stone if I'm going to get a half-day off on Christmas. So since our friend Aubuchon Connery, the general factotum over to the Rumford Meteor, has asked me to help him catapult his "News straight from the seat of Oxford County" up into the rarified air of the greater World Wide Web -- where it can explode into many interesting colors, or something -- I figure I'll recycle his stuff and knock off early. Western Maine needs the publicity in any case. If it wasn't for the paper mill, no one downwind would even know we were here.

Actually, I think Aubuchon is angling to get Clint Locke Muskie, a local swell that runs an extravagant quarter-page ad for his fill dirt, artisanal cupcake, coal hod fabrication, storm door, and amateur podiatry business in the Lewiston Sun-Urinal (every week! A one-percenter fer sure!), to give the Meteor a try instead. Aubuchon says if he gets a guy like that on account, he can get his ice auger professionally sharpened twice a year and not give a second thought to the expense.

So here's double duty, Rumfid style. The TOP TEN HEADLINES OF 2011 from The Rumford Meteor: Please disregard the fact that there are twenty five items in my top ten list. It's a habit I got into in the ten-items-or-less checkout lane when I'm buying booze at the Mexico Walmart, and I can't help myself anymore.

The Straight Dope says of the The Rumford Meteor: "It's like Lake Wobegon. On Crack." They're obviously "from away." We're all on Bath Salts around here.

The Rumford Meteor

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. I SAID, SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN!

2011-12-19T15:06:00.000-05:00

I SAID, SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN!

SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN!

YOU HEARD ME!

SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN!

SANTA! CLAUS! IS COMING. TO. TOOOWWWNNN!

How To Operate A Model T

2011-12-18T10:07:00.001-05:00

A kindly man with a vapor trail of museums and sponsors and institutions behind him explains how to drive a Model T.

Explains it to you, I mean. I already know how to drive a Model T, of course. It involves, like so many things in this world that turn out well, being friendly first.

Drove around for a half an hour down one green allee after another, my little son under my arm in the tufted leather back seat of that car; a car just seven years short of one hundred years old, with no roof but the trees and no care in the world. It was like robbing a museum.

Is There Hay In Your Bed Today?

I've Been Doing My Taxes With An Adding Machine Like This One. I'm Almost Done With My Schedule C From 1986

2011-12-17T09:12:00.001-05:00

Tango D'Amore

2011-12-16T18:22:00.000-05:00

Sit and drink and sit and drink and sit.

If she doesn't show up soon, I swear I'm going to wear this guy's guts for suspenders. I'm going to take this place apart brick by brick. That's not much of a boast. The bricks only have a passing relationship to each other anyway. The mortar looks like it was mixed from the stuff in funeral urns and mouthwash. The spiderwebs are structural, installed in the 17th century. The spiders have long since moved to a nicer place, like a sewer or the bottom of a shoe. Columbus's dandruff is hanging in the stuff.

I grew up in the street and turned out as tough and smart as any hydrant, but around here I'm like a clockmaker. They come and go as they please, and setting a date or a time on something is like lighting candles in church. Might work; who knows? I like the churches here better, too. There's guys on the walls eating people whole and stabbing them with pitchforks and cooking them in pots. I go in there when the monk's off and sit among my own kind.

The waitress ain't half bad --more like three-quarters -- but all these dago women sure got some melons in their sacks. I swear they wear brassieres to hold them down, not up. They'd just as soon stab you as tell you to take out the garbage, but that's half the fun in it, ain't it? But sleeping with one eye on the door and one eye on the kitchen knives wears a man out after a while. I wish the Germans were still here so I could kill someone and not get yelled at.

Tinkerer, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

2011-12-15T12:36:00.000-05:00

Les Paul is cooler than everyone that's ever played his guitar.

It's a very specific kind of cool I'm referring to. He was resolutely square, of course. I've known many men like him. Back in the day you could spot them easily. They wore short sleeve dress shirts in the winter and clip-on ties. They had boxy shoes and a bit of grit under their fingernails. They had basements full of oscilloscopes instead of screwdrivers. They were tinkerers.

A tinkerer is a visionary of a very particular kind. The world seems entirely full of "visionaries" nowadays; small H hitlers and amateur Gandhis and everything in between. Read the comments section of any major newspaper and feast your eyes on the ready-made, misspelled manifestos people have on hand for the most mundane of topics. But of course, the peasant's idea of how to be Napoleon is strictly between him and anyone that will listen to him. Napoleon's busy.

There's others thick on the ground that people mistake for visionaries. But screaming at Chinese workers through California accomplices, telling them to make it with one less screw showing, or jump off their factory trying, is not visionary. You're just a wealthy jerk. No, it takes a particular sort of visionary to see what's possible, right now, using what's lying around handy. Practical magic syncretists. Think of Hewlett and Packard in their garage. That sort of thing.

Les Paul invented nothing, or a lot of things, depending on how you look at it. The solid body electric guitar, multi-track recording, overdubbing during recording, various reverb and delay effects. He was actually an innovative and interesting performer, along with his wife, Mary, which is unusual for tinkerers. Lots of luthiers can't play a lick. He's called a pioneer, another word for a guy in there mixing it up on the edge of what's possible when few others saw the potential. I prefer the word "tinkerer." Colt, Ford, Edison, Marconi; lots of others you could name wouldn't turn up their nose at the title, no matter how successful they became as a result of their efforts. I wouldn't, while I was waiting for my sunrise, alone in my shop.

Sippican Cottage. The Fine Print

2011-12-14T16:16:00.003-05:00

*No purchase necessary. Some assembly required. Tax, title,license and dealer fees extra. Do not exceed 4 doses in a 24-hour period. You will get wet on this ride. One size fits most. Batteries not included. The white zone is for the immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no parking in the red zone. Dramatization. Proof of mailing does not constitute proof of delivery. Shake well before opening. Contains eggs. Also available left-handed. Before posting, please take a minute to review our posting rules and our legal/privacy policy. All lyrics by Hammerstein, not Rodgers. Hours may vary by location. No smoking or open flames. Professional driver. Closed course. Any similarities between the characters, locations or events depicted herein and actual persons, living or dead, locations or events is purely coincidental and unintentional. Use as directed. Must be 18 to enter. Positive identification required. Handle with care. Do not pass on right. Not responsible for lost or stolen articles. User assumes all risks. No right turn on red. If you can read this, you're too close. Ass, grass, or cash; no one rides for free. Occupancy by more than 135 persons is dangerous and unlawful but kinda fun. Interior is genuine rich, Corinthian leather. Viewer discretion is advised but not anticipated. Not available in stores. Do not feed the animals. Available for Windows, Mac, and the seven people running Linux. 70% cotton, 30% nylon. Nos falamos Portugues. Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. The cake is a lie. Limit one per customer per visit. No trespassing. No loitering. No soliciting. Please don't eat the daisies. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Ensure equipment is properly grounded prior to operation. Registration required. Not recommended for women who are nursing, pregnant or may become pregnant. Ladies drink free. Apply directly to forehead. Closed Sundays and holidays. Filmed before a live studio audience. Available only for a limited time. Follow the yellow brick road. Lights on for safety. Made in China. Do not use as a flotation device. Stay off the grass. Offer void where prohibited. Installation extra. The rain in Spain should be expected to fall mainly on the plain. All sales final. Two-Year service agreement required. Non-toxic. HTML enabled. Don't try this at home. Your ad here. Tamper-resistant packaging. Expect delays. Refrigerate after opening. Restrictions apply. See store for details. No shirt, no shoes, no service. Have a nice day. 

Fascinating, But Not Interesting

2011-12-13T14:05:00.000-05:00

For all intents and purposes, I never see television. My wife and I like watching football games together, though, so we grab a stream online now and then. It's generally a feed from some far-flung, random place. Unlike watching cable TV, there is no remote control to allow you to hammer through the channels when they show commercials. You end up seeing everything. It's like a glimpse into another world for me.

I've remarked before that I appear to be the last male on earth that doesn't need a truck, and can still get an erection without a handful of pills and two bathtubs out in the landscape. I'm not in the market for diet beer, either. That means 99 percent of the commercials are lost on me. It's Christmas, so the truck commercials have morphed into "buy your wife or your metrosexual significant other a car" for a present. We're wondering if we'll have three square meals and heat on Christmas, so it's a little weird seeing everyone else agonizing over buying each other cars --when they're not commenting on MarketWatch articles they just read on their iPads that they're so poor they need Obamacare vouchers to afford their Levitra prescriptions. The whole mess just sort of rolls by, oddly, like a flood of flotsam from a tonier town wrecked upstream. The average American has grown fascinating, but not interesting.

Never mind all that. If I took an interest in other people's lunacy, I'd have precious little time for my own. There was another thing that caught my eye. It was a commercial repeated endlessly on an Arkansas local station the game was on. Other than the crazed amusement you can have watching the Swedish TV station feed, the Arkansas feed is the best for delightful incongruity. We call the Swedish feed "The Hitler Channel," because every-other commercial on there is some sort of WW II program promo. The Arkansas feed is all tree stands for deer hunting, weirdo furniture stores, and misshapen local news docents. Everyone looks exactly like Monica Lewinsky no matter what they're selling. The only nod to Hitler on the Arkansas station is Michael Jordan selling T-shirts, because he's got a Hitler moustache now. I'm from Boston, so I always thought it was Bill Laimbeer that was Hitler, but who am I to argue with Michael Jordan?

