wake DA MAN

since 1954, major league baseball has required a waiting period of 5 years from a player's last mlb action before becoming eligible to be voted into the hall of fame, with one notable exception. roberto clemente was immediately enshrined in the hall after he died flying relief supplies to earthquake victims in nicaragua, and his example has stood to become the basis for the "roberto clemente award", given annually to the major league player who "best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement and the individual's contribution to his team".

in 2010, that honoree is boston's own tim wakefield.

wake, you da man.

tank!

tim thomas played last season with a bad hip he wasn't telling anyone about, and not the least whimper of self-pity for having been supplanted down the stretch and into the playoffs by the wunderkind, tuukka rask. (two u's, two k's, two points!). and a funny thing happened on the way to his retirement party--he's undefeated with TWO shutouts in his first 5 games (all wins, of course), with a goals-against-average of 0.60 and a save percentage of .981, both of which put him squarely and statistically in the "god" category. how beautiful is that!

it's a long season, yes, but it sure looks as if boston has the best netminding duo in the league to backstop what is coalescing to become a character-rich locker room full of heads-down and down-to-business skaters. (i personally loved to see nathan horton drop the gloves for just the seventh time in his career the other day, knowing as i do that it means that they're all putting it all on the ice from top line to bottom). marc savard and marco sturm? how's that for bench.

it's a great year to be a hockey fan in bobby's hub of the hockey universe.

bald-faced liar spectrum quotient

fact-checking the campaign rhetoric is more than a full-time job. clearly the BS artists can sling it faster than reasonable people can dig into the mountains of obfuscations to retrieve the turds in order to hold them up to the light. recently we've been getting a full dose from all sides, and there's one particular lie that absolutely has to be called for what it is: this TARP crap ain't done, not by a long shot, and folks trying to escape their culpability in the mess are selling their snake oil pretty hard to pretend it is. but the fetid stench of big money politics isn't quite so easy to shake:

to wit: neil barofsky, the inspector general in charge of the steaming pile had this to say the other day: "there's still close to $180 billion of TARP money outstanding, and $82 billion obligated to be spent". here's the punch line, per the AP: "most of the contracts treasury awarded recently are for work officials can't even describe, because it's not yet needed". that's right. billions are being spent, but nobody can tell you, the taxpayer holding the bag for it, what it's all for. ("recovery" of hundreds of billions of good money after bad is the best explanation i can find for it).

the real problem? even the guys not holding the smoking TARP gun that we have left from which to choose are no better. charlie baker was writing memos from his desk ahead of the "big dig" burying the facts from the electorate as a matter of partisan loyalty. those races up in NH leaving "choice" between miscreants like paul hodes and charlie bass are actually funny when you play their campaign commercials blindfolded trying to figure out who is who. actually, they're not funny, because then you realize that no matter which yahoo you send to congress you're going to be sending a cog to one half of the republicrat (or was that demican?) political machine that has no intention of ceasing the spending of money that we don't have in pursuit of pork, injustice, and the new "american" way.

sapere aude. unenroll. vote against party. BOTH parties. find people who will make themselves accountable to the electorate (not party) once again. which is all a long way of saying that i never saw tim cahill as anything other than a bald-faced lying opportunist when he dropped out of the democrat party, but even so he's less of a danger to me as a taxpayer now than any of the other major-party-affiliated racketeers from which we're asked otherwise to choose, and that's gotta be good enough for me to start. (anybody wishing to whine that voting for cahill lets the other side "win" isn't seeing the "sides" for what they are, which is, the party-political side vs the innocent and screwed taxpayer side--only we're not quite so innocent, because we're the dolts that elected the bipartisan treasury thieves in the first place).

personally? if cahill polls double digits next tuesday, regardless of which organized criminal takes the governorship, it'll be better for us than if either of those criminals were elected without the rising voice of the disaffected and disgusted taxpayer saying "i'm mad as hell, and i'm not going to take it anymore". because i am. how about you?

