But I can’t seem to find any motivation to write about anything.
Politics…. Meh. It’s all the same.
Dan Savage…. Meh…. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do.
The fact that my battery charger I bought last year has already died…. OK. But who cares.
The only thing that bums me out right now, it the news that iconic Fresno bowling alley Cedar Lanes is not only shutting its doors, but is apparently being torn down.
What a drag. Will have to go bowling there one last time before the take the ‘dozer to it, and implement my now famous between-the-legs shot!
Televised bowling was pretty big in the 70’s. Here is some old video of the Fresno Open, a bowling tournament. Who knew Fresno was in Southern California!
I have some recent video of my new band playing at Cedar lanes a month ago. I’ll post it when I get the chance.
“Marriage between a man and a woman is at the heart of our civilization.”
Um… Nope. Definition of Civilization is
“An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions.”
Did marriage increase mans intellectual state?
Nope.
Did marriage cause an increase in either art or science?
Nope… Though sometimes art has been inspired by ones mistresses or forbidden loves!
Did marriage spur the need for extensive use of record-keeping?
Nope…. Or at least not until prenups and divorce became more common.
Did marriage induce the appearance of complex political and social institutions?
You know the answer.
Civilization does not suddenly go away if marriage suddenly did not exist. Civilization grew as a result of homo-sapiens ability to do things, such as refine agricultural techniques for instance, which diminished nomadic societies and allowed a greater number of people to be fed, which allowed a larger and larger number of people to live in one tribe, which freed more people to specialize in tribal responsibilities and created the conditions and the impulse to “civilize”.
I cried for strangers today and I don’t know why. Perhaps memories of my youth. Perhaps there is some majik when we are moved by another. The impossible knowing that they are on your side. May the creator find you willing and free.?
I know this. I get teary eyes when I listen to sad or touching songs that never used to affect me in this fashion. Part of it is thinking of the inevitable, when I’m going to have to mourn for the passing of a favorite artist – Paul McCartney, Simon or Garnunkel, Judith Durham, either of the Finn Brothers – when one of these great music influences go, I’m going to be devastated!. It all just brings our mortality a little too uncomfortably close.My mind often thinks that I’m younger, but the various little aches and pains in the body says otherwise. Granted… I’m not “OLD”. But I’m not young either. I hate the thought of our mortality, and more selfishly, my mortality.
Dying sucks!
But, even when I was a kid, I understood it as a natural part of life. It’s what we do.
Strange thoughts. I just realized, as kids, we understand the life cycle’s end long before we realize how we were brought into this world, i.e. sex. Only later after the single digit years do we come to grasp intellectually and physically the tremendous drive that creates us, dominates our life and kind of screws us up for so many years thereafter! We understand our end before our beginnings. Seems that should be the other way around.
What a strange and wonderful way things work out!
PS. Who is Judith Durham you ask? Only one of the finest voices ever to have existed on the planet, thank you!!!!
I cut my musical teeth? on this stuff. My brothers, sisters, and I used to sit around the kitchen table and sing together to this, Simon and Garfunkel, Kingston / Chad Mitchell Trios and anything else with harmonies in it. Though, as a musician, I’ve play so many different styles of music, these are my roots. To the Seekers and all the other influences – Thank you for teaching me how to think music, and be music.
PPS. And here’s a live performance.
See kids, this is how the grown-up do it! No auto-tune in existence. We had to learn to do it right when it counted! Love the newspaper hats too! Won’t that at concerts much anymore!
This is even getting reported in New Zealand! We’re world famous!!!! Doesn’t get much better than that! Probably might as well retire this entire tag, as I doubt I’ll ever have anything to report on that can top porn!
PS. When you get into the details, there isn’t any porn per see. It’s just another Santorumite wanting to dictate morality and control our lives.
I just got this in my email. It’s complete with Verizon Wireless graphics:
Your current bill for your account is now available online in My Verizon
Total Balance Due: $1706.74
Keep in mind that payments and/or adjustments made to your account after your bill was generated will not be reflected in the amount shown above.
> View and Pay Your Bill
Want to simplify payments?
> Enroll in Auto Pay
Thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless.
One little problem…. I don’t have Verizon Wireless.
I’m sure this has been out there for a while, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. The links provided on the page are not letting me access the page. If i were using a Windows machine, that might be different. I am on my Linux computer, so I’m safe from any virus that might be attached to the e-mail or links. Regardless… Be warned. I’m sure there are a few people who might have gotten scammed in this fashion.