No human is entirely immune to advertising, no matter how we like to flatter ourselves, but my antibodies are higher than the next guy's, and I had to ask my wife this morning who the hell was selling useless toy tools to useless tools right after every single fair catch time out. Ah yes; Crapsman:

Any effeminate cubicle drone that keeps a blog instead of doing his job would make a tedious point that if the gender roles were reversed, and a woman was unwrapping a vacuum cleaner by the Yule log, there's be nothing but a greasy spot where the ad agency used to stand when the feminists were finished with the place. But that's not me. That's not what's going on. Those tools are not to be useful with.

I'm surrounded by tools all day long. They hold no terrors or excitement for me. They just is, to coin a malapropism. I make furniture, but I don't have elaborate tools, really; but then again, I don't have toys from Sears, either. Most of mine are just big lumps of nondescript cast iron and noise. I use them to do things and that's that. There are no lightning bolt stickers on the side of them.

Those tools in the commercial aren't about being constructive. They are a form of flattery, the seemingly useful given to the seemingly useful to feel better about themselves. But there's something more *ahem* afoot here. There is a female equivalent to the childish man ego being massaged in that commercial, and it isn't a vacuum cleaner, or even a Lexus with a bow:

Men and women are plunged together in modern office life and they're not allowed to have overtly human lives with clear delineations between the sexes anymore. The women have to pretend they're sort-of men and the men have to pretend they're sort-of women. They all mill around in cubicle farms glaring at each other and wondering whether to ask each other out on a date or sue each other for looking at each other like that. There's laws against anything really productive (smelting only has something to do with lunch now) going on in most workplaces now, so sublimating everyone into the sexless iBorg doesn't hurt the company much. You shuffle some pixels and then you go home and watch TV no matter what sort of wedding vegetables you're packing.

But a human is a human. Girls want to feel like girls, so no matter how dowdy and sensible they feel they have to look to make partner. They can't help themselves and buy the cruel shoes over and over again like a geisha girl would. And the men, such as they are, need something to hang on the pegboard in the basement, even though an Ikea shelf is equivalent to a particle accelerator that needs assembling to them.

God bless you, kids; kick off --er, pry off -- your shoes, put down your cordless screwdriver with the battery you've forgotten to charge for four years, and hold hands while you watch the Hitler channel. Maybe you'll get lucky, the Cialis will kick in, and you'll end up with a kid. You won't know what to do with the little ankle-biter either, but you can play with their Legos and Barbies, and you'll finally be happy.

I Used To Be Four Percent As Cool As This

2011-12-12T19:24:00.001-05:00

That makes me a lot cooler than your average person.

My Last Time On Earth I Lived A Whole World Of Sin

2011-12-11T16:17:00.001-05:00

I'm not much better this time around, either. Still, Divine Providence sent Stevie Wonder to ease the pain.

Thinking Of Hiring Product Safety Consultants. These Guys Seem Legit

2011-12-10T10:34:00.001-05:00

My Approach Isn't This Complicated

2011-12-09T09:55:00.001-05:00

The Devil's In The Cows

Fairly Deep. Thanks For Asking

2011-12-08T14:54:00.001-05:00

The Legion of Rock Stars totally rock. OK; if not totally, then they at least rock in large part. 60/40, minimum. They are the greatest thing since sliced running bread and water. They transport me to another dimension. The Fifth Dimension is already taken, so it must be like, say, the seventh or eight dimension. It's, like, the dimension around back, near the dumpster and the stack of milk crates. The LRS were put on this planet by a higher power to point to the place on the doll where the Bee Gees touched us all. And YouTube is free, which makes the whole shebang a bargain.

Let's Go Places And Look At Things

2011-12-07T11:51:00.001-05:00

I Always Liked Sly Stone's Understated Fashion Sense

2011-12-06T14:33:00.001-05:00

Dear lord that's some greezy funk for 1974.

In 1974, you could have gone to the big old movie theater with a huge screen and no one texting and seen The Godfather Part II and Chinatown, and then Thunderbolt and Lightfoot at the drive-in. When you got home, Sly and the Family Stone was on Midnight Special.

Other than that, there was nothing to do.

Something Else Happens

2011-12-05T11:07:00.001-05:00

This is Saigon.

I'm sorta old. When I was young, I'd sit in the living room in my footie pajamas while Huntley and Brinkley counted the day's dead for us on the evening's news. It was like some insane football score from a game that never ended.

There are a lot of pundits who like to invoke the law of unintended consequences to explain everything everywhere. They are mostly mistaken about everything, because they don't understand what's going on, and they misapprehend very intended outcomes as unintended collateral damage. The flip side of this sort of thinking is just as confused -- always spotting a plan cooked up somewhere, designed by cabals if you don't like it or heroes if you do, in random, or at least widely dispersed, individual activity. It's tiresome sorting through this sort of thinking. It's an opinion onion with no center. I'm especially weary of a commentariat that tells me they are experts at everything because they can half-remember more of the misapprehensions they just read in newspapers, all written by partisan dullards, than the next guy.

I wonder (no I don't, I'm lying my ass off, I don't wonder at all) how so many people can be so very wrong about so many things, and have that wrongness demonstrated to them over and over, and in such a lapidary manner --incontrovertible-- and they still never draw any sort of sensible conclusion about their worldview and the faulty approach to analyzing things that gave it birth. The average, educated person has an internal ruler that's missing two or three numbers and they keep using it to measure time, stir their porridge, beat their dog, and set their oven temperature anyway.

I don't subscribe to the law of unintended consequences because it's like saying you obey gravity or think capitalism works. Like there's any choice in the matter. As if you're choosing not to fly off into space. Like the natural behavior of humans to barter and accumulate is something you're ambivalent about, and have a manifesto you're working on to replace it.

I subscribe to Something Else Happens. That's generally what happens. That video is a long way from black and white footage of napalm and helo extractions and Dean Rusk and Ho Chi Minh and Abbie Hoffman. There have been legions of men and women lecturing --hectoring-- me for a generation about what it was and why it was and what it meant and who was to blame and they're still rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic of their opinions and hoping no one looks at what they said last week about it. But there it is. Something Else.

Pink Sippican Cottage Tank Tops Coming Soon. In The Meantime, Listen To Matt The Electrician

2011-12-03T10:02:00.001-05:00

Picking through the debris of the last generation's kitsch was once my job. There's a fine line you have to straddle to poke fun and entertain at the same time. You have to have an affection for the object of your depredations. If you say you hate things while obsessing about them, there's something desperately wrong with you. It might make for page hits on a blog, but its damn poor entertainment.

My Heir is picking through the flotsam and jetsam of pop culture now. I find it interesting to see what attracts his attention. His friends play a setlist that looks like ancient oldies to them, but is 90 percent of a setlist of "current" stuff my friends and I used to play back in the day. I don't find that all that interesting. I beat it to death for money already. It's the other stuff that I find interesting. What would a teenager that isn't a dullard listen to? Why, Matt the Electrician, of course.

Once upon a time, there was a youg man named Matt Sever. He lived in Austin, TX, and he worked as a journeyman electrician. Every morning, when it was still dark outside, he would go to work, and wire houses all day long in the blistering Texas heat. When he would come home, again, it was dark outside. And then, sometimes, with no time to shower or change his clothes, he would go straight to the bars and nightclubs of Austin to play his songs for whomever would listen. And he would apologize for his appearance, and explain to the audience that he was an electrician, and he found a certain nobility in this, even if no one wanted to sit too close to the stage. So they called him Matt The Electrician, and he did not mind this, for he was proud of himself, for there is no shame in a hard days work.

But eventually, he quit his job as an electrician, to spend more time writing and playing songs, and the name stuck with him, because everyone needs an electrician sometimes. And there are some who say, that when the moon is full, and Jupiter is aligned with Mars, you can often hear Matt The Electrician in the distance, wiring a house, and whistling softly to himself.

Matt the Electrician

There's Something About The Production Values Of This Video That Leaves Me Expecting Moe Howard To Appear And Slap Someone

2011-12-02T11:44:00.001-05:00

It's Mendelssohn's Third Racket or something.

Buggin' Outah Vinalhaven, Maine

2011-12-01T11:10:00.001-05:00

Mainers call them "bugs."

My uncle was a lobsterman for a while. Went out to George's Bank from Cape Cod. Imagine the hardest construction work you ever did. Now do it during an earthquake that never stops with a hose pointed at your face in a walk-in cooler.

That Glorious Song Of Old

2011-11-29T20:57:00.001-05:00

Over there in my ramshackle blogroll thingie, you'll find Daughter of the Golden West. There aren't enough blogs like that on the Intertunnel. Or people like that on the planet, now that you mention it. It's pleasant, and it's location specific. If I need a dash of Southern California, I go over there and get a fix. One of the greatest services a blogger can perform is to simply depict what's outside their windows. I used to live a few hours north of there, and I miss it sometimes.

The Daughter and her daughter have a business. They sell vintage Christmas ornaments and assorted other Yule swag at 32 Degrees North. They sent my sons Advent calendars. Marvelous.

When I was young, such things were rampant. We had little caroling books --and used them-- and made garlands from strips of construction paper and wreaths from computer punch cards. We hung up those big, garish Christmas lights with red, orange, blue, and white bulbs, on the tree outside the door. We wrapped our front door like a present. We had fake snow in the corners of the windows. We favored all sorts of things we don't see much of now. In many ways I feel as though my life has been thrown back in time. Because we didn't have very much, we had to take a bit of time and care with everything. Little trifles become more memorable that way. It's certainly like that for me again.