autism spectrum quotient

in an apparent effort to spread awareness and support for asperger's and autism diagnosees, some folks have hooked up a facebook app that administers simon baron-cohen's (of cambridge u's autism research centre) 50-question personality test that assesses the extent of autism traits. the test can't make a diagnosis, (many folks with extreme scores still function just fine), but it can indicate how much in common you may have with those diagnosed with autism or a related spectrum disorder, and it seems to be reasonably popular. (if you're curious, you can take it without joining fb and having to authorize am app to steal your data by going to the wired.com site). the average score in the study control group was 16.4, and 80% of those diagnosed with a related disorder were all over 32, so there's your benchmark. have at it.

besides having no trouble scoring well into the 30's, (i've always been good at tests, what can i say), it occurs to me that the entire premise of asperger's and related spectrum disorders is a pernicious and proverbial slippery slope down which the social-gadfly-esque hugger-and-feeling-sharer crowd marginalize, pathologize and pariah-ize anyone who doesn't want to play with them. seriously. i mean, who made up the rule that says socializing is "healthy", while preferring to keep to ones self is not?

those of you who know me know that i have no trouble socializing when i care to. maybe that's why nobody's stamped my forehead with a scarlet A (for asperger's/autism, yo). but i absolutely get why numbers are cool, (if you ever want to win a bar bet, just bet the guy drinking next to you that no matter how tall his beer glass might be, its circumference at the top is longer, and if you'd like to understand pi and diameter sometime, just let me know and i'll happily regale you), and i have no love to lose for people who are always getting their feelings hurt for no logical reason at all. (get over yourself, will ya?). my real problem is with "professionals" who take trivia like the quotient derived from the aforementioned test and try to use it to put individuals in diagnostic pigeonholes, and imply to them that there's something wrong if they choose the library over the theater.

theater sucks, ya know? and i'm quite convinced a good part of our myriad problems here in this country stems from not enough people making not enough trips to the library, and i, for one, would like to see MORE asperger's folks in positions of responsibility than fewer. (aspy's don't collude well, which would eliminate a lot of that pesky party political graft and corruption, for one thing).

until then, leave me alone--i'm working on a math problem.

"recovery"

the major political parties are doing their biennial dividing of the national cake, and arguing the semantics of "economic recovery" and telling me all about jobs (lost and created) while doing very little i can see more than stumping for their own. the dow is floating somewhere around 11,000, having earned me back most everything it took from me since october of '08, (i'm either good or good and lucky or just plain lucky with my investing--your results may very well have varied), and it's worth noting that corporate economics and private economics are on two extremely different tracks. it actually makes a certain amount of sense to me, since the greatest portion of the deficit and ongoing tax burden to me as an individual has been to "rescue" wall street (if ever there were anything not worthy of rescue, i'd suggest wall street tops the list) without any concern at all about my or anyone else's ability or lack thereof to pay for it, but lets not digress.

food for my morning's thought is the new software industry acronym, "SSRS". did you know that my company's is up? (good for us, right?). did you also know that "SSRS" is a bullshit accounting dodge to paper over the truth that software sales continue to be down, while "software related services" have been invented to help fill in the hole? yes, it's true.

in the old days, software companies that sold big systems to big companies sold a "license" to use their software, accompanied by an annual "maintenance" contract that covered efforts to fix bugs. in the heyday (aka pre-dubya-deficits) the target was to balance the two and add a third category of similar magnitude of additional services. (my last time out ten years ago i was billed at $2400 a day, but that's because i had "specific knowledge of the size, type, composition and frequency of the data and how they are used", and any DBA can tell you those are the magic application software words, but lets not digress here, either). the end result was a three-headed hydra of revenue, and healthy profits for any company that could keep to the formula.