I’m sure you’ve all encountered some of the blow-back from the careless comments made by former RIAA lawyer Hillary Rosen about Ann Romney. If you haven’t hear the comments, here’s the video:
In a conversation on Facebook, someone wrote this about the core of Rosen’s premise:
“A stay at home mom, married to a billionaire, really shouldn’t be speaking on working women’s issues.”
As my Mom says…. “If you don’t “should” on me, I won’t “should” on you!”
(God I love my Mom sometimes)
From my POV, there is no reason why she shouldn’t be able to talk about it. Example – I’m not married, and I can not get married here in California, at least not to the person I wish to marry. Does this mean that I shouldn’t be able to say anything or talk about the topic? Now, you can say she doesn’t have the same perspective as an out-of-the-house working mom just as I don’t on actually being married, but, even then, sometimes looking at things from the outside gives you a perspective that an insider might miss.
Next:
“It is now being taken way out of context”
Oh, those of you who know me know that is a very BIG bugaboo of mine – taking things out of context. But, having just relistened to Rosens entire comment, even in its entirety, hers is a dumb comment and not out of context. Sometimes you get reporters who lead a guest to a spot where they are lured into a stupid comment. That’s not the case here. Cooper did not lead Rosen to the attack on Mrs Romney. Rosen initiated it. And it’s worse, because Mitt, with his statement, was obviously pandering, and using his wife to do so. Had Rosen stuck to the main focus of the question, Mitt’s pandering, there would not be the backlash.
It’s not as if Ann Romney has never stepped out of the house and never talked to business people and working women when she was either First Lady of Mass and doing charity work, or that she doesn’t have friends and or relatives who speak to her about such things.
I’m a trained teacher. I hear a lot of people level criticisms at the teaching profession. Some of those people not only have never been teachers themselves, but they don’t have kids as well. Some of the criticisms annoy me, because, having experienced the teaching environment personally, I know that some of their criticism is off base, sometimes ridiculous. But, even though there is no connection to the profession, some of it is still none-the-less valid.
I have no problem criticizing any politician when he or she is pandering, which Mitt was doing with his original comment. And it was clumsy, as usual. But what Rosen did, in order to score some political points, was akin to throwing fellow woman Ann Romney under the bus. And here it’s worse, because Mrs Romney wasn’t even in the road, but was a pedestrian on the sidewalk, and Rosen had to swerve to nail her!
Last night, I was selecting the songs from my 34 year long history of song writing I am going to record. The first song I wrote when I was about 13. So of the songs are complete works and include the music, kept in my head for all these years, while other things are little more than scribbling of various incomplete thoughts that never got thrown away. At the time, I didn’t think to date the songs when I wrote them, but many are autobiographical and tied to specific events, so I have a good idea of the general period. They are, in their own way, time-stamped. One of the songs I came across, about 40 so pages in, has a lyric written about my time as a theater major. It goes like this:
Yes it’s true I’m 20 But I can squeeze into a 15 year old’s shoes The world is my window And I can pick any role I chose
And that’s all I wrote. The rest of the page is blank, which is OK, because where ever I was going before I hopped off the trail of creativity, I can’t imaging it would have ended well.
But back on point. I can confirm that it was almost certainly written when I was twenty. Here is one of the few pictures that I got around to taping into my lyric notebook. I was going to make it a dual purpose thing, doubling as a sort of scrap book, but it turns out scrap-booking just isn’t my thing. Ignoring the hot black guy in the picture below; just above the snap-shot is a ticket stub for a play I was in, The Desperate Hours, dated March 7, 1986. That was 3 days before my 21st birthday.
I played Ralphie, the 15ish year old boy in the play. That’s me, being shy and pretending to shave (my beard was pathetic back in the day) Look at my shoe size… And I looked so damned young. I still got carded by Vice a couple of times when I was 27. So,yeah, I really COULD pull that 15 year old character off with ease! Quite honestly, it ticked me off, because there were not very many good roles for that in the plays we put on while I was a drama major.
So I do have a distinct time marker here. And that matters. In my twenties, I became fairly introspective and philosophical with my lyrics. There is some pretty good stuff there. Most everything written before then is, how do I put this delicately….
DAMNED DEPRESSING!
