Clint Eastwood Chose The Wrong Words.

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Soooo many people are indignant that Eastwood would suggest that President Obama might tell someone something to the equivalent of “F*&% You”….

Um….

I should point out he’s come close to doing just that. More than once.

Raise your hand if you think a President who would go on national television and proudly tell the world he’s going to “kick ass” would easily go a little further and tell someone to “f*&% Off”.

Yeah. Both my hands are high in the air.

PS. I wonder if “take-backs” are allowed in the “Chicagoland” Presidential rulebook? I smell an inverse beer summit in the works!

Oh look! There! It happened!!!!

PSS. Yeah. I just had to post this.

Hat Tip: Beer Summit Image.

A Blast From My Past!

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A diving score card, circa 1980-ish. My best score was on dive 5111, which is a from drive with a half twist. On twisty dives, I used to throw the very unusual reverse dive in layout with a half twist, dive 5311. In all my years of diving, I was as far as I know the only one who did that dive.

The back 1 1/2 summy with a 1/2 twist was one of my favorite dives to throw. My two regrets in diving was that I never got to states – missed that by 2/10’s of a point (my fault as I muffed two dives in regionals) – and I never got the chance to learn and throw a back 1 1/2 with a 1 1/2 twist. The last year I dove, the guy who was going to coach had a family emergency and had to quit, which left me without a coach for much of the season. When I finally go a coach, it was so close to the beginning of conference competition, he was reluctant to start working on new dives. I should have insisted that I learn the dive anyway, but i didn’t have the self confidence to issue that challenge in those days.

Oh well.

Here is the back 1 1/2 with a 1 1/2 twist. This is on the 1 meter board. Mine would have been from the 3 meter.

PS. This was written on the back. Have no idea why, except it was probably referring to my car. The writing on top is not mine. I have no idea.

 

Saluting the Son

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Yoga Filled Body, Christ Filled Souls

Glass Half-Full: New strategy to market specific exercise to Christian-identified persons.

Glass Half-Empty: An exercise with East Asian roots shamelessly appropriated by another religion. Biblical stories were borrowed from previous myths, why not exercise?

The First Song I Ever Wrote.

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It’s called “Insanity”.

As I said, it was the first song I ever wrote. My song writing journey started when I was about thirteen. So, I’m 47 now. That means it took some 34 years to complete this song! Many if not most of the songs I’ve written over the years are incomplete. In the event that the lyrics come out whole and complete at the initial point when I put pencil to paper, the tune that would go with it usually came later… Sometimes MUCH later. This first song was different. It just all came out.

Well, almost.

I knew how it was going to go music and form wise, where things went up and down and paused and what-not, but I had no idea what key it would be in. The thing is, I never really thought about what key it would be in. It never crossed my mind. I wasn’t playing an instrument, or even thinking about performing the song for that matter at the time I wrote it, so there isn’t any reason why I would think of that.

Fast forward nine months ago. I spent a decent part of an evening rifling through my entire song catalog – thirty four years and three binders full of songs or unfinished scribblings that might show promise – looking for something, anything resembling a decent song I might be able to bring in to my acoustic guitar / vocal duo Taylor Martin. I didn’t find anything that had the makings of a good Taylor-Martin song, but I did realize that I have a lot more decent songs written over the years than I had ever realized. The stuff that I had once thought was horrible or just plain dumb, now that there is some distance between the creation of the thing and the immediate revulsion of the work many artists experience – kind of a creators remorse* – didn’t look so bad in retrospect. In fact, some of my songs are probably pretty good.

“Insanity”, that first song, was one of those that looks better with age. I’m not going to say it is the best song in my collection. At least I wouldn’t say it is. But it is one of the most honest songs about the depression and withdrawn state I was in. It is about the aftermath of the move from huge metropolis of Dallas Texas to the tiny berg of Lemoore California, a town that had no movie theater, no bowling alley, and not even a single stop light! I was already alone, depressed, and isolated as a kid, but moving to Lemoore… Man, that hit me HARD!