*sigh*

those were, indeed, the days.

these days, new software license sales are in the shitter. part of it are "on demand" software offerings (salesforce.com is the classic prototype) and if you've heard anything about "cloud" computing, you caught the whiff of this particular steaming pile, and we could digress about the nonsense of this until the cows that drop the cowpies come home and go out again. (back in the 60's, the mainframe was the cloud, and we all used "dumb terminals", and everybody convinced us that was crazy talk, so we put pc's on every desk and we were told we liked it and client/server and all sorts of other "cutting edge" high-tech things, and, now, apple is selling macbooks without disk drives and everything old is new again). but the real problem is that companies are doing a pretty good job of using their computers already, and are hard to convince that big investments to just a little bit better are in their better interests, so they stand pat, and software companies wring their hands and gnash their teeth at the unfairness of their own efficiency. (only dentists have done a better job of making themselves marginally important over the years, and when was the last time you had a cavity?)

the peculiarity of this situation is that "maintenance" revenue continues apace (the software is plenty buggy, so owning an insurance policy against the incompetence of your software vendor, even if paid to your software vendor against all common sense, is indispensable) and it was only a matter of time before the accountants moved the numbers in column b back into column a so that they could pretend that all was well. (hence, SSRS instead of just S).

so if you own stock in a software vendor and they're telling you that revenues are up, take a look at the fine print, because i'm willing to bet you right here and right now that "SSRS" revenues are up, and that's masking a huge crater where software revenues used to be.

however, i'm willing to bet that exxon's top-of-the-street earnings this quarter were "earned" the old-fashioned way, by sticking their greedy little hands straight into your pocket, just like always.

not to worry.

strike 2

yesterday i made some noise about making up my mind not to vote for charlie baker over the straw of a robocall from "scott brown" (aka scott brown's recorded voice) making no substantive argument in favor of the candidate, and offering only vague warnings about the "direction" being taken by the commonwealth of massachusetts. actually, i distrust charlie baker for his having put politics (paul cellucci's gubernatorial approval ratings) ahead of doing right by the taxpayers of the commonwealth who continue to hold the bag on the "big dig", and that's all the reason i needed to decide he's not the stripe of cat to be let loose in the jungle of massachusetts politics, but i didn't start this piece to talk about that...

jill stein has never really enjoyed my attention, not least reason for which being her inability to even interest the electorate in trusting her with a simple state rep position, but beyond a couple of marginally well-received papers on environmental hazards, she's really done little to justify faith in her candidacy for an office to control billions of dollars in government spending. strike 2.

this leaves us with a couple of real characters, doesn't it...

strike 1

i happened to like how scott brown got elected senator last year--without preceding national party interest or support--and i have kept a "half-full" interpretation of his votes and pronouncements in hopes that he could remain (relatively) un-stained by the filth of party politics. however, yesterday afternoon i received a robo-call from my junior senator exhorting me to take a partisan stand on the present gubernatorial campaign, and my glass just emptied.

strike 1, scottie, and, just for it, i'm considering my options for governor usefully reduced by one.

sorry, charlie, but this kind of crap really makes me nauseous.

life on a budget

alimony, blah blah blah...

(though such is far better than unemployment, so don't ever take this as a complaint).

regardless of how you got here, i'm guessing a fair portion of readers will be feeling an economic pinch these days. for some, the "pinch" is more like an unrelenting vice, pinning them mercilessly between rent, food and any sort of hope for the future. for others, it's just the random inconvenience of an under-performing retirement portfolio which will have them working until they are dead as long as they prefer to stay ahead of being pinned between rent, food and any sort of hope for the future. we can debate all the causes, (i would point out that all of them sport either a D or an R on their political party name badges, but let's not digress), but it's also necessary to examine what it is that we all plan to do about it.