Good Lord I was one miserable teenager! But then, I had good reason to be.
At 12, I had moved from the big city of Dallas Texas, to a tiny town in what I considered the middle of nowhere, Lemoore California. It didn’t have a bowling alley… Hell. it didn’t even have a stoplight in the entire town! Talk about culture shock. (I love the place now BTW)
I was way short.
I had (have) lazy eyes, left or right, depending on which one was taking time off to wander.
I felt like I couldn’t get a date with anyone I had a crush on, which…
Was a mixed bag, because the girls I had a crush on were either some that my older Brother had dated, were COMPLETELY out of my league – yes, I admit I had a HUGE crush on Debbie Sheffield (God, she was – and still is – beautiful, and I did also write a lyric about her unavailability, which is good and might make the album… hope that doesn’t embarrass her), and it was equally frustrating because…
At the same time, I was completely hiding the fact that I was also attracted to guys. I knew I had homosexual feelings before I knew there was a word for it.
I’m sure I’m leaving some other cause of my anguish out, but you get the picture. I was one messed up emotionally battered shipwreck of a teen! And MAN DOES IT SHOW!!!!! My first lyric was this:
Fortune fame and friends
It seems it never ends
Then I took a fall
And it seems I lost it all
But now I see
It’s not them, it’s me
My fantasies and dreams
For all of them it seems
They’ve all gone down the drain
‘Cause of all the hurt and pain
I just can’t go on
My whole world is gone
Hello’s
Why bother
Why try
You always have to say good-bye
And it’s driving me insane….
And for seven years, most of my inner thoughts I committed to paper were not much more uplifting.
I’m realizing I have enough decent material from those torturous years to make a whole album! If I did record all that stuff, I’m thinking I would have to name the thing “The Sad Album :-(“.
Last night, in response to this article, I posted this on my Facebook page.
Ha Ha! A123 is tanking and laying off workers!!!!
One of my friends responded:
Is that joy in people losing jobs…?
No, just laughing at unrealistic policy.
Government is great at developing cutting edge technologies – the internet, various medical procedures developed with the help of government grants, technology from NASA etc. But you have to develop them first, wait for not only practical applications to develop, but also for the consumer to start yearning for the tech or product that uses the tech, THEN pass it on to the private sector to sell. and establish its place. The administration did this bass-ackwards. I’m sorry, but there is no real “green ” industry. I do think you will see more of it in the future, and it will become more profitable, but the desire of government can’t create a thriving industry. This administration over-reached on this big time, and, just as the “green” initiatives are crashing in Europe, the same is predictably happening here.
Successful businesses start out small, and grow if there is a demand for the service or thing. .
A similar mistake was made when the liberal radio network Air America was launched, intended to be a counter to the Conservative talk format that has dominated for a couple of decades now. They got a bunch of people together, paid out huge sums of money to executives and some of the talent, and set up a huge network, without knowing if there would be consumer demand to support it. Their target was, of course, to be a counter voice in the radio industry to the Conservative Talk radio industry. And I would have like to see them succeed, as I fully support the idea of having a more diverse set of voices out there for the general public to choose from. But, it was obvious from the get-go that this enterprise was doomed to fail. They put the cart before the horse… No, they built a huge heavy cart before they even knew if they had any horses at all! What they should have emulated was the way he grew his business, starting small (one man), establishing that, yes, there is a demand for the product, and expanding one station at a time into each new market and see if the program survives in that market.
PS. I noticed this bit from the article:
The company laid off 125 factory workers in November, lost $257.7 million in 2011 (including an $11.6 million write-down of its stake in Fisker), and announced it would spend $55 million to fix the defective batteries it delivered to Fisker and other customers. Meanwhile A123’s top executives received big raises and inflated parachutes should the company change ownership.
I thought that was supposed to not happen anymore with the regulations put into place by this administration and the “Executive Pay Czar”. So, did this company get a pass on those rules? Or were there never any rules put into place on the first place to prevent this from happening?
(hint… it’s the second choice)
PPS. One more note on Air America… The product shoveled out to the public was HORRIBLE! They emulated Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Sean Hannity’s bombastic and often intelligence insulting style on many of the programs. Except for Al Franken – who was boring but actually had good guests – and, sometime Ed Schultz – when he wasn’t exploding over this or that – the programming was unlistenable.
Blog Admin Stuff, Life | Sonicfrog April 30, 2012 | 
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