Category: Uncategorized

Yeah, this is one of those fill in the blank thingies I swiped from Tosy, with apologies to Neil Diamond:

I am a news junkie. If I can’t watch it, I’ll tape it.
I said a lot of things with a filter.
I want people to recognize that the current federal government is not working in their interest, unless they make a lot of money.
I wish my father were still alive.
I hate hot and humid weather.
I love my family, my friends, music, and blogging.
I miss a lot of my family and friends, who are too far away to see regularly.
I fear getting bats in the house AGAIN because the contractor never bat-proofed the house like he said he would.
I hear poorly in bars.
I wonder about the nature of God. Constantly.
I regret not being able to have made my ex happy, even though no one can make another person happy if she’s rooted in depression.
I am not nearly as smart as people think I am, but I let them keep thinking it anyway.
I dance at weddings, and that’s about it.
I sing constantly. Even when I’m not singing aloud, I’m often singing in my head.
I cry often over certain pieces of music.
I am not always methodical.
I make with my hands lasagna. Some other stuff, too.
I write not nearly as often as the muse strikes.
I confuse some of the -ance and -ence word endings.
I need a massage.
I should lose some weight.
I start making duck noises and crack myself up.
I finish weeding old magazines, even if they’re unread.
I tag no one. But those who haven’t blogged lately – and you know who you are – might use it to get started again.
***
Happy birthday to my “baby sister”, Marcia!

Last year, when I attended these same two conferences, I gave laboriously detailed instructions to my wife to make sure she took out the VCR tape on Tuesday night before JEOPARDY!, lest the six hour recording be cut off and I miss recording one of our shows. This year, I didn’t have to worry about that because we have a DVR. All I had to be concerned about was the fact that the memory was up to 87% and that I had to watch or purge some programs.

So what did I think of the finales of Everybody Hates Chris, Scrubs, My Name Is Earl, The Office, and Gray’s Anatomy? I don’t know; I haven’t seen ANY of them yet, or indeed the penultimate episodes of ANY of those series (three back with Gray). Also, as is often the case, I watch the series finale of a show I used to watch, but then stopped. Previously, that’s included Friends and Seinfeld; this season, it was West Wing. Haven’t seen that either.

The only finale we DID watch was Gilmore Girls. I was disappointed. But then I read Tosy and I’ve totally changed my mind. Really.

I hadn’t read many of the bloggers until recently. I hadn’t seen Eddie’s review of my recent compilation or Lefty lifting heavy books or even Fred dissecting the Pen 15 club back on May 11.

I did answer Lefty’s question about boycotting musical artists. I tend to operate opposite of that. The Dixie Chicks are putting out a new album this month, and I’m most inclined to get it because of their troubles.

(Although now that I think of it, there IS one artist I did boycott, or more specifically the product she endorsed: Anita Bryant and orange juice, until her contract ran out.)

There’s a special on Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions on CMT that I’ve missed twice already, and will record tomorrow (Thursday) at 6 pm.

I almost forgot Pinkersterfest on this Saturday past (!) until my wife reminded me; it’s a VERY BIG DEAL around here. Maybe it was the gloomy forecast, but actually Saturday was the one day it DIDN’T rain – at least in daylight hours – in about a week.

More than that, I almost missed They Might Be Giants playing in the park for free! In any case, they were great. They did “We’re the Replacements” from the very first EP of theirs I have from 1987. Of course, they did “The Egg”, one of at least three venue songs they performed. One of things they were promoting on stage was “Experimental Film” from Homestar Runner. Very early on, during their description of the sun, they described their politics, talking about a “failed foreign policy”, a “failed domestic policy”, and “a failed Presidency”; they also describe themselves as “tax and spend liberals.” Their last song before the three-song coda was “Istanbul”, which was written the year I was born.
***
Friend Dan sent me this a while back:
“Thought you might find this amusing. Think about it… so many comic covers these days have blatant female T and A in skintight outfits, and no one objects. I sure don’t, lemme tell ya.
But what’s good for the goose is good for the female bird, right?
So… are these covers obscene, or are they the male equivalent of female depictions?”

I spent six of the first 12 days of this month at two different conferences. While I enjoyed them, it inevitably disrupts the daily rhythm. For instance, I miss news stories, or else, I hear them piecemeal.

One example: the death of Floyd Patterson. He was the first boxer I could identify by name. Additionally, this resonated for me because he was living in my old college town of New Paltz for years and because, like my father, he died from prostate cancer.
***
Someone asked me one day last week what I thought of the NSA domestic spying. Ever eloquent, I said, “Huh?” Then it was explained to me. Truth is, it didn’t surprise me all that much. Nor did it surprise me that 2/3s of the American people, according to some poll, thought domestic spying was a good idea. I figure they just didn’t understand the implications, that the spying could be on them.
But then, there was a follow-up question in which 2/3s of Americans wouldn’t mind if their own phone calls were intercepted.
ARE THEY CRAZY?
Do they really want other people to know about that a cyst they had that was found to be malignant, or the bill they didn’t pay because they were a little short? (I was going to write something about a married couple having bicoastal phone “relations”, but didn’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities.)