one thing that strikes me this morning is how profoundly confused we all remain (if the demographics and statistics are to be believed) about what, exactly, is "living well" in the first place. wags often point out that indoor plumbing makes almost all of us (let's skip the homeless for a bit, shall we?) living at a higher standard than even the most wealthy of only a few short centuries ago. but wags mistake plumbing with the substantial and persistent gap between rich and poor, which is the REAL way we perceive our wealth--and in that gap there lies a pernicious and corrosive element that is, i believe, the REAL source of poverty among those of us who would like to believe otherwise.

to wit: this morning i was struck (bowled over as by a semi-trailer rig full of it) by how differently something as basic as honey can taste, depending on whether it's the real thing, or a homogenized, pasteurized bastardization of same. the 2lb container of "country style old fashioned us grade a pure honey" (product of usa and argentina) that i got awhile back at the warehouse store cost me $4.99, and i would put it to you was more of a cheat to me and my ever-thinning wallet than the 1lb jar of raw spring blossom honey (the spring blossom type is the light kind, as opposed to the summer honey that's darker and richer-tasting, though less delicate and delightful if you ask me) at $7.75. seriously, people: if you buy crap, that's what they're going to continue to sell you, and YOU'RE BEING CHEATED. even if it's a fraction of the price.

not for nothing, but carlisle honey comes actually from carlisle, and provides actual livelihood for actual people, instead of subsistence wages for some, and pure corporate profits for others, none of whom live anywhere near here. it's also better for you. yes, it'll cover fewer english muffins and bowls of rice krispies and embolden fewer cups of (real from the tin not the bag) tea, but one taste of the real thing is a better experience than countless empty spoons full of the industrial crap, and you can quote me on this.

my theory is that we'd all be better off going without honey entirely than springing $4.99 for 2lbs of the factory stuff. and i sincerely apologize if you can't afford $7.75 for your sweetener, (yes, i know--i'm the luckiest guy on the planet, remember?), but for every dupe i see springing for cigarettes or drive-thru coffee or lottery tickets or what have you, i see someone who could be living better RIGHT NOW if only they'd choose to do so.

we can't help that we're not rich. but we can help how we choose to remain satisfied with who and what we are. there are some bees down in carlisle who are hoping to help you with your particular existential dilemma. they've done wonders for me and mine this morning.

ahhhhhh

yesterday evening's comedy

yeah, aasif mandvi is indian, not arab, but he gets the line of the night on last night's "daily show":

after describing various (extremely humorous) ways to make people nervous on airplanes, and being asked why he might be feeding into things (aka the juan williams circus) instead of trying to change people's minds instead, aasif replies, "well, jon, if they're not going to make a distinction between muslims and violent extremists, then why should i take the time to distinguish between decent fearful white people and racists?"

laughed out loud at that one, i did.

this morning's comedy

today's paper of record (nods in the direction of where used to be the mr mill city boys) includes an 8 1/2 x 11" insert inviting 7-day subscribers of the lowell sun to sign up for ("it's simple!" "it's efficient!" "it's flexible!" "it's connected!" "it's convenient!") their new online edition. (for an additional charge, of course, since being one of the few people left in town fronting over $200 a year for the print edition obviously invites hope that we just might be silly enough to toss a few more bills on the bonfire of someone else's vanity).

well, regardless what you think of all that, you have to laugh right out loud when you realize that the only way you can sign up for the online service is via telephone (rotary if you have it) or snail mail.

yes, nothing says cutting edge about an online information source than having to hand-write your application.

too funny.

in case anyone is reading (can't presume they know how to read things online but you never know) you can send me the plea for cash again after you fire campanini, though until then i feel like i'm being screwed thoroughly enough, tyvm.

the lost onion rocks the house

yup, i'm bragging--i was there. not sure there's a thousand-word photo that'll ever say enough, but this one is my favorite from the evening, and i hope you like it. carl johnson was trading it but good with claire finley all night long, who was turning out pete maclean's smile like christmas, and when you put it all behind mark mullins' trumpet and jen kearney's keys, you have extra special sauce to pour all over your monday evening, and even tuesday morning on short sleep seems like bliss. the room was on its feet demanding they send us off with some zeppelin, and carl and claire and pete and mark and jen did not disappoint. the end of jen kearney and the lost onion's year-long monday night residency at toad in cambridge coming to an end is perhaps what is and what should never be, but for nights like last you still feel good about the whole circle of life and love, as hard to predict and follow as it may be.

