Apr
16
2012
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.
Apr
12
2012
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!
Apr
6
2012
Here we come!!!!
Did this last year. It was spectacularly fun!
Hopefully, Greg will stay in the boat this year, and not lose his hat to the river!
Apr
6
2012
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 meMy 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 goneHello’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 :-(“.
Apr
5
2012
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.
Apr
4
2012
Many have been flabbergasted at the Presidents apparent lack of knowledge about the Supreme Court case of Mabury v Madison, which did indeed establish the power of the Supreme Court to declare a federal law passed by Congress and signed by the President as unconstitutional.
That is pretty astounding, considering he’s supposed to be a Constitutional scolar.
But there is something else he said this week that caught my ear. From obama’s speech at the Associated Press luncheon:
“Disguised as a deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism,”
Excuse me?
My friend Dan at Gay Patriot commented on the significance of Obama’s comments in relation to the Clinton budget, but everyone is missing the real significance of the “Social Darwinism” comment.
Think about the term and how it’s been used over the last century and more. It has been justification for all sorts of atrocities and prejudices, from racism to eugenics to Nazism to state sterilization of the mentally challenged and infirm. I generally scoff at the notion that people use “code words”, which is usually an accusation tossed at Conservatives by Liberals to try and portray Conservatives as racists. Well, in this case, although he apparently isn’t that familiar with the aspects of Marbury v Madison, I think it’s hard pressed not to conclude that this was the “Unifier-In-Chief’s” veiled and half clever way of accusing Conservatives of wanting to off cleans society of the poor and minorities.
I find his use of this rhetoric to be vile and ugly. I wonder how the press would have reacted if the previous President would have said anything like this about his political opponents.
Apr
3
2012
As someone who studied broadcasting and related industries in college, I find this stunning! Read to the end:
Sarah Palin phoned in to the “Today” show this morning as she makes her way across the country to New York where she will co-host tomorrow’s show.
Matt Lauer asked, “What are you doing to prepare? Are you reading some newspapers?,” a reference to Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric in 2008. “That’s a fine how-do-you-do. That’s a great start. Here we go,” said Palin laughing.
Palin will appear mostly in the 8am hour including taking part in “The Professionals” panel.
“Hopefully we won’t bore viewers with too much in-depth political talk,” said Palin, then boring viewers with political talk about “energy prices and some national security issues that have to be addressed and I think no matter what it is that we discuss it’s going to turn into a bit of a political discussion.”
“I appreciate NBC’s boldness in having me on,” said Palin, adding, “Doesn’t it kind of reflect that diversity of opinion that I hear that you all espouse?…”
“Or desperation,” said Meredith Vieria to laughs.
I am not a Sarah Palin fan by any means, but this kind of comment from a co-anchor of major network news show, is amateurish. Should she be disciplined or fired? I don’t know. But there will be some backlash if nothing is done.
Mar
29
2012
On the George Zimmerman video that’s shuttling around the web. Both sides are using that to bolster their case, when, if looked at with a critical eye, it may not show what either side wants it to.
The Pro-Zimmerman side says, if you look at one certain frame on the vid, it shows that Zimmerman does indeed have a wound on his head.
…..
Or clearly shows a moire pattern due to the poor video resolution and the short hair on his head. Johnny Carson used to tick off his producers because he would wear jackets that would often produce the same effect.
Two problems with that being a head wound:
1. That is a sizable cut. Even very small head wounds bleed like all get-out. If that IS a head wound, he would have needed proper medical attention from paramedics on the scene, and
2. There are other shots in that video of the back of his head that don’t show that mark. Something that large would certainly had to have shown up on several frames, at more than one angle when viewing the back of his head.
The outer side, those that want to make this a race issue, says it shows he has NO head wound.
But this is very low res stuff. He may still have a head wound, and the initial police report do state he was treated for a head wound, but it’s small, and the low res camera doesn’t pick it up. I don’t know how much a broken nose typically bleeds, or what the swelling looks like. But again…. Low res video. Not sure how much that will show up in this situation.
People are also making a note that there is no blood on his shirt from his broken nose. He may have had his jacket zipped up, and whatever blood there was went on his jacket, which would explain why there is no blood on the shirt. And, if the jacket is water-proof, and it’s raining, then much of the blood and grass that was reported may have washed off in the precipitation.
Another snafu in this whole thing – Conflicting reports. That’s going to happen in a case like this. Think it always does. We do have one report from an officer on the scene that does provide some good detail. But this officer was not the first on the scene. The one report does say that Zimmerman was given some on-the-scene aid for a cut to the head and a bloody nose, but the video certainly suggest those injuries are not as severe as some, perhaps even Zimmerman, are making them out to be. I would very much like to see that report too, as it would give us another view of the events as they unfolded after the police got there.
Now, on to the pictures being used by various outlets concerning the two principles in this case. I posted the ones you will typically see of both Mr. Martin and Mr. Zimmerman. Why use the picture of Trayvon as a 12 year old instead of using one of the recent ones that shows him as he looked a few days before his death? Don’t be afraid to let us see him as he was. I keep seeing the 12 year old picture used. And, on the other side, the photo of Zimmerman is not recent either. And it certainly brings out his Latino lineage more than the more recent pictures, as if to say “Hey, this guy can’t be a racist because he’s also a minority”. It’s manipulative, like the 45 year old who posts a picture of himself when he was 25 when trying to attract a date. It’s almost like it scares some people to show honesty.
To me, this is the most important issue – If things are as they appear, Zimmerman’s pursuit of Trayvon probably, in the end, makes all this other minutia irrelevant, as he appears to be the first aggressor. But, again, I am not going to side that way until all the facts, as much as possible, become known.
Zimmerman, to me, does look to be in the wrong here (understatement as the other guy is dead) but in my lifetime I’ve seen too many people who initially looked guilty turn out to be quite innocent, including some who have ended up on death row and been executed, and that gives me great pause when these kind of cases enter the public square.
Unless something else breaks, this will be the only thing i will post on this case.
Mar
27
2012
I played yet another open mic all by my lonesome self on Monday night. I did pretty well, all things considered. I’m finally losing the bit of nervousness I wrote about previously, partly because I’m getting better on guitar, and partly because I’m getting used to being on stage solo, with no band to lean on for comfort. I played my new (to me) Takamine G-335 12 string guitar on stage for the first time. I also played two originals, which is also a first.
One song was something old, a song called “Fools For Love”. The lyrics were written some 20 something years ago. More often than not, the songs I write start out being only lyrics. The tune that will accompany it usually comes later. In this case though, the basic melody had indeed been there from the beginning. But I didn’t play guitar at the time, so the song never got solidified. Also, in this case, the body of the song, well, it seemed awfully short.
Fast backward to last fall. Me and my Taylor Martin band-mate Jim Rust were mucking around on the guitars in his back yard. Since I’m still pretty new on the six string, I discover “new” chords and progressions almost every other day. While doodling, I came across this neat little instrumental bit that was fun to play. Though I never developed it into anything finished, it hung around and I played it often when goofing around on the guitar. It just kind of hung out there waiting for its lyrical soul-mate to complete it. Well, I was in the shower on Sunday, it dawned on me, right then and there, that the two bits would go together wonderfully. Of course, I couldn’t just jump out of the shower and grab the guitar, because the wet would have done some serious damage. But, as envisioned, the two fit together beautifully!
It’s interesting. I wrote the lyrics to “Fools” so long ago, and probably haven’t looked at them more than twice since I scribbled them down so long ago. Those of you who write songs will understand this completely. There are some songs you write that, no matter how hard you try to memorize the lyrics, they just don’t stick. “Fools For Love” was just the opposite. From the moment I wrote it, it was cemented into the synapses of my brain. Maybe it’s just the fact that the lyrical cheese factor is turned up pretty high. It starts out like this:
Romeo and Juliet
They haven’t done themselves in yet
They’re alive and well
In modern America…
Kind of has a John Mellencamp feel to it.
I did have a bit of a problem though. When I sat down this last week-end and ran through some of the song to make sure the music fit, I didn’t go all the way to the end and complete the composition. Didn’t even think about it; I just dabbled with some of the song, made sure parts fit, and went and did something else with the rest of the day. Things would have been much better for me if I had, because then I would have realized the song had a flaw. Recall that I was just going on and on about how some songs stick with you? Well, this was one of those songs…. Except for the last few bits of lyrics on the end. For some reason, that detail did not anchor itself in my brain.
Last night, about 30 before I was to leave for the show, I started leafing through my ancient lyric book to see how the song would end. But, um, the lyrics to that song were nowhere to be found in the book! I don’t know why they weren’t where they should have been, but they weren’t. I flipped through the book several times to make sure I hadn’t missed it. Time was getting short, and it began to dawn on me – even IF I would have found the page with the probably barely discernible scribblings on it, it may not have done any good. I began to realize that “Fools For Love” was almost certainly one of those many songs in my book that never quite got finished! I had wasted too much time looking for the lyrics, so I didn’t have time to sit and think of how I was going to end it.
Here is the last bit of lyric that I remember:
Can you hear the friars call
Or does he wait for the sun to fall
blah blah blah blah blah…….
blah blah blah blah blah…….
Crap. “Blah Blah Blah…” is in general not a very satisfying way to end a song.
Oh well, I thought as I was driving to the open mic. It’s my song, and I’ll just make something up when I get to the end. I did, and it went OK. Sometimes, song just write them selves. But I won’t reveal what I did until I record this one for my long delayed solo album. Why ruin the mystery!
