Month: November 2011

100 years of Chevy: music

Here’s a couple versions of the famous See the USA in Your Chevrolet commercial.

Chevrolet, the car company, is 100 years old this month. In honor of that milestone, there’s a dedicated Chevy station on Pandora.com, with 100 songs mentioning the Chevy; they are listed below.

But two fairly obvious choices are left off:

409 by the Beach Boys and Little Red Corvette by Prince. Little Red Corvette [listen] might have been left off because the Purple One can be fussy when it comes to licensing. But the exclusion of 409 [listen] is surprising.

Here are a couple of versions of the famous See the USA in Your Chevrolet commercial:
Dinah Shore – 1952
Glee – Super Bowl 2011

Here’s that list on Pandora:

99 In The Shade, Bon Jovi
All The Best, John Prine
American Pie, Don McLean [here’s The Grand Rapids, Michigan LipDub version]
Amy’s Back In Austin, Little Texas
Ball And Chain, Social Distortion
Blitz, Audio Adrenaline
Blue (Da Ba Dee) (Remix), Eiffel 65
Blue Jeans, Silvertide
Captain Jack, Billy Joel
Chattahoochee, Alan Jackson
Chevrolet, ZZ Top
Chevy Van, Sammy Johns
Chrome, Trace Adkins
Contact, Citizen Cope
Crazy About Her, Rod Stewart
Crocodile Rock, Elton John
Dare To Be Stupid, “Weird Al” Yankovic
Don’t Forget To Remember Me, Carrie Underwood
Dr. Feelgood (Live), Motley Crue
Drive South, John Hiatt
El Camino, Ween
El Tejano, Cowboy Troy
Everytime It Rains, George Strait
Fall In Love, Kenny Chesney
Family Reserve, Lyle Lovett
Fightin’ Words, Trace Adkins
Girls With Guitars, Wynonna Judd
Go ‘Head, Mystikal
Go Lil’ Camaro Go, The Ramones
Going Back To Cali, LL Cool J
Here I Am, Lyle Lovett
Here’s To You, Rascal Flatts
How Bizarre, OMC
Hustlin’, Rick Ross
I Can Only Think Of One, Dierks Bentley
I Go Back, Kenny Chesney
I Got You, Dwight Yoakam
I Learned That From You, Sara Evans
I Won All The Battles, Tracy Lawrence
I’ll Be Your Johnny On The Spot, Ween
I’m Customized, The Cramps
I’m Just A Girl, Deana Carter
I’ve Got A Rock N’ Roll Heart, Eric Clapton
If I Stay, Tracy Byrd
Jesse Went To War, Marcy Playground
Joe Rey, Fountains of Wayne
Keeping The Faith, Billy Joel
Less Than Zero, Elvis Costello
Let You Go, The Clarks
Metropolis, Trace Adkins
Miss Popularity, Jordan Pruitt
Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song), Billy Joel
Mud On The Tires, Brad Paisley
Natural Beauty, Neil Young
Neutron Dance, The Pointer Sisters [listen]
Night Moves, Bob Seger
One Bud Wiser, Gretchen Wilson
Paint The Town Redneck, J.M. Montgomery
Pickin’ Wildflowers, Keith Anderson
Picture Perfect, Nelly Furtado
Putting The Damage On, Tori Amos
Racing In The Street, Bruce Springsteen
Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy), Jim Croce
Real Gone, Sheryl Crow
Renegade, Tim McGraw
Repetition, David Bowie
Ridin’ In My Chevy, Snoop Dogg
Riding With Private Malone, David Ball
Right Time Of The Night, Jennifer Warnes
She’s In Love With The Boy, Trisha Yearwood
Small Town Girl, Kellie Pickler
Something On, The Tragically Hip
Song Of The South, Alabama
Still Love You, Rod Stewart
Superstar, Sheryl Crow
Suzy And Jeffrey, Blondie
Tannin Bed Song, Shawn Mullins
The Greeting Song, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man, Rolling Stones
Three Marlenas, The Wallflowers
Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen
Thundering Hearts, John Mellencamp
Tim McGraw, Taylor Swift
Twentieth Century Fox, 38 Special
Unappreciated, Cherish
Uneasy Rider, Charlie Daniels
Union Sundown, Bob Dylan
Water, The Who
West Texas Highway, Lyle Lovett
When I Think About Leaving, Kenny Chesney
When You Close Your Eyes, Night Ranger
Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?, Paula Cole [listen]
Why Do We Want What We Know We Can’t Have?, Reba McEntire
You Never Know Just How Good You’ve Got It, Tracy Byrd
You Win My Love, Shania Twain
Young Blood, Rickie Lee Jones