Someone at one of the conferences told me that Americans were sheep. The context was Iraq. I was willing to play devil’s advocate about people being fooled by misleading/false information from their government. But this one? Bah! Or Baa.

Or am I missing some nuance of this story, besides the “don’t leak our secrets” argument?
***
Albany County district attorney David Soares made headlines when he described the failed U.S. drug policy at a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was criticized locally by the mayor and the police union for suggesting that the police were overpaid. But Soares, who took on the Democratic machine and won what many thought was a surprising victory in 2004 had his supporters as well. He apologized for parts of his remarks, but stands by his main point, opposition to the arcane enforcement such as theRockefeller drug laws. (I suppose I should note here that I made a few phone calls on his behalf during the primary campaign, which, in Albany, is generally tantamount to election.)
***
I’m troubled. At least some of what the President of Iran said, that 18-page letter generally described as “rambling”, as though that were a bad thing – look at the name of this blog – made some sense to me.
***
Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News – seems like a lot of money that won’t translate into better ratings. In fact, the ratings went up when Bob Schieffer “temporarily” replaced Dan Rather for 14 months
***
Meredith Viera, new co-host of the Today show – good for her. I liked her going back to her 60 Minutes days.
***
Rosie O’Donnell, new co-host of The View – don’t care. Saw some AOL thing about whether the couch will be big enough for her and Star Jones.
***
Spanish language national anthem – don’t care. Don’t think it is a substantive issue. Besides, as Greg points out, almost nobody knows the lyrics in English anyway.
***
Rush Limbaugh – the fact that he turned himself in to be arrested means he was arrested; that’s not liberal press bias. His sentence seemed reasonable to me – hope others with his problem but without Roy Black as their lawyer get similar treatment.

Carol and I picked our wedding day seven years ago, in part because it was about halfway between my birthday in March and her birthday in July. (I for one never thought about it nearly coinciding with Mother’s Day.) Having been married before, the planning of the event didn’t hold much excitement for me. I mean, I wanted to BE married; it’s just, at some level. I just rather have eloped. But Carol hadn’t been married, and I didn’t want to cheat her out of “her day”.

Most fortunately, my father was, among many of his other skills, an amazingly good designer of weddings and other celebrations. So when Carol and I went down to Charlotte in April 1999, Carol and Dad dealt with color schemes – PLEASE don’t ask me what the color scheme of the wedding was – and decorations for the reception, while I concentrated on what I wanted in the service itself: the Scripture, the music, etc., with Carol’s input.

The wedding was a careful negotiation: one of my new brothers-in-law, John, as one of my groomsmen (hmm – his birthday was yesterday, but he died a couple years back) and I got to use my then eight-year-old niece Alex as the flower girl. Stuff like that.

The event turned out to be bigger than either of us had originally thought, and as I mentioned last year, at a church we longer attend, but all of that is temporal.

Baseball figures into our anniversary this year. I’m going to the Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh…with my father-in-law. Then he, his wife, and my wife will rendezvous somewhere. She’s been a good sport about this.

Happy anniversary, honey. (Geez, I don’t know why I wrote that’; she STILL doesn’t read the blog.)

It’s Mom’s Day. My mother is the person I know least likely to operate with an agenda. She is overwhelmingly nice. Sometimes TOO nice. A telemarketer calls and she says she’s not interested, and doesn’t understand why he doesn’t then hang up. (Because he still things he can still sell to her as long as she still on the phone.)

My father was the disciplinarian when I was growing up. My mom actually tried to spank me once, but it was a half-hearted effort.

She had a lot of guilt about being a working mom; the correct verbiage now is “a mother working outside the home”, but we’re talking the late 1950s and the 1960s. We would go to her mother’s house at lunch and after school. My grandmother was a strange, paranoid woman who told us about bogeymen, “bad people” and the like in such terrifying detail that both sister Leslie and I tended to believe her, whereas baby sister Marcia saw through the BS.

So, my mom was upset that her children’s minds were being filled with so much rubbish, even a decade after the fact. We tried to assure her not worry, that we were OK, that none of us ended up as mass murders or committed other felonies.

We could really tease my mom. She was not a great cook, and in fact, my father was much better in the kitchen. But she tried. Once, she made something from a recipe she found. It had weird green specks in it that we thought were awful. There was a detergent at the time called Oxydol, which advertised having “green bleaching crystals”, and for years we made reference to this disastrous meal with “green bleaching crystals.”

I think one of my favorite times with my mother was when I was 12 and Leslie was 11. My father smoked at the time, but my mother never has. So we sat at the kitchen table and we all lit up. Then we all coughed our brains out. Neither Leslie nor I ever were smokers.

So, there are some random thoughts about Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.
***
Happy birthday, Rocco.