How hard?

This hard! Here is a taste of the song “Insanity”:

Fortune, fame and friends
It never seems to end
But then I took a fall
And it seems I lost them 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 can’t go on
The dream, is gone.

[chorus]

Hello’s
Why bother
Why try
You always have to say good-bye
And it’s driving me insane

The verses are a bit of an exaggeration. It’s not to say I felt like I had much of anything to begin with, as I was not a happy kid in Dallas. But when I moved to Lemoore there was a brutal reality of being truly alone, as I lost everything that was familiar, including contact with my best friend, a relationship of the type I would not again have for a number of years. As I had written before in a previous post, many of those early screeds were my way of deal with being alone and isolated, while the rest of the world seemed to be having a good time.

Now it’s my turn to have a good time. Doing the solo album and performing those songs live will in some ways make all that hurt not worth it, but at least make it worth something.

 

More Solo Album stuff here.

 

PS. * I think most artists experience “creators remorse” from time to time. I’ve written so many songs that at the time I though were just fantastic, and then a day later, I look at them and go “Jeez, this SUCKS!”. But I rarely throw anything I’ve written away. So they get a second chance for evaluation somewhere down the line.  Also, when I wrote “Insanity” I was listening to ELO when I wrote it, so I always thought it would have a familiar  ELO vie to it. As it turns out, that isn’t the case. This thing has a life of its own.

For When You Got to Go & You’re On the Go

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The Japanese are always a step ahead.

How’d You Spend the Money?

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I believe this may be doctored; it’s funny, none-the-less.  The thing is, you have to wait until the very end for the punchline.  Why I find it funny only speaks to my juvenile nature.

via The Daily Wh.at

NEIL ARMSTRONG, August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012

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I am crying right now.

He meant so much to this nation, so much to the world.

There are so few people in this world who can say they were the very first to do something. Neil? Armstrong certainly could. So precious few have been able to bring the world together, if only for a little bit. For that one supreme “giant leap” of a moment, Neil Armstrong did. I hope future generations can understand what he meant to this world.

HooRay! Sonicfrog.Net Is “Safe” For Consumption!!

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Though I was hoping my site value would be more than $1,796. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Rating for sonicfrog.net

Alienating Voters, One Demographic At A Time.

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Yes, I’m not thrilled with the way the Obama administration has gone behind Congresses back and implemented part of the “Dream Act” via executive order. But Arizona Gov Jan Brewer’s response to it, denying drivers licenses to those young adults to be covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Process is mind numbingly dumb. I was going to write “It might be politically sound at the present moment“, but, unlike gays, who are mostly not going to vote for Republicans ever, the GOP has a chance to court and win a good portion of the Latino vote. Silly defensive actions such as the type Brewer is pulling will not bring any Latinos who are on the fence to the GOP side, and will only alienate a generation of both Latino and non-Latino voters for generations to come.

Then there is this.

Evelyn Cruz, an Arizona State University clinical law professor and director of the Immigration Law & Policy Clinic notes:

“that the REAL ID Act of 2005, a federal law that modified requirements for state driver’s licenses and ID cards, specifically listed immigrants who have been granted “deferred action” as among groups of people eligible for a license.”

Supreme YouTube Banter! Candy-O Style!

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I say often that I was sick and tired of 1970’s longhairs and their guitars…but then came synths, hungry starving bands on Welfare, and inno-FREAKING-vation.? 80’s New Wave and alternative appealed to something I had no name for, but which I now recognize is my cold, cold silicon heart.

The Cars combined New Wave cool with “spirit of AM radio” accessibility.

And

Since we are reminiscing: I had just started high-school and got invited to a party by some seniors.They played this record ALL night long. I got to drink, I got to make out with a HOT older chick, and I got to “smoke”. I thought to myself “wow, the Cars rock!”. Next morning as I was barfing out all my internal organs into the toilet, I remember thinking.

A) Beer tastes terrible coming out.

B) That chick was actually fugly as hell

C) That might have been oregano.

D) The Cars STILL rock!