My little son has a very orderly mind and likes calendars and lists and thing of that nature, and he's quite taken with his Advent calendar. We're quite taken with him, of course, and grateful to people who are kind to him and his brother.

32 Degrees North

O ye beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

All The Things I'm Missin', Good Vittles, Love, and Kissin', Are Waiting At The End Of My Ride

2011-11-28T13:14:00.001-05:00

When my wife and I were looking for a house a couple years back, we drove all over Maine using Google maps. The realtors would never tell you if there were twenty-five cars up on blocks in the neighbor's yard, but Google is Sauron's eye.

When I'm Good And Ready

2011-11-27T09:38:00.001-05:00

If I got to go get a roscoe I'll get me a roscoe and then what? But I don't need no roscoe for you. This place is nothing but a dunghill, but I'm the cock on top of it, brother. You don't wanna come down here into my chicks. Ask anybody. You got a razor? I like it when they got a razor or some knuckles. Nothing but a minute's work and then the Man don't care what I done to you. But you don't look like you could do nothing anyway.

You see that car out front? That's me, brother. I go where I please and I do what I want and there's no bud dee can tell me different. You cats always be measuring yourself to other peoples but I'm the only yardstick here and you better know it. You don't know what you don't know and that's bad for your health if you get a notion. Why don't you slide on down the rail and let me be. There's high test and wimmins enough for everybody after I'm through and gone.

When I'm good and ready.

Orange Line

2011-11-26T10:19:00.001-05:00

I wished I had you in Carrickfergus,
Only for nights in Ballygrand,
I would swim over the deepest ocean,
The deepest ocean to be by your side.

But the sea is wide and I can't swim over
And neither have I wings to fly.
I wish I could find me a handy boatman
To ferry me over to my love and die.

My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy days so long ago.
My boyhood friends and my own relations.
Have all passed on like the melting snow.

So I'll spend my days in endless roving,
Soft is the grass and my bed is free.
Oh to be home now in Carrickfergus,
On the long road down to the salty sea.

And in Kilkenny it is reported
On marble stone there as black as ink,
With gold and silver I did support her
But I'll sing no more now till I get a drink.

I'm drunk today and I'm rarely sober,
A handsome rover from town to town.
Oh but I am sick now and my days are numbered
Come all ye young men and lay me down.

I wish you'd put the battered kettle on
The bag could take one steeping more
I'd walk for miles across a rocky down
To hear the whistle we're all waiting for

The gulf yawns wide and I can't leap over
Until my time is drawing nigh
You're laid to rest in the nonesuch clover
When you were here you slipped on by

Those Christmas days and our destinations
Trolley rides through the dirty snow
My childhood's gone, like passing stations
Eyes full of tears, some from the cold

One Of These Mornings, The Chain Is Gonna Break

2011-11-25T12:42:00.001-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T06:05:00.001-05:00

Hope someone at your house knows how to cook.

The Vice-President In Charge Of Trefoil

2011-11-18T09:01:00.001-05:00

Still some wicked cool benches left over at Sippican Cottage Furniture's Ready To Ship page. They're all very nice, but none as nice as this one.

My little son is eight. He "helps" me in my workshop. He's fond of earning a quarter by vacuuming the floor, for instance. He gets an equal amount of dust on himself and into the vacuum, but either way it's not on the floor anymore.

An eight-year-old is prone to flights of fancy. He's as likely to ask you if we could vacation on Jupiter as anything more mundane. The world is full of possibilities for him. There's very little world in the rear-view mirror to discourage him in any way.

In a lull in the dust fighting, he looked at me in a way I'm accustomed to seeing just before some sort of trouble. It's usually followed by a request for us to make a ray gun with a paper towel tube and the hot glue gun. It wouldn't be so bad except that he expects it to actually emit some sort of rays when we're finished, or it's a failure. He hears not now too often, as I work most all the time at one thing or another.

"Why don't you put a shamrock or a heart on your benches, dad, like you do with your steppers? It would look nicer, and then you could sell them for more because they're better and you could pay me for inventing it. Then I'd have lots of money and could buy a Bionicle."

I began to disabuse him of this notion as a wild flight of childish fancy and impractical and daddy's too busy to...

Then I stopped and realized it was a bona fide good idea, and made one. If you buy it, the kid gets 10 bucks, and I probably won't get my floor vacuumed again for the forty weeks worth of quarters that represents.

Sippican Cottage's Ready to Ship.

An Arts And Crafts History Of The World

2011-11-15T19:46:00.001-05:00

Peppy, pepe.
Kalle Mattson

If Silence Was Golden, You Couldn't Raise A Dime

2011-11-12T10:18:00.001-05:00

Everyone loves Mose Allison. Tom Lehrer. George Carlin. Mark Twain. They belong to a select few that can spend a goodly portion of their time being irascible, but somehow manage to make being the rock in the world's shoe feel like a massage to the pedestrians.

"If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while." --Tom Lehrer

I Am Not A Good Father. This Is A Good Father

2011-11-11T10:38:00.000-05:00

I am a father. I take that rather seriously. News media refer to the persons simply responsible for impregnating women as "fathers." I don't.

The word father does not allow for any hyphenations or qualifiers to me. You either are, or you aren't a father. Pass/fail. If I am proud of anything in this life, it's that I'm told by people I respect that I pass as a father. It's enough praise, but it's not enough accomplishment to suit me. I keep trying.

I'll break my own rule now, and use an adjective to describe a father. The man in the video, little Ivor's father, Jorge Cardile, is a good father.

He is not a good father because he succeeded in his effort. If it had failed miserably, and had no effect whatsoever, it wouldn't have affected my opinion of him one whit -- quite the opposite -- for a prayer is not the pull of a lever expecting a gumball.

Jorge Cardile

Hostile Workplace

2011-11-10T12:16:00.001-05:00

In a previous life, I supervised the construction of commercial buildings -- filling stations, convenience stores, restaurants -- that sort of thing.

After a short while, I was in charge of most everyone. When you're in charge, all the ticklish things make it to your desk. The staff tries on their own for a while, and then it escalates to supervised trying, and finally at the end of the winnowing process, there's nothing left but really tough things that only a person with the keys to the kingdom can handle.

The worst stuff was what employees would hide for years at a time. Carrying uncollectable debt on Accounts Receivable forever, never quite completing a project until a place needs to be remodeled before it's officially finished, stuff like that. A couple of times project managers went into the hospital for short periods and a casual look over what was hidden under their desk blotter gave me an aneurysm. The passing of an employee out of the building was like the old business saying about the tide going out: It affects everyone the same amount, but you get to see who isn't wearing any swim trunks. It was at the tail end of one of those cathartic employee convulsions that I gazed upon the second most beautiful woman in the world. You don't forget people like that.

There was a convenience store/ gas station combo that had been built before I was even employed by the company, but was never really finished to the last jot and tittle, and there was some money left on the table and I had to go get it. The building was in the inner city of Boston. I arrived in the late afternoon after a long drive. The place looked as neat as a pin, like it was ten minutes old. I got out to look around a bit, then went inside.

The building was built in what we termed "the urban style." What was meant by that was that it had to be constructed to withstand a zombie apocalypse, a full-on riot, a nuclear strike, and World War III at the same time. The building was constructed of textured concrete block. The block was ribbed to make it harder to deface. A concrete block might seem substantial to a layman but it's hollow inside and won't stop a high-caliber round. While laying up the blocks, each cavity in the wall was specified to be filled completely with mortar instead of the insulation a regular wall might be filled with. Reinforcing steel bars were put vertically through the webs before the mortar, because it was common for hijacked cars and trucks to be rammed through the sides of such buildings for smash-and grabs. In addition to the wall reinforcement, bollards were set deeply into the ground in front of any part of the facade with any sort of penetration in it. The bollards were steel pipe that were filled with concrete.

The roof was flat with a short parapet wall, as is common with such structures. HVAC (Heating,Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning) and other mechanical contrivances were installed on the roof. In the "urban" environment, every opening that was required in the roof , some large, some very small, had to have a steel grate welded over it before the units were installed on them, to protect from entry to the building after removal of the machinery from their bases.

The front of the building had a lot of glass, centered in the facade. It was all bullet-proof glass, and not ordinary bullet proof glass, but a form of it the suppliers often referred to informally as "military." That was just to protect the building during the day when it was open; there was an enormous sort-of steel garage door that was lowered over the glass part of the facade after the business closed for the night. The building became a short, squat metal and masonry bunker that showed no opening whatsoever. At one time, these sorts of buildings has a four-inch square window in the back door so that employees going out to the dumpster could look outside first, but a would-be robber had shot an employee in the face through the window at another building, and the architects changed to a blank, steel, bullet-proof door with a camera instead. There were cameras all over gas stations already, to allow the clerks to shut off dispensers if people were smoking and so forth; one more didn't cost that much more. That other employee at the other place died, by the way, and the robber couldn't reach the knob by reaching through the window hole, so he never did get inside.

All the money in such places was treated like radioactive waste, and we used to install safes that were welded onto a sort of steel sled, and the concrete floor was laid over and around them. There was a kind of slot with a slim rammer that you folded folding money over, and injected it into the safe. There was no way for any employee taken hostage to open the safe.

I went through the front door to talk to someone about whatever needed attention before we got our money. It was a conventional convenience store, with all the usual stuff that's in one. But instead of entering the store, you entered a sort of quiz-show booth, about the size of a roomy phone booth or a cramped handicapped bathroom, maybe. Nothing and no one in the store was accessible to a customer. Items were displayed on shelves facing the door. There was a stainless steel drawer, like maybe you'd find in a supermax prison, and everything going in or out went through it. I was in the noticing business, and noticed that the size and shape of the drawer was painstakingly designed to keep a robber from being able to put a hand holding a gun and turning the barrel up to the cashier when the drawer was half-opened; it would break your wrist to try it.