Running for Office QUESTIONS

For some reason, the city of Albany holds its school board vote in November, rather than in May, when most other locations do. In fact, the school BUDGET IS voted upon in May, along with the library board and the library budget.

Anyway, someone called me up a few months ago and asked me if I wanted to run for school board. Last year, someone I knew told me that “people” were discussing having me run, but I never got a call. This year, I got a call from a local official who I knew before he was elected to his office. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

It’s not that it’s an unpaid position that takes a lot of time. It’s more that school boards are handcuffed by No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top. Moreover, in the city Albany, the nine or ten charter schools, which are far less transparent financially than they ought to be, are paid for out of the school budget. In other words, I don’t know how to make the situation better, or even maintain the status quo.

A few years ago, I was also asked to run for the library board; THAT position I thought about for a while before declining for time reasons. Someday, I might run for that.

1. Have you ever thought of running for political office?
2. Have people requested that you run?
3. Have you run? For what office(s)?
4. Have you served in elected office?

I was in student government in high school, college, and grad school, but it’ll be a while before I try again.

There were more than a half dozen countywide positions for which there was no opposition candidate, only the Democrat. That is distressing, but I’m still not running.

A Sense of Proportionality

Getting lost is the fact that OWS changed the conversation. The narrative that wealth trickling down works has been largely rejected. The notion that your can’t fight back against the banks has been proven to be false.

Things in the world have been annoying me, and I think there’s a common theme: everything seems to be perceived as equal as everything else. I go to a news aggregator and I see the latest on the wars, a bad weather event, and the most recent person voted off a reality show, and it’s all treated similarly, as though they have the equivalent news value.

There has been a run of misstatements by US politicians recently, and they are not the same at all. US Senate Majority leader Harry Reid recently talked about being done before the Easter recess, then quickly corrected himself to say Thanksgiving. In a debate, Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry has a brain freeze and can’t remember the departments he’d eliminate, and some pundits declare his candidacy over; it WAS bad but human. GOP candidate Herman Cain not seeming to know that China had gotten nuclear missiles – over 40 years ago! – or the US position vis a vis Khaddafy’s Libya seems less like a gaffe, which I think means a relatively trivial matter, and more like a fundamental shortcoming.
***
Re; the Occupy Wall Street, et al movement. There were basic truths about income inequality that fueled the protests. But recent polling suggests that the OWS has become less popular, not, I submit, because of the wrongness of the original premise, but because of the obfuscation over whether or not the protesters had the right to essentially live in public parks, and the manner in which they were removed by the police. In fact, it has been the heavy-handed response by authorities in many cities, such as NYC; Oakland, CA; Burlington, VT; Portland, OR; and Chapel Hill, NC, which has actually energized the movement, rather than defeat it. Of course, I know from too many rallies that “the people, united, can never be defeated.”

Getting lost by critics is the fact that OWS changed the conversation. The narrative that wealth trickling down works has been largely rejected. The notion that you can’t fight back against the banks has been proven to be false. There’s a pushback against the idea that unions are all costly, terrible mistakes. There is an economic disparity, and if there is a class war, it isn’t the 99% waging it. So a poll of whether one supports the movement is facile at best.
***
Another issue: the alleged sex crimes at Penn State. Jaquandor hit on much of it when he noted that PSU isn’t the victim here; children allegedly are. And I should say here, I suppose, that Jerry Sandusky is innocent of the charges against him until proven guilty. What I am compelled to note, though, is guilty or not, Jerry Sandusky is an idiot. Who thought it was a good idea to agree to a phone interview on national television? His lawyer, who had a child by an underage girl more than 30 years his junior? His lawyer is an idiot too.