The other song was new…. I mean, really new! Just wrote it yesterday. It still had the afterbirth on it! Eww…. Did I just go too far???? It is an instrumental called “Rage!”. I was mucking around on the 12 string Takamine, kind of thumping on the string with my thumb. It’s a standard bass guitar technique that is as it turns out completely useless on a 12 string guitar. That ticked me of a little. But when i put on the thumb pick and did the same thing…. Oh, there’s cool sound! So I just started mucking around in an angry sort of way, because the things I was playing just had that “I’m pretty pissed” attitude about it, and, Viola! A song is born!
Anyway, I played the 12 string. Such a fun instrument. I certainly didn’t play it perfect last night by any means, but i was happy with what I pulled off. When i picked up the guitar almost two years ago, I didn’t think I would be playing a 12 string this soon in the game. I was intimidated by the whole idea. I thought 12 string guitar would be much harder to play than it turns out it is. One of the guys at the OM brought up the point that, as a bass player, I might have an advantage as I’m used to holding down the strings with more force than a guitar player.
PS. Yes, I already know how to play “Tambourine Man”. As soon as I got the guitar a couple of weeks ago, that was of course the first song to pop into my head. It had to be played. Next was, you guessed it, “Comfortably Numb”.
PPS. According to Takamine Guitar Date website, my guitar “…was manufactured Wednesday, December 31st, 1980. It was the 39th guitar made that day.”
Mar
24
2012
This popped up on Facebook today, and I have to say, I’m a bit appalled.
A Facebook friend provides the narrative:
“Struggles with his faith” may have been “an indirect cause, at least,” says one activist. This wasn’t some youngster that had been bullied. This was a 38 year old man. The Mormon Church has blood on its hands…
Now, the actual headline reads:
Gay Mormon Man’s Suicide Points Up Tensions
Does it?
As friends mourn the death of Chris Wayne Beers, a gay man and former Mormon missionary and church employee who took his own life Sunday, some are noting tensions between LGBT people and the church, which opposes gay relationships.
OK… But do those “some” have a direct connection to Chris Beers? The article continues:
Utah native Beers, 38, had worked in the missionary and travel departments for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to a Web posting by Affirmation, a group working for LGBT equality within the LDS church. At the time of his death he was employed by the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City.
Mitch Mayne, a gay man who serves as executive secretary of the church’s Bay Ward in San Francisco, commented on Beers’s death in a Facebook posting. He did not know Beers but had been in contact with a friend of his, he noted, before saying, “While struggles with his faith may not have been the direct reason he took his own life, I’m hard pressed to imagine that there isn’t an indirect cause, at least. If we, as Mormons, did what we were supposed to do for all of our brothers and sisters — love them unconditionally — Chris would never have been stripped of his family of faith. He would not have been forced to choose. He would have had a deeper, richer and more spiritual support network to walk him through what life brought his way. Sadly, like many, he was given the ‘Sophie’s Choice:’ live life according to a heterocentric cultural practice and do so alone, without a partner — or live life without your family of faith and the strength of that spiritual community.”
Project much?
I’m sorry, but this is very weak. There is no indication in the article that he was very devout, or that his family had dis-owned him. The main interview of the article didn’t even know the guy. Mitch Mayne does not give any indication of knowing any of the details of this mans life. The statement “While struggles with his faith may not have been the direct reason he took his own life, I’m hard pressed to imagine that there isn’t an indirect cause, at least.” mean he’s grasping at straws and trying to make a martyr of the guy.
On his memorial page, there is a reference to the fact that his own brother Jeff had also passed away. That could be just as much or more of a weight on Mr Beers than the conflict between church and being gay.
If close friends come to the fore and say Beers was troubled by religious conflict, then there is validity to the slant of the Advocate article. Otherwise, it’s just advocacy extremism. It would be just as bad if you committed suicide, and some religious advocate came out and said, without verification, that you offed yourself because you couldn’t deal with the sin of being gay, without giving solid evidence that that was the case.
While it is certainly possible that his religion created personal conflict, nothing in this article provides any evidence, other than the fact that he was a Mormon. I suggest people get all the facts before you try to make this guy a martyr. Otherwise, you dishonor him in death.
Hell, we don’t even really know if he was gay.
Full disclosure – I’m agnostic, and gay, so I don’t have a dog in this fight, except to maybe not contribute to the distorting of a dead mans reputation.
PS. Upon reflection – I do have a bit of a dog in this fight. My Mates family is Mormon, but have treated me with great respect. Not all religious families are freaked out about homosexuality. So much of this hostility toward Mormons goes to their opposition to same sex marriage. As far as that goes, I respect their right to fight for what they believe in, just as I have the right to fight for my own beliefs. My side got overconfident and lazy in the fight against Proposition 8, and paid the price. We figured it could never pass here. We are as much at fault for its passing as the other side is responsible for getting it passed.