The glass inside was way, way more bulletproof than the bulletproof glass on the outside. It gave a hint of greenish parallax to the view inside, like everything was under water filled with algae. It was like a window on a submarine. You were expected to point to what you wanted, pay first, and the item would be placed in the drawer. There was no penetration of any kind, and I knew from blueprints that the glass went all the way to the underside of the roof deck, so you couldn't climb over it. You spoke to the attendants through an intercom only.

There was a young girl behind the counter. I am in the describing business, but I cannot do her justice by telling you how beautiful she was. It would be easier to build a time machine, go get Titian and DaVinci and bring them back and have them work in shifts trying to paint her picture. I'll bet the picture would never be completed because they'd be fighting over her with knives before fifteen minutes was up. She was so pretty that a normal person, which I sometimes am, would just look at her, slackjawed, and forget how to breathe or think or behave. If God has some plan for mankind it is surely inscrutable because no one else would put this daisy on the far side of Pluto like that.

She was very pleasant, but didn't speak English very well. I was expected, and even though she was barely an adult, she had been left in charge and given instructions on what to show me. She told me to go outside, and she appeared from around the back of the building and showed me some trifling problem I can't remember right now; a busted hinge on a dumpster corral, something like that.

There wasn't anything left to discuss. We'll fix it, you'll pay, case closed. I leaned on my car and was writing some notes about the meeting, and she put her hand on my arm. She was very worried, and told me that I must leave, right away, because the sun was going down, and very bad people would come out. She pointed to a park across the street and said it was very dangerous, and that after dark no one like me should ever show their face there. She wasn't frightened, exactly; she was frightened for me. I was born a few blocks from that place, and for all I know my parents took me to that park when I was an infant, but I didn't mention that. She lives here all the time now. That's seven no trumps. She went inside, and I left.

I'm told recently that if someone looks at you funny twice, or maybe if a guy with bad breath instead of Fabio pectorals asks you out on a date at your cubicle farm, you're working in a "hostile workplace."

I've been to a hostile workplace. I'll raise my hand when you're in one.

I Cannot Fiddle, But I Can Raise A Great State From A Little City

2011-11-09T10:31:00.002-05:00

Van Morrison is not handsome. His voice is not of a particularly pleasant timbre. He refuses to project a phony aura of likeablility, and is likely incapable of projecting a real one. He's strange and prickly and inscrutable. It's likely that all of the members of the band he's playing with are more musically cultivated than he is. Some might be better singers. Hell, the audience probably has dozens of people with more musical chops than he has. He only brings one unusual thing to the table. No one knows what that one thing is; they only recognize it when they encounter it.

The Vivisectionist Never Leaves A Live Subject

2011-11-08T11:58:00.000-05:00

If you don't need it deboned for weak teeth:

Skatalites!

Late 60s Yin And Yang

2011-11-07T10:34:00.001-05:00

Boris Raskin adapted an old Russian song about the "good old days." The song was popular with folkies in New York, who like to wax wistful about every damn thing. Everything sucks until it's in the rear-view mirror, and then magically morphs into the bestest time there ever was. Paul McCartney produced the Mary Hopkins version, which was a big hit when I was a little kid. The radio used to be much more diverse than it is now.

Those Were The Days

Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And dreamed of all the great things we would do

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
La la la la...
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days

Then the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
If by chance I'd see you in the tavern
We'd smile at one another and we'd say

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
La la la la...
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days

Just tonight I stood before the tavern
Nothing seemed the way it used to be
In the glass I saw a strange reflection
Was that lonely woman really me

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
La la la la...
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days

Through the door there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
La la la la...
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days

About the same time, straight-up cocktail lounge music used to come blaring out of the car speakers, too. Peggy Lee:

Peggy Lee was like your mother's friend that drank a lot and smoked like a chimney and didn't care very much if their husband was away on business. She dressed like a cross between Cleopatra and a hat check girl. They were always prying her out of a car wrapped around a tree. She'd yank her elbow away from the policeman like a queen as soon as he propped her up on her tottering shoes. She was nostalgic for a tomorrow that never came.

I loved the music hall vibe of the thing. A novel read aloud:

Is That All There Is?

I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire.I'll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me upin his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement.I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames.And when it was all over I said to myself, "Is that all there is to a fire?"

Is that all there is, is that all there isIf that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancingLet's break out the booze and have a ballIf that's all there is.

And when I was 12 years old, my father took me to the circus, the greatest show on earth.There were clowns and elephants and dancing bearsAnd a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads.And as I sat there watching the marvelous spectacleI had the feeling that something was missing.I don't know what, but when it was over,I said to myself, "Is that all there is to a circus?"

Is that all there is, is that all there isIf that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancingLet's break out the booze and have a ballIf that's all there is.

Then I fell in love, with the most wonderful boy in the world.We would take long walks by the river or just sit for hours gazing into each other's eyes.We were so very much in love.Then one day, he went away. And I thought I'd die -- but I didn't.And when I didn't I said to myself, "Is that all there is to love?"

Is that all there is, is that all there isIf that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancingI know what you must be saying to yourselves.If that's the way she feels about it why doesn't she just end it all?Oh, no. Not me. I'm in no hurry for that final disappointment.For I know just as well as I'm standing here talking to you,when that final moment comes and I'm breathing my lst breath, I'll be saying to myself:

Is that all there is, is that all there isIf that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancingLet's break out the booze and have a ballIf that's all there is.

That's a Lieber and Stoller composition. Tin Pan Alley is dead, dead, dead. Back then Randy Newman still needed honest work, and arranged and conducted the orchestra. The whole hot mess is a pretty sophisticated thing to come out of a radio, ain't it?

Here we are now, entertain us, is a message from the performers to the audience. When I'm the audience I don't want to do all the heavy lifting, thanks.

Martin D-18. Some Assembly Required, But Supplied. It's Up To You To Shake The Notes Out Of It

2011-11-06T04:30:00.000-05:00

Oh man. High ceiling. Banks of big windows with the sill at bench height. Steam heat. I could make things in that shop.

D-18

In a pawn shop in Odessa in the fall of '64
The pawn shop man was leavin' he was lockin' up the door
I ran up just in time and I hollered through the screen
Hey, man, you got any good guitars in here,
he said "I got this D-18"

So I gave him a hundred dollars and I took that sucker home
I cleaned it up and strung it hit a chord and heard that tone
It was crisp and clean, rich and full, all a guitar ought to be
I said Thank you, Mr, Martin, you made this D-18 for me

I Said Thank you, Mr. Martin, I'm alright
'Cause once again this old guitar helped me through the night
I'm mighty grateful to you, you know how to make 'em right
I said Thank you, Mr. Martin, I'm alright

If I'm feelin' down and worthless and I haven't got a dime
Wonderin' if I spent my life just wastin' my time
I pick up that old guitar, some paper and a pen
I say Thank you, Mr. Martin, you saved my life again.

I've written songs about my lovers, my family and my friends
My wife, my child, the old home place and the road that never ends
Heroes hobos rock n' roll and a honky tonk queen
I wrote 'em all without exception on my Martin D-18

Now It was made way back In '43 when I was just a kid
I believe it's about the best thing Mr. Martin ever did
It plays real good, it stays in tune, and never treats me mean
Thank God for Mr. Martin and that fine old D-18.

Well there's your Gallagher, your Gibson, your Goya, Gretsch, and Guild
I've played every kind of guitar that them guitar makers build
I' picked on a lot of axes but the best I've ever seen
Is my funky beat up wonderful old Martin D-18

They still make the very thing: C.F.Martin D-18

Martin D-18P Dreadnought Acoustic Guitar at Amazon

Alces Alces

2011-11-05T14:07:00.003-04:00

More Woodworking Music

2011-11-04T13:04:00.000-04:00

My people are Sicilian, so we can't see anything Venetian without muttering tedeschi under our breath, but isn't it a grand performance in a grand place?

The Interpreti Veneziani homepage

Buy their stuff through Amazon here: Interpreti Veneziani

They're heavy on Vivaldi, but I think that one in the video is Albinoni. Not sure. Anybody?

( Thanks to fellow thumbsmasher and good music devotee Rob Williams for sending that one along)

The First Piece Of Music Ever Broadcast

2011-11-03T10:35:00.000-04:00

There are long periods of time during the workday when I have a mask over my face and earmuffs clamped on my head. It lends itself to a sort of underwater effect.

I have an MP3 player hooked up to some old computer speakers in my workshop. The little harddrive holds a lot of music, but I don't bother much with it. With all the racket I rarely hear much of it, so the same things can cycle around quite a bit without getting boring.

Sometimes, during a quiet interregnum, the music will synch itself with the slant of the light through the window, and the lull in the fighting, and the effect can be quite profound. Like the shade of a tree on a hot day. Which brings us to Ombra mai fu, from Handel's opera Xerxes. It's an aria about the shade of a tree, after all.

Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never bother your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.
A shade there never was,
of any plant,
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.

Ombra mai fu was probably the first piece of music ever broadcast on the radio.