I read an article by a local retired journalist, which I cannot now find, that suggests that people have watched so many “real” people interviewed on TV after a tragedy that they feel some sort of obligation to do the same. This is a false assumption, and especially when one has been indicted. Sandusky, from everything I’ve seen of him, seems to think HE’S the misunderstood victim here. Some free legal advice: Jerry Sandusky should say NOTHING, at least until his trial.

What the heck is behind Congress considering a bill counting pizza as a vegetable? A paean to some fast-food lobby or hostility towards Michelle Obama’s efforts towards healthier living? Or something else?

I believe in intellectual property rights, but the Stop Online Piracy Act, proposed in the House of Representatives, and the companion bill PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) is a pair of oxymoronic newspeak titles, just like peacekeeper missiles and the USA PATRIOT Act. As an intellectual property attorney I know puts it, the proposed law is “insidious and dangerous. It will change, some say break, the internet as we know it, by turning the internet into a limited portal where you can’t do much more than buy what they want you to buy, and only from them, and to read only what they want you to read, and for a price.”

Yet the legislation has a good chance of passing with bipartisan political support, despite the opposition of Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Linked In, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zynga. This is bad law, and could easily affect those not in the United States as well,

Done ranting. Or, I’ve run out of time.

Would have been Mom’s birthday

One of the things my mom would sing to us on our birthdays and other special occasions was If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.


As I mentioned at the time, I got a lot of wonderful remembrances and condolences regarding my mother’s death in February. And things are usually better now. But the first birthday after her death somehow has a special poignancy. I’m NOT calling her or sending her a card or struggling over the fact that buying stuff for her became increasingly difficult, because she said she wanted for nothing.

This is something one of my SBDC colleagues sent back in February:

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet”

One of the things my mom would sing to us on our birthdays and other special occasions was If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d Have Baked a Cake. Unlike my father, my mom didn’t sing around the house all that often. Here’s the Eileen Barton version of the song.

Smoke Gets In Your Lungs

Non-smokers have come a long way since the days when I had to prevaricate in order to breathe cleanly.

November 17, 2011, is the Great American Smokeout when folks in the USA are encouraged to end their consumption of tobacco. I’m all in favor. I find myself increasingly sensitive to cigarette smoke; if my eyesight and hearing have diminished over time, my olfactory sense has not. In fact, it’s arguably stronger.

As I’ve noted, my father was a cigarette smoker when I was a child, and in those days, he could send me or my younger sisters to the corner store to buy him a pack of Winstons. His smoking was a source of some irritable conversations between us.

At college, I have a clear recollection during my freshman year in college, back in 1972, of going into the Faculty Tower to take the elevator to the 9th floor. Some guy I did not know was going to take his lit cigarette into the conveyance. I said, “Please don’t bring that thing in here.” He snapped, “Why? You have asthma?” “Yes,” I lied. And he then complied!

Non-smokers have come a long way since the days when I had to prevaricate in order to breathe cleanly. Airplanes used to have smoking and non-smoking sections. I remember sitting in row 22, the last non-smoking row. Wouldn’t you know that the smoke did not have the courtesy to go back from row 23, but instead wafted forward?

I still remember the VFW hall where a wedding reception was held and the smoke was so thick that I spent more time outside than in. Or going to a bar called Pauly’s in Albany to hear a band, but ended listening to them from the street; Pauly’s is reopening, I hear, and if I get a chance to see musicians, I believe I’ll be able to do so from inside the establishment.

Just last month, I was on a bus. This guy stood in the entryway of the bus, sucking in as many drags as he could before entering. As he walked down the bus aisle, people said, out loud, “Boy, something really stinks in here,” and the like. Not just one person but perhaps a half dozen. I agreed with their assessment, though not so much with their tactic.

Anyway, read about the Great American Smokeout, even if you’re not American. Here are ways to help you quit.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial