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At the Mike: Wallace

I’ve been watching Mike Wallace for probably 40 years, certainly for the duration of 60 Minutes, which started in 1968. So, I was rather interested in this story from NPR that I happened to catch on the radio that suggests that Wallace, Barbara Walters and Larry King, for three, don’t know how to interview very well.
Then I thought about the interview Wallace did with the head of Iran recently, and I realize that, at least in that instance, the critic may very well have been correct. Wallace’s schtick got in the way of getting actual information. One tends to remember the questions from his interviews more than the answers he gleans. I recall one interview with Ayatollah Khomeini when he suggested that others – not himself – thought of the leader (Arafat?) as a “lunatic”.
I suppose I oughtn’t to pick on an 88-year old man, who indicated in this audio clip from 12/29/2005, “I wouldn’t know what else to do” if he weren’t working, though he’s supposedly semi-retiring.

Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s blog, available in Farsi, English, Arabic and French.
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The death of Bruno Kirby last week bothered me for so many reasons:
* He was in two of my favorite movies, The Freshman and Spinal Tap.
* He was in several movies I enjoyed, such as Harry/Sally, City Slickers and Good Morning Vietnam.
* He was fifty-frickin’-seven years old.
(Didn’t know he was in the pilot of the M*A*S*H TV show.)

Monday Meme 8/21: Ice Breakers

I get to brag on my wife, as she is prominently mentioned in this article from last week.
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Found at the July 07, 2006 post here.

Ice Breakers

We’ve all been there. Those gatherings where you don’t seem to know anyone well. You’re trying to make small talk and that usually means questions. What do you ask? How do you answer?

1. How do you respond when asked “So, what do you do?”

I say “I’m a business librarian at at quasi-governmental agency.” Anything to work the prefix quasi- into the conversation.

2. What about the classic “Where are you from?”

I used to have a rude reply to this, but now I just say “from Binghamton, NY.” If they’re from NYS or nearby, this means something, but if they’re from south of the Mason-Dixon line or west of the Mississippi River, they hear New York, and invariably think “New York City”, which is about 200 miles away.

3. What other questions are you frequently asked at parties and other gatherings and how do you answer them?

“Is that REALLY your daughter?” “Yes.”
If someone at the party knows I was on JEOPARDY!, that person will almost invariably tell the new person that I was on the show, which leads to:
“Were you REALLY on?” “Yes.”
“What’s Alex Trebek really like?” “He did the rabbit-ears things with his fingers behind my back. I saw him on a monitor.”
“How did you do?” “I won one game, and came in second the second day.”
Considering this happened almost eight years ago, this conversation happens at least a half dozen times a year, and I never initiate it.

4. Are there any questions or topics that make you cringe?

No, but there are topics, usually home improvement, where, once the conversation is launched, someone in the midst of renovation, e.g., will tell a detailed 15-minute blow-by-blow; I’ve faded out by minute four.

5. What is your strategy for breaking the ice?

Usually to look for the person who seems out of the loop. Another tactic – be useful – offer to open the wine bottles or bring in additional chairs, for instance.

Hiatt Hits the Big 5-4

John Hiatt turns 54 today. I don’t know about you, but I always think of musicians as older than I am, or more recently, considerably younger. But Hiatt is essentially my age. I suppose I could have waited until next year to write this, when he hits the double nickel, but what the heck – I’m still bummed that I missed seeing him this summer, for FREE, because of my wisdom tooth extraction the day before.

I have no better way to indicate how much I love the music of Hiatt than to indicate that I’ve seen him live once (and would have seen him again this year), I’ve put together compilation discs of songs written by him and covered by others, and I own a majority of his output. To wit:
1979 Slug line NO
1980 Two bit monsters NO
1982 All of a sudden NO
1983 Riding with the king LP
1985 Warming up to the ice age CD
1987 Bring the family CD
1988 Slow turning CD
1989 Y’all caught? CD
1990 Stolen moments CD
1992 Little Village CD
1993 Slug line/Two bit monsters NO
1993 Perfectly good guitar CD
1994 Hiatt comes alive at Budokan CD
1995 Walk on CD
1996 Living a little, laughing a little CD
1996 Master series best of NO
1997 Little head CD
1998 Greatest hits and more NO
1999 Greatest Hits The A&M Years ’87 – ’94 CD
2000 Crossing Muddy Waters CD
2001 Anthology NO
2001 The tiki bar is open CD
2003 Beneath This Gruff Exterior CD
2004 20th century masters: The millennium collection NO
2005 Master of disaster CD
2005 Chronicles 3 CD box NO
2005 Live from Austin TX NO

About 60% of his output. I’m missing some of his early, unfocused work, and some of the other stuff I don’t have is duplicative.

My favorite John Hiatt songs:
1. Shredding the Documents from Walk On. Faux Beach Boys harmony, name-checks Larry King and Oprah.
2. Have a Little Faith in Me from Bring the Family. And the remixed version on one of his greatest hits album, with more orchestration, is definitely NOT an improvement.
3. Perfectly Good Guitar, title track. Reportedly really ticked off Pete Townsend, who has been known to smash one or two.
4. I Don’t Even Try from Riding with the King. Used to listen to this on the late, great Q-104. I love how the intro line echoes Smoke on the Water.
5. Lift Up Every Stone from Crossing Muddy Waters. I first heard this on an episode of A Prairie Home Companion on a co-worker’s 35th birthday, right after his party in Albany, while driving towards Poughkeepsie, my co-worker’s hometown. The song has a gospel feel.

An NPR story on Hiatt. Julie Hembeck, someday, you’ll appreciate the music of John Hiatt.

Don’t Play That Song! QUESTIONS

A couple work moves ago, my fellow librarians at the time developed rules about what we could and could not play around each other. This was one librarian’s list:

Music I never want to hear again as long as I live
Celine Dion
Brian Setzer
Mariah Carey
Bob Dylan
Sheryl Crow
BROOOOOOOOOOCE
(Southside Johnny, too, while we’re in Joisey)
Air Supply

Another list:
Joni
Janis Joplin
Liza Minelli can be tough
no Cher in the house (not that there’s ever been any)
and, in deference to your favorite band, absolutely no Klaatu

List #3:
Neil Young
Willie Nelson

My list? Nothing. There were no artists that I couldn’t have taken, at least now and then. There is some atonal John Coltrane I can’t listen to for very long, but none of these folks had any. (For that matter, I don’t think we had any Celine Dion, either).

Whereas, there were people we could play that no one would object to:
Lyle Lovett, the Beatles, and Bonnie Raitt immediately come to mind.

So my question: in your house, in your workplace or in your car: when you hear what songs, or artists, do you change the station or scream, “Turn that thing OFF!”? What songs, or artists, are almost always acceptable to a cross section of your family or colleagues? Julie Hembeck, please answer this query.
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TV Land has been doing a series of Top 10 lists, most of which I’ve ignored. But for some reason, I did watch Top 10 Musical Moments on TV this past Wednesday. A rather predictable list; the vague “MTV Unplugged begins” wouldn’t have made my list, though Nirvana on Unplugged, a “bubbling under” choice, might have. And the ONLY value of actually watching the thing, rather than just getting the list from the site is this little tidbit, about the guest on the Smothers Brothers show who passed out into Mickey Rooney’s arms during the Who’s explosive performance. (It was Bette Davis, and she did perform on the show.) Moreover, the irritating thing about the program is that the 10 p.m. EDT show actually began at 10:04:30; I find that be generally true of that network at night, so if you’re TiVoing, you may want to record the next show as well.
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LIBRARIANS IN THE MOVIES: An Annotated Filmography.

What Do We Know?

(Listening to: Information Overload by Living Colour; guitarist Vernon Reid was born August 22, 1958.)

This week, someone at work asked me what the derivation of the term “golden sombrero” in baseball was. I knew what it MEANT, but why that term? It’s hockey’s fault, according to the Wikipedia:
“In baseball, the golden sombrero is a slang term used to describe a player’s dubious feat of striking out four times in a single game… The term derives from “hat trick”, a hockey term for three goals that was applied to baseball as a term for three strikeouts. Since four is bigger than three, the rationale was that a four-strikeout performance should be referred to by a bigger hat, such as a sombrero.” There’s more about this topic here.

One of my racquetball buds was trying, and failing to tell this joke:
A man went into his doctor’s office to have a vasectomy, wearing a tuxedo. The doctor asked, “Why are you wearing a tuxedo to your operation?” The man replied, “I figure if I’m going to BE impotent, I’m gonna LOOK impotent.” (Say it aloud – it makes more sense.)
Anyway, he was failing in his joke telling because he couldn’t remember the word vasectomy. It happens – the word just doesn’t come. He was trying to describe it and said, “You know that thing that you have to kill your sex drive.” And while we got what he meant, another of my racquetball guys quickly noted that, in fact, a vasectomy doesn’t kill the sex drive.

One of the things I need to relearn again and again (and again and again)is the fact that what I think passes for “Everybody knows that!” doesn’t necessarily apply.
Case in point: last week, the racquetball guys were BSing, as they are wont to do, giving each other a hard time, when one said, “Well, even a busted clock is right twice a day.” Another of the guys, who was in his 30s, laughed heartily at this, so hard, in fact, that I said, “Surely you’ve heard that one before?” He laughed, “No, I haven’t. That’s really funny!” O.K., then.
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I was reading the articles about the new Census data released this week, which the Albany mayor has been complaining about an undercounting of the city’s population. I don’t really understand the problem, because the “group quarters” (dorms, group homes, prisons) are not counted, and weren’t scheduled to be counted. They won’t be counted in the future either if the Census Bureau budget gets cut, which may very well happen, based on preliminary legislation.
One of the pieces that I read showed the growth as a percentage of white, non-Hispanic people in only two states, West Virginia and Hawaii. In the latter case, white people are a growing minority population.
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In some music exchange I was in last year or early this year, someone included Led Zeppelin’s The Lemon Song. This piece touches on my general ambivalence about uncredited stealing by the group, though in fact I have at least a half dozen of their albums.
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Mark Evanier posted a video link about Post Crispy Critters, a cereal from the 1960s, and even before the video ran, I remembered the punchline: “the one and only cereal that comes in the shape of animals!”, music and all. What an extraordinary waste of my brain power.
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GUIDANCE FOR AIRLINE PASSENGERS from DHS. In its latest airline security restriction, the FAA has banned all people from flights. Which is the satire?