On the evening of December 24, 1906 (Christmas Eve), Fessenden used the alternator-transmitter to send out a short program from Brant Rock. It included a phonograph record of Ombra mai fu (Largo) by George Frideric Handel, followed by Fessenden himself playing the song O Holy Night on the violin. Finishing with reading a passage from the Bible: 'Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will' (Gospel of Luke 2:14). He petitioned his listeners to write in about the quality of the broadcast as well as their location when they heard it. Surprisingly, his broadcast was heard several hundred miles away, however accompanying the broadcast was a disturbing noise. This noise was due to irregularities in the spark gap transmitter he used. (Wikipedia)

Hmm. A beautiful piece of music, during a time of quiet and reflection, interrupted by a disturbing noise. Handel had me pegged.

(The whole opera on DVD at Amazon: Handel - Serse / Rasmussen, Piau, Bayrakdarian, Bardon, Hallenberg, Peirone, Lippi, Rousset, Les Talens Lyriques, Dresden Opera)

When Genghis Khan Shows Up At Your Door You Best Be Handing Over The Snickers, My Friend

2011-11-01T09:19:00.001-04:00

A few years back, I wrote something about Halloween that was republished here and there on the Intertunnel. In the fifteen years or so we lived at our last home, we never had one trick-or-treater show up. But things are different here in western Maine. We left The Heir home with a big bowl of Hershey bars, and went out into the receding snow under the bracing starlight after dinner with The Spare. And it was -- exactly, precisely, to the last jot and tittle -- what I described as the way Halloween should be:

At around dusk, small children dressed in cute and fantastic costumes will visit the doors of their nearby neighbors, who will give them a little Snickers bar for their trouble. Any child old enough to be unaccompanied by an adult is too old to trick-or-treat. The children's parents will stand slightly behind their children and wave to the neighbors and they will exchange pleasantries. The home will have a pumpkin or two on the step, and perhaps the silhouette of a witch on a broom and a black cat, cut from construction paper by a gradeschooler, in the window. These small children will not be frightened by this activity, and startling people for your amusement will get you only a rap on the head from a Maglite flashlight that you will commemorate for several weeks by rubbing the lump it leaves on your addled head. The small children will be home and asleep at the regular hour, more or less.

It was marvelous. There were a few homes on our little route around our neighborhood where the denizens were out, but they left bowls of candy on their front step to be neighborly.

Now I've got to go turn my fleece-lined workshirt rightside-out and go down to the tablesaw.

Many Thanks

2011-10-31T10:06:00.000-04:00

I'm grateful for a lot of things.

There is no way for me to tell who does it, but people do use the Amazon search box you'll find in the right sidebar, and also the various Amazon links I append to entries about this and that. I get a little commission and a stream of income from it, and it doesn't add anything to the price of things purchased.

Of course, I sell the furniture I make over there in the sidebar too, and many of my readers are my best customers. I still make all of it myself, out of raw materials and elbow grease, and am gratified each and every time I sell something. It's especially nice to get emails from hither and yon with some feedback.

The new tables are so incredibly beautiful that my whole house now looks tacky. There should be warnings on your website that these consequences might occur! (Diane)
Many thanks for a beautiful table! We will continue to watch your site! (Barry and JJ)
The tables you made for us are terrific and work perfectly in our bedroom, we love them! Thanks so much for making them for us and shipping them to the Vineyard. Beautiful! We love the tiger maple tops with the off white legs. (Judy)
I was totally delighted with my purchase from Sippican Cottage Furniture. The proprietor corresponded with me personally to let me know when my item shipped. The item was packaged tightly and securely and arrived in time for the event for which it was purchased, and the product was even more beautiful than pictured on the web site. Definitely a positive experience! (Phoebe)

Lots of people compliment me on the packaging. I think they're used to having things delivered broken. It's more expensive to ship a fully assembled table than flat-pack stuff, of course, but isn't your time worth something? Most people are too busy to put together their own furniture, and nothing put together with a little wrench is likely to last very long. Packaging for mass-produced goods gets whittled down to its barest essence, and often doesn't last the trip. The disappointment of a busted anything coming out of a shipping box exceeds just the money involved. We avoid it like the plague by packaging smart and sturdy. My wife and I do it together. It's as close to a date as we get these days, I guess.

I especially like it when people send me pictures of the stuff in use, and most especially love the pictures of the youngins using their furniture. Look at Andy's beautiful children, using their Super Ten Finger Stepper to hang their Halloween decorations.

Andy wrote to me along with the picture, prompted by my waxing poetic about getting a muffin and a cup of coffee like I was sitting in the electric chair and the governor called:

What we give to others is precious, indeed. In pursuit of that sentiment, I thought I would update you on the development of your stepper under the care of my children. It is coming along swimmingly, and shows much promise toward a long existence of cheerful utility. The darn thing can't help itself from wanting to help everyone else.

It's the children that remind you what you're trying to do. "It is a meager thing, but mine own."

So thanks, everybody, for reading and commenting and buying my book,and purchasing my furniture and pressing on my links and being my Interfriends.

Simple Pleasures

2011-10-29T15:09:00.000-04:00

The secret to life is to do the same thing over and over again, as long as the thing you're doing is pleasant in the first place.

Every Al Green song sounds more or less the same. That doesn't matter because the first one was so fine. It leaves you wanting more of the same.

"More of the same" is what most people get for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The problem is that you don't really like what you're doing, or seeing, or getting, or listening to in the first place. You feel compelled to do it for myriad reasons, and you hang in there for as long as you can, because you don't want to feel strange or left out or old-fashioned or something. Then you take a handful of pills for breakfast to get through the day. Something's busted.

I get up first in the morning, usually just before the sunrise. I do not have an alarm clock. To sleep until you're done sleeping is a great gift. People assume that since I rise so early that I must have some sort of military regimen. Not so. The alarm clock is a dread lord and I have beaten it.

I dress in the dark and cold these days. I must make the heat if we are to have any. You might think this an imposition. You could think of it that way. There is an oil tank in our basement. It is a totem of a lost heat civilization that once worshiped in our basement. It holds 275 gallons of fuel oil. That would cost maybe $900 to fill, if you still had at least a puddle left in it. Even if the elderly furnace that was the oil tank's partner in crime still worked, there is no way I'd put that many quarters into the game. So making the heat might be considered an imposition; but the oil tank is an obscenity.

You appreciate things more if you know the true value of them. What is lost, what is gained. We cannot do everything ourselves, of course. But what we give to others is precious to us, and so we tend to have an appreciation for what we get in return, more than if we were swimming in money, instead of the last decade's septic tank.

My wife rises a little later than I do, and I know she's awake because the ancient water meter under my floor goes tick tick tick. She comes five minutes later with two cups of coffee for us to share in my snug little office, and we wait for the sound of the little one's feet hitting the floor above us.

Today she was late, and came with pumpkin muffins, too, warm from the oven. I could do this every day forever and ever.

Muzak For The Elevator To The Nice Part Of Hell

2011-10-28T11:19:00.000-04:00

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. --Mark Twain

Hell is a half-filled auditorium. --Robert Frost

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise. --Victor Hugo

Every man is his own hell. --H.L. Mencken

Maybe this world is another planet's hell. --Aldous Huxley

Hell is full of musical amateurs. --George Bernard Shaw

Hell is empty and all the devils are here. --Bill Shakespeare

It Is Not That It's Done Well. It's Amazing Enough It Was Even Attempted

2011-10-27T09:50:00.000-04:00

Old Skool, yo.

Of course, it helps he chose my favorite song to record. If he'd chosen something annoying, like Die Meistersinger, it would have gotten tedious right quick. But it illustrates a rule of thumb I like to employ: Compared to what?

It's a bad recording, it's true. But look what an inquisitive person can accomplish with next to nothing. It is the only yardstick I will allow anyone to use on me: Compared to what? What have you accomplished on your own? What can you do with meager supplies and not much help? What are you daring enough to attempt? Are you successful? Compared to what?

There are children gone a little long in the tooth already demanding that everything be made easy and presented to them as a gift while they loudly sit on a tuffet and search for peas with their gluteals. They seem immensely old to me. Like the elderly in a rest home demanding double rations of prune juice. Laissez Faire are dirty words to them. "To let to do" is the literal translation, I believe. No one seems to want to be let to do much of anything. It was the only thing I've ever wanted in my life, to be allowed to try, so I am of little use to the Doc Martens and iPhones in a Patagonia tent contingent. They wish to be paid to be constrained from doing anything. It's good work when you can get it, kids, but there are only so many State Senator jobs to go around.

Let's play "compared to what" with them: you've been given every advantage and you're useless ciphers, incapable of any useful activity except complaining that you'd like to change the dictionary definition of useful activity. The dictionary will likely be immune to your depredations, as dictionaries are not allowed into the schools you attended for twenty-odd years. Even if they did debase the dictionary further on your behalf, other forms of reality are waiting in the dark with a cosh to knock some sense into you the hard way. Luckily for all of us, you're just a very loud minority. Most people get on with their lives, and help others get on with theirs, too. The squares out in the sticks might seem like Morlocks to the beautiful people, but at least Morlocks can mine a bit. What can you do? No fair trying to call yourself a Morlock when the dinner bell is rung. You're a Morlock? Compared to what?

Your college bookstore was full of clothes, the library was for sleeping it off and surfing porn and stealing MP3s, and all the money's gone and you've been Blutarskyed out of the ivy nest with nothing but a sneaking suspicion that fifty large is a big nut to pay for four-plus years of Keystone and cable. I think of what I could accomplish, right now, with fifty grand, four years, and a library card. Hell, I'll take two out of three of those things and build a very small empire with them. You got an education? Compared to what?

You're right to be angry. You were robbed. Unfortunately, you worship the robbers. Saint Jobs of Cupertino comes to mind. There is no caramel-colored interactive button to press repeatedly to get your kibble; and no matter what Sesame Street told you, the alphabet does not get up and dance to keep you amused. You are not an audience anymore. You're supposed to make the alphabet dance now, and it keeps tripping on all the apostrophes you scatter around willy-nilly. You're mad at the audience for leaving while you're still sorting out who will paint the scenery on the stage instead of performing. Someone must know how to open the paint cans. It's a plebeian job, not worth your while, but important in a way you barely understand. You're useful? Compared to what? You think if you agitate hard enough you'll be in charge of the mess that follows opening the paint cans with an ax and a shotgun. I have my doubts. The company store has very high prices, a lot of customers, but precious few clerks.

You should try making something with what's at hand instead of demanding that things be made for you. The results might be a meager thing, but it will be thine own. And then you can say, "Meager? Compared to what?"

Boston Museum

2011-10-25T10:56:00.000-04:00

The wands from the buses grind and spark on the electric nets like a welder gone mad running down the street. There's a screech as the wheels attempt to negotiate the turn. It is the shriek of a negotiator losing an argument. I can smell only metal in the air. I don't know if it's possible; it just is, like praying to Jesus. The faint tang of electricity, of power, of life and death on the wind. One man's trolley is another man's electric chair. The city is an idea held together with dirt. Leaves of newspaper crabwalk across the cobbles and spidered asphalt, looking for rest, like the people in the ink on their pages. Neither seems to find a place to stick and so wander endlessly and fitfully up and down the streets. There is no rest in a city; only the grave. The stalls were full of flowers ready for last rites, and consumptive vegetables. The cold kept the heaps from warning the unwary with a whiff of truth in the nose. What good is a nose in the winter in the city anyway? We stood on the platform and the wrong trains rushed by and everyone has the expression of a dog hard by a stain on a carpet. We rocked with the wind of the cars going by, while you decided whether you were inhaling or exhaling just then, because neither suits just now. Your lungs start up again like a tug on a rope to pull a flywheel. The city has a kind of cold I don't know how to describe. It is a robber. It takes the warmth out of your pocket when you're not paying attention. It's gone and you pat yourself looking for it on your person somewhere. Like a fool. My father's hand was cold, but warmer than mine. He's warm enough for us both.

Give The Real World A Pass

2011-10-23T12:38:00.001-04:00

I ain't ashamed. A fella's gotta make up his mind what he's tryin' to do, and do it. Save the hangdog expression for confession and the judge. I put mine on like an off-the rack suit that one time. The weepy frown kept ridin' up in the back, and I put it back in the closet forever. Man's gotta order his affairs better'n that.

Who do you gotta kill to get a drink in this bucket of blood, anyway? Bad enough you hafta park your own car. The hatcheck girl looked like she should be ringin' a bell in a tower. You can always tell when the owner of one of these joints is a schlub. You can't give them your money.

We're supposed to have made this deal already. I know the amateurs think a loud place is how it's done, but this is ridiculous. They never learn that if the cops are even interested in listening, you're already doing it wrong. Man should be able to stand up in a dump like this here and grab the mike from the greasy emcee and tell everyone in the joint what you're doing, so what. Half are pisspant civilians and the other half are in on it somehow in any place you oughta show your face. Smart man gives the real world a pass.

Up For Anything

2011-10-21T14:07:00.001-04:00

There are certain musicians you encounter over the years that are "up for anything." If you couched the offer in the correct terms, you could get them to try drug abuse, orgiastic exhibitionism, competitive eating, garroting, transfixion, cannibalism, voting Republican -- pretty much the compass of human depravity. They'd never show up for rehearsal, often pawned their instruments to get tequila money, and lived in a hallway, but infuriatingly always seemed to be able to play and sing better than the kids who practiced. And they always knew what to do when the audience showed up. Exhibit A: Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.
Bestest guitar solo ever.

Fairly Certain I Played In That Second Bar The Night After This. They Didn't Remodel It In The Interim

2011-10-19T19:02:00.001-04:00

Leningrad Cowboys!

Back When Driving And Drinking Was An Activity

2011-10-18T12:51:00.000-04:00

The Flying Burrito Brothers. I could write all sorts of tidbits from Wikipedia and my foggy memory about them, but all you really need to know is that there's a chain of Mexican restaurants in New Zealand named after them. Do you have a chain of Mexican restaurants in New Zealand named after you?

I didn't think so.

Six Days On The Road

Well, I pulled out of Pittsburgh,
Rollin' down the Eastern Seaboard.
I've got my diesel wound up,
And she's running like never before.
There's a speed zone ahead, all right,
I don't see a cop in sight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

I got ten forward gears,
And a Georgia overdrive.
I'm taking little white pills,
And my eyes are open wide.
I just passed a 'Jimmy' and a 'White':
I've been passin' everything in sight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

Well, it seems like a month,
Since I kissed my baby good-bye.
I could have a lot of women,
But I'm not like some other guys.
I could find one to hold me tight,
But I could never believe that it's right.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

I.C.C. is checking on down the line.
I'm a little overweight and my log's three days behind.
But nothing bothers me tonight.
I can dodge all the scales all right,
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

Well my rig's a little old,
But that don't mean she's slow.
There's a flame from her stack,
And the smoke's rolling black as coal.
My hometown's coming in sight,
If you think I'm happy your right.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.
Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight.

(Dave Dudley)

The Spot On The Calendar When A Nation Of Can-Do Morphed In A Nation Of Co-Pay

2011-10-16T14:35:00.001-04:00

Off our rockers, actin' crazy
With the right medication we won't be lazy
Doin' the old folks boogie
Down on the farm
Wheelchairs, they was locked arm in arm
Paired off pacemakers with matchin' alarms
Gives us jus' one more chance
To spin one more yarn
And you know that you're over the hill
When your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill
Doin' the old folks boogie
And boogie we will
'Cause to us the thought's as good as a thrill
Back at the home,
No time is your own,
Facillities there, they're all out on loan
The bank foreclose, and your bankruptcy shows
And your credit creeps to an all-time low
So you know, that you're over the hill
When your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill
Try and get a rise from an atrophied muscle,
And the nerves in your thigh just quivers and fizzles
So you know, that you're over the hill
When your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill

Stories

2011-10-15T10:03:00.000-04:00

My wrists and ankles were always on display. That was the tell. The current kid's legs tapered down to a kind of wide stump. There was enough sleeve for five noses. They had hair for three sisters. We had Sears jeans.

The city was our Roanoke. We went back after a long, hungry hejira and looked for signs of a lost life. The wardheeler Powhatans had finished their work. There is a look to a brick building with no windows. An accusation in it. Why did you rake the clay from its slumber in the river in the first place? Force it into a heartless mould and fire it, to sit one on top of another, chained together, to reach for the wan sunshine, now just a monument to entropy. For what? For this?

The women decorating the doorways slouched like squid but looked hard as hydrants somehow. Their eyes competed for attention with the empty windowholes in the triple-deckers. I was certain if I looked right at them I'd lose my soul. I had a soul. They gave it to me on Sunday. I wasn't using it just then and so it was ripe for the taking. I looked at my shoes and walked on.

The staircases all canted into the well. The railings all had ideas of their own about how much you should depend on them, so you hugged the spidered walls. The wallpaper was entirely made from the scrolls of a dead civilization, glued to the wall with hope and held on now by sheer stubbornness. Just like the people.

One Doesn't Read "The Social Evil And The Social Good." One Reads Lord Byron

2011-10-14T09:54:00.000-04:00

HERE be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like Thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sound were causing
The charméd ocean's pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:
And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep,
Whose breast is gently heaving
As an infant's asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

The Kids Are Playing Rock Band Right Now, And The Bigger One Is Using A Real Guitar

2011-10-13T15:09:00.000-04:00

My wife and I go out for a walk at lunchtime sometimes.First I eat at the computer while working a little on emails and such, then I give my young son a drum lesson as part of his schooling, and if it's not raining we walk around the neighborhood for fifteen minutes. The time together is one of those precious mundane things you don't appreciate until they're gone, I imagine.

We homeschool our two children. Mostly my wife does, I mean. I give them music lessons. I'm having trouble with the drum lessons for the little fellow. It sometimes takes me longer to demonstrate the sticking in the first place than it does for him to execute it. He has a tendency to look all around the room while I'm trying to figure it out, and I scold him for not paying attention but then he sits down and plays it, first time, to make me feel silly.

Our computers are a joke. The little one's runs Windows 98 and isn't Intertunnel connected. Mine's an ancient Pentium running XP. It can't run a YouTube video on hi-def without the video card seizing up like a defendant with a light pointed at them. But it has Intertunnel so he's always keen to get a crack at it. All the children in the public school are given an expensive Apple laptop that is completely useless for any sort of real work, and simply use it to update their Facebook pages and play games while they're in class. We'd kill for a laptop, but since we save the town around twenty-two large by keeping our kids home we get nothing.

When we returned from our walk yesterday, this was on my screen, drawn in MS Paint:

I didn't know what it was for a good while, then I figured it out. It's a neon atom. He forgot to put the lower-case "e" after the N. But there are ten protons, ten neutrons, and ten electrons. He's even got the isotope number appended on there. I looked it up. I had to look it up:

I went and asked him about it. He was building a model of it with K'Nex plastic dross, and explained it to me. Ten protons gives it its atomic number, dad.

I'd bookmarked a Khan Academy website, thinking my older son might be able to use it. But my younger son sneaks into my office when I'm out or at the tablesaw, and he's watched at least four of the chemistry lectures. They're college courses. He's eight.

Little boys like to know things about the way the world works. They like lists. They like dinosaurs and atoms and planets and Lego sets and army men, and man do six-year-olds like lists of presidents.
There are lots of videos on YouTube of people who think their kids are geniuses because they've memorized something. The education and rearing of children has become so degraded and mysterious that people don't even recognize what comes naturally to children, especially male children, anymore. You have to beat the love of learning out of children. This has been totally accomplished, at least as far as boys are concerned in the public schools.

I couldn't sleep the other night, and went back to the desk at 1:30AM to write a little. I heard my older son murmuring, through the floor, up in his room. His friend had Skyped him for help with his Physics homework. Our son had already finished all his schoolwork for the next morning -- he does it at night the day before it's assigned almost without exception -- but his friend will be rousted out of bed like a vagrant and put on a bus a few hours after I heard them. He's just as bright as my son, but his teacher has dyslexia and can't explain anything properly to him. Nothing can trump social engineering in public school.

Mark my words. There is a day coming. It is not on the horizon yet, but it is not far over it. Prospective employers are going to look at your children's resume, and if it refers to any sort of "public school" on it, they're going to roundfile it without hesitation, and they're going to call HR and ask them to find another homeschooled kid. Maybe they'll settle for an expensive privately schooled kid if there's no "non-socialized" kids available.

How Can A Man Explain The Phlorescent Leech And Eddie To His Son? I'd Rather Have The Sex Talk. There's Less Perversion In It

2011-10-12T15:19:00.001-04:00

Turtles! 1968. You try working "et cetera" into a pop song.

You got a thing about you
I just can't live without you
I really want you, Elenore, near me
Your looks intoxicate me
Even though your folks hate me
There's no one like you, Elenore, really

Elenore, gee I think you're swell
And you really do me well
You're my pride and joy, et cetera
Elenore, can I take the time
To ask you to speak your mind
Tell me that you love me better

I really think you're groovy
Let's go out to a movie
What do you say, now, Elenore, can we?
They'll turn the lights way down low
Maybe we won't watch the show
I think I love you, Elenore, love me

I Doubt The Blanket Has Smallpox On It

2011-10-11T13:18:00.000-04:00

Every once in a great while, something comes into your line of sight that renews your faith in humanity, at least a little, for a little while.

I'm forced to read the local newspapers. They are uniformly and intensely stupid and useless, written by illiterates, edited by dullards, and read by... well, me, now. Yikes. I'm constantly amazed that my fellow citizens read the newspaper or watch the television and think it's hard information. It has no more fellowship with information than a ransom note assembled out of words clipped from a magazine resembles a novel, and has much the same purpose: A demand for money by lowbrow losers for holding a hostage for a short period. The hostage in this case is a siamese twin consisting of you and whatever they're writing about.

When I read a newspaper, I don't believe the writers would tell the truth if they knew it, wouldn't recognize the truth if it bit them on the leg, and don't know how to read and write well enough to accurately portray facts in a useful format anyway. But other than that, you can find out all sorts of things from the newspapers. I found out there are still people in this world that are kind to one another, even at some risk and inconvenience to themselves, and despite the fact that the object of their kindness might need kindness a lot more than they deserve it.

FARMINGTON — A resident of Spruce Lane called police early Sunday to report a man sleeping in the foyer of their house, police officer Wayne Drake said.

The resident was concerned for his safety and covered him with a blanket as he slept, Drake said.

Drake added that when he arrived the man was still intoxicated. The man had also been in a fight the night before and had a black-eye and a ripped T-shirt. He didn't remember entering the residents' house or the fight, Drake said. (Farmington Homeowner Issues Blanket Pardon To Intruder from The Rumford Meteor)

The homeowner didn't want the police to arrest the fellow, and they didn't. They drove him home.

The tedious imbeciles that put out the Lewiston Sun Urinal, the original home of the story, don't know how to connect any dots but imaginary ones, so I will; in the not-too-distant past an elderly woman was murdered in a home invasion in Farmington. It was in their own paper so they probably didn't read it. I know by the spelling and homonym warts I regularly see sprinkled about their paper the editors don't read it. Or more amusingly, maybe they do, and it starts out even worse than it ends up.

For the most part, there isn't much in the way of crime in Maine. The murder of a stranger is a very rare item around here. An unsolved one is even rarer. But someone in Farmington saw a very disreputable-looking person asleep in their foyer in the middle of the night and was kind to them, because they looked like they needed it.

Maine is not like Massachusetts, where I moved from. I am trying to get the hang of living around here still. You can walk into the Wal-Mart here with nothing but a little cash and buy a shotgun, for instance, something I couldn't do in Massachusetts. One aisle over is blankets. People here have both, and use both, as the situation warrants.

I think I like it here.

(Read The Meteor, or you won't know what it says)

Colon Day 2011

2011-10-10T07:14:00.001-04:00

I remember Columbus Day because I used to play music in a hundred and one bands anyone that would have me and try to make money to eat and get cigarettes and I don't smoke and there still was never enough money and I played at a tee-totaling biker association party for two members' wedding not gay a man and a woman that arrived on a motorcycle with the woman I think wearing a white wedding dress and no helmet and we played for one hundred sober bikers and ninety-nine of them were like accountants and one was like a serial murderer but they all looked exactly the same so you had to assume they all would kill you if they got the chance instead of the more likely thing that they'd do your taxes if you asked nice and I never played Born To Be Wild for a wedding song before and the bride's father was in jail I think so she had to dance with the groom twice and the whole thing was held at the Italian-American Club on Gano Street in Providence but everybody calls it Guano Street for a joke haha and it's a real long time ago but it might have been the Portuguese-American Club I don't remember but I do remember it was Columbus Day and I went into the bar to get away from the sober biker accountants and that one serial murderer that were in the function room and it didn't matter if it was the Italian-American Club or the Portuguese-American Club or the Knights Of Columbus Hall haha that would be funny but I don't really remember but I distinctly remember a guy with a knife a real knife not a just a knife a dagger that came to a perfect point and didn't fold or look like you could do anything wholesome with it it just looked one hundred percent like it was designed and made to gut a bass player and that guy held that knife right under my chin and explained to me in Portuguese that Cristobal Colon was Portuguese and don't you forget it and my Spanish was very sketchy and Portuguese sounds like Russian to me not Spanish anyway but believe me I understood every damn word he said and I advise you all to answer the question did you know Cristobal Colon was Portuguese in the affirmative at all times.

The end.

Sometimes There's A Man... I Won't Say A Hero, 'cause, What's A Hero? But Sometimes, There's A Man

2011-10-09T12:31:00.000-04:00

Aw. I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced him enough.

Rape! Murder! It's Just A Shot (And A Beer) Away

2011-10-08T09:05:00.002-04:00

Reader Charles Schneider sent me a link with a handful of "Worst Band Performances Ever."

I hate to disagree with my readers. I'm constantly doing it, though, and it brings me nothing but grief. But how can I sit still, and allow the South Bay Surfers (on MySpace, natch) to be lumped in there with all that execrable stuff? This aggression must not stand, man. They're not "bad." They're not "the worst." They are sublime. We must take a minute to consider the sublime when we encounter it.

There's plenty of bad stuff on that webpage, don't get me wrong. But YouTube is a cornucopia of bad stuff. It is the Miss America Pageant of Meh and the Nobel Prize Committee of STFU. You're going to have to be a lot worse than that to get a rise out of me. But even YouTube isn't big enough to hold every abominable noise, every obnoxious attitude, every atrocious waste of time, every repellent theme, every nauseating worldview -- each and every aspect of the self-absorbed caterwauling that the American garage, filled with the fetid and festering innards of a disemboweled Guitar Center and engorged with wannabe rock stars, can produce. It exceeds the Gross National Product of Perdition. It's too vast to get a handle on, although you'd like to get a shovel handle on it, wouldn't you?

Out of that morass, out of that septic tank of pre-adolescent hopes and dreams, washed up like dead things on the shore of no talent, hard by the smoldering caldera of suck, a champion can appear. One that has bathed so fully in the fetid essence of insipid rock music that they have become immune to it; they ride it like a hobbled stallion, a gelded centaur with emphysema; surfing it like a slow roller in a sewage treatment plant.

Beelzebub shat a Faberge egg. Attention must be paid.

Need To Update My Out Paradin' Music

2011-10-07T13:13:00.000-04:00

Of course the instrumental version of Keep on Truckin' by Eddie Kendricks has held me in good stead for many a day when I'm out paradin'. I have bearers holding a portable music device of some sort -- one to hold it and one to pay out the extension cords -- who parade behind me while I truck and truckle with the passersby. I usually have a few extra out front to shove the uncool into the gutter and clear the decks. Of course when I'm in my sedan chair, I simply mount the Realistic speakers to the roof and keep my Onkyo dual cassette deck and a Marantz receiver inside with me, and alternate between a pope wave and a queen wave at the windows, with an occasional "two left hands" Egyptian motion with horizontal head bob thrown in.

But time marches, or parades, on, and I feel I need to refresh my peripatetic shimmy shanty. I'm thinking of swapping over to Uncle Rico music instead:

So unless you guys have a better idea, you best step aside when you hear that Uncle Rico train a'comin'. A woodworker is approaching.

Well, As Long As It's Not John Williams Again, I'm OK With It

2011-10-06T11:07:00.002-04:00

Mrs. Mamet Captures The Essence Of The Thing

2011-10-05T14:54:00.000-04:00

Show, don't tell. Dem's the rules. Alone in the big city, with a happy, somewhat wistful hope to be together soon. The song will do the work for you if you let it.

Always hated the Beach Men. I was forced to play "Surfin' USA" about eleventy hundred times. No matter.

Captain Tammany H. Plutocrat Real Estate And Bill Collection, Inc.

2011-10-04T12:46:00.000-04:00

(Editor's Note: Captain Tammny H. Plutocrat explanation here)

(Author's Note: There is no editor. Maybe I'll hire one if you buy a goddamn book)

That rapscallion Bird Dog over to Maggie's Farm linked to one of those titanic bits of news that apparently only warrants a mention on the last page of the Internet, while a few dozen well-to-do hipster doofuses have a hissy fit on the first fifty pages of all the newspapers.

NEW YORK -- The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private investors -- vulture funds.

These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government, the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to real value.

You and I will not be allowed to participate. These investors will come from the private-equity and hedge-fund community, Goldman Sachs and its derivatives, as well as foreign sovereign wealth funds that can bring a billion dollars or more to each transaction.
In the process, these investors will instantaneously become the largest improved real estate owners and landlords in the world. The U.S. taxpayer will get pennies on the dollar for these homes and then be allowed to rent them back at market rates.

Hmmm. The government is giving away all those practically free foreclosed houses you've been waiting and saving to purchase, to rapacious investors. Who'da thunkit? I mean, besides me, a year ago:

A “foreclosed house” is not a house. The jots and tittles have to be filled in by the lawyers and clerks –who owes and owns what, what’s required to call the house complete and safe for habitation -- just like you do before you dig the cellar hole. It is only a potential house. Think of them as housing starts for future years, because the vast majority of them won’t be ready to be sold for years. And since practically no one is building any new houses, and household creation plugs along, unspectacular but inexorable, those foreclosed houses are not going to be sold for peanuts in the future, because they’re going to represent the only game in town. Buy them or rent them, they’re going to cost you real money.

Banks, especially big, national banks, are not realtors. They’re not property managers. They have nothing in place to handle owning and selling the property they have on their hands. They will never use a retail approach to unloading them. They will sell them in huge blocks to investors, unload them on the government –who will unload them on favored investors -- or demolish them. These investors will be risking a great deal by buying real estate, and they’re going to demand an enormous return on that investment. They are going to make the most rapacious developers that built the houses in the first place look like Pollyanna.
The people who are currently living in the foreclosed houses “rent-free” while the bank’s lawyer scratches his head in front of a judge saying: “I know that deed is around here somewhere” are actually doing the bank a favor. They are of no use to the bank as paying customers anymore, and the bank has already written them off, but they will serve as a kind of disreputable housesitter for a year, maybe two, saving the bank from paying someone to mow the lawn or otherwise look after the place. By then the banks will have their foreclosure ducks in a row, and out in the street they’ll go, and into the now nascent, but soon to be gigantic foreclosure machine the house will go.

I'll tell you something else. All those people who thought they were going to walk away from those houses and give them back to the banks? The banks are going to figure out the difference between the mortgage and what the house is sold for, which will be huge, sell those debts to lawyers --who'll make the mafia or a first wife look reasonable -- and they'll use the court system as their own private strong-arm collectors, and hound those people to kingdom come.

Barring a sea change in governance, five years from now there will be nothing left to do but piss in the hole where the American housing industry once stood. It'll still be smouldering from a subsidized public/private arson fire initiative, so even that might seem like a blessing when they're done with it.

OPINIONS

2011-10-03T10:14:00.000-04:00

It is not my fault I notice things.

I've felt compelled to say that a great deal in my life. I had a sort of knack for ruining amusements for my acquaintances. I'd offer a mordant observation about something --offhandedly, usually -- and somehow I was the bad guy because it rang true to the hearer's ear and ruined their enjoyment of some pop song or TV show or whatever. They'd get mad at me for speaking the truth without malice. I found it very curious. It's not my fault that Bruce Springsteen can't sing or play his instrument, even after four decades of trying, and is a lame lamebrain in the bargain. It's not my fault for noticing that, either.

People don't like to consider, never mind admit, that they're susceptible to conditioning and appeals to their cupidity and herd instincts. That's why they bristle if you don't like what they like. Their affection for things assigns an importance to them that cannot be challenged. It doesn't matter to them that their affection for things was likely manipulated in the first place. They'll get mad if you even broach the subject, and tellingly call you a sheeple on a good day, or much, much worse if they think you're gaining traction. They think they like Apple computers because they're smart and smart people like Apple computers and not simply because a rapacious creep got every school in the country to use the useless things to the exclusion of all else and now having the close button in the wrong place is all they know. Me? I've more important things to care about. Like what you like.

"Like what you like," is likewise a common thing for me to say. I made money playing a comic version of a Bruce Springsteen song, and smiled while I did it. I try not to assign ponderous importance to trivial things. But most people aren't like that. A vicious narcissism rules the age. People will fight with fists over the primacy of Katy Perry over Lady Gaga. People want to write their condiment preferences into the Constitution. They believe that their love for things, however acquired, places the imprimatur of importance and goodness and intelligence on the objects of their affections. You can get shot for wearing the wrong laundry at a football stadium. People have OPINIONS now, not the lower-case kind.

Personality cults abound in a world of unbridled, crabby partiality of course. Politicians and businessmen are made into messiahs, not functionaries. If you oppose them, or are even ambivalent about them, you're evil. Of course anti-personality cults appear, to associate odd, cookie duster moustaches and stiff-armed salutes to innocuous, if venal, persons. Everyone's both a bohemian corporal and John the Baptist at the same time, depending who you ask.

It's getting especially tiresome here in no-man's land between those trenches. One side adores people and things you find tiresome or useless, and there's no rest from it, either, as the other side does nothing but talk about the same persons and things all day long. One cannot notice that both opinions are held by persons who are immune from the results of both their own and the competing worldviews. You all count coup in an effeminate set-piece, while a loaded pistol is in the nose of the rest of us.

You can both claim it's friendly fire, but the mortar shells all fall in the same place -- nearby, thanks. It's not my fault I notice that.

Lignin. Is There Anything It Can't Do?

2011-10-02T14:22:00.002-04:00

I find the carpenter is more malleable when he's stewed a bit, too.

Put Your Back Into It

2011-10-01T15:25:00.000-04:00

I don't know what tomorrow brings,
But I made just eight cents today;
Shouldered wheels at many things,
And danced and sang a cabaret.

Thousands looked upon my wares,
And sat upon their lumps of gelt;
They mimicked all they couldn't steal
To plop on their conveyor belts.

Electrocution is my fate;
Before, they sound a little tone.
But I don't dare recriminate
In hopes they'll throw a little bone.

There's little left for me to hope,
I will not steal, I cannot borrow,
But if I feed my zoetrope,
Perhaps I'll earn nine cents tomorrow.

Interestingly, The Blues Brothers Was The Worst Band John Belushi Was Ever In

2011-09-30T12:06:00.003-04:00

Last Century: Learn; Do; Teach. This Century: Wish; Smug; Blame

2011-09-29T14:16:00.001-04:00

Belladonna

2011-09-28T18:07:00.001-04:00

Belladonna n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues. (Bierce)

The Avett Brothers

A Chance Like That

2011-09-27T10:54:00.000-04:00

I can't believe I gotta sit through this. Boss says go I go. Says this fathead's playin' way past payin' now. He ain't got no use exceptin' what he can learn to the others. He shoulda knowed that eventually you gotta pay the band. Oh, he's gonna wail until I shut him up. Sidle up next to him in the alley and take his elbow like we's on a date, only I leaves fingerprints in him right off so he knows what's what. All the way in the car he's gonna walk Spanish and tell the side of my head that he's got the lettuce stashed and all I gotta do is let him go get it. He knows I'm hard-boiled but he thinks we're still talkin'. Talkin's over, you lizard. I got sent 'cause I got no conversation in me. He's such a swell with the broads when he's gamblin' with other people's dough and drinking champagne and wine. He's gonna look a lot different under the lights I'm gonna show him. Man's gotta learn. He ain't gonna like it but he should get down on his knees and thank me because I'm sent from heaven and I make you repent first so you can meet your maker baptised. Who else is gonna give a man a chance like that?

A Lucky Fellow

2011-09-26T10:34:00.000-04:00

I wake up every morning and the room's a little smaller. Walls are creeping in. The ceiling's thinking it over. I limp to the window and it's a porthole that looks on nothing but icebergs.

It's a good room, though. The landlord drinks a bit and you can fool with him. The old ladies he worries like a dog worries a shoe, hair trigger, 'cause they haven't anything but money for him, and they ain't got any of that very often, either. But you find a pint for him now and then, or lift a couple cigars off the counter at the station when the worker bee's making change and you're jake for another month with the guy.

I tried quitting the smokes, but what's the use? It's the only currency in the world now. The only manners a man can have. I got smart and got matches and always kept 'em on me, and the swells never seem to have one and they'll give you a coffin nail for a light every time. Get the empty packs from the barrels and fill 'em back up and pretty soon you're rolling in it.

Once upon a time you could go to the railyard with a gunney and pick up the steam coal that bounced from the cars. Just pennies at the coal and ice, but just pennies is all you need in this world. Now the kids don't bother with school anymore and they're too close to the ground to have a chance against. They waste the money on their mothers. Until they grow up and the army harvests them like they did their dads a man's got to find another way.

I'm a lucky fellow. There's always another way for a lucky fellow.