the moment of my evening was during the break when the din from the crowd and the patsy cline from the house system was putting the buzz right inside everybody's heads, and the warmth of the room and the crowd and the musicians wading out into everything was like being at home in front of a fire with 100 of your very best friends. i fall to pieces, indeed, and, yes, i can't help it if i'm still in love with every note. and exactly like that scene in buckaroo banzai across the eighth dimension, when buckaroo cuts through everything to get us to the sound of penny priddy's tears at the back of a full-tilt rock and roll room, carl noticed something and stepped back up onto the stage to turn the volume knob on claire's bass down just enough to cut a low feedback hum that, apparently, no one else could hear, though, once he'd adjusted the control, it became obvious to all us mere audio mortals what had been going on. which just made every other sound in the room all that much more clear, like someone had put a projector into focus, and everything was crystal. i swear he even touched exactly the one string of the five (pentabuzz, people!) to diagnose what was needed...

can't say enough so i won't go on any longer than to say jen kearney and the lost onion are a musical artifact in my life's anthropology that i will always remember as they were last night. the perfect music with the perfect set of perfectly-matched musicians to bring it to life, and beer to boot. (sierra nevada, please!)

all good things

only faith in the future spares jen kearney and the lost onion past tense, for tonight marks the final night of their year-long monday night residency at toad in cambridge, and it's extremely hard to envision it ever being the same again. however, rather than muddle ones daydreams with all that's been, this is the quintessential occasion to seize the moment, and live life to its fullest, and i and an entire roomful of people will be doing exactly that. you should too, and you know that, but i guess it remains to be seen just how long on the sidelines some people can remain...

jen kearney's songwriting speaks for itself, and eloquently through the series of cd's she's published of her work. her vocals and keys are remarkably rich and soulful, and i've never known anyone to see her for the first time not to marvel and want to see her again. and if that were all it was, that would certainly be enough, but, it isn't, and that's where making it out to toad tonight becomes such a privilege and a priority.

the lost onion in its present incarnation is an array of musical talent that comes together once in the proverbial blue moon. both perfectly suited to the music as to each other, they bring together a sound that IS jen's music, and then all that much more so. i've seen them with spare bass players and drummers and guitarists, and horns and yahuba to boot, but i've never seen them better than when (alphabetically) claire finley, carl johnson, pete maclean and mark mullins are the show. i can't even begin to list everything that i love about them. mark and carl trading and interweaving lead melody lines... (you know how the allman brothers used to do it with two guitars? wait til you hear it between a guitar and a trumpet). carl and claire leaning into each other, back-to-back, and tearing the roof off the place... (i caught them jamming over at voices rock club a few months back, just the two of them with some drums, and was blown away). claire and pete playing tightest-rhythm-section-in-the-universe on virtually any and every song they please... (i have never seen two players having more fun being more amazing than i've seen pete and claire). the combinations are endless. they cover erikah badu better than erikah has ever dreamed herself to be. lenny kravitz like a dream. led zeppelin like you pinch yourself in disbelief that a guy with no pick can rip out of a stratocaster. (have you never seen carl? you HAVE to see carl--and you can, opening up for jon butcher and charlie farren in a few weeks--MUST SEE). and they embody jen's music in a way that transcends description. it's something you just have to see.

the truth is, for those reading tea leaves and paying attention to details, that this lineup will likely be a long time before being heard and seen again. of course, anything can happen, but the one SURE THING you have is that they're playing together TONIGHT, and you have a chance to be able to tell people you were there when.

yes, i will be.

the spanish are not like other people

i'm often explaining to people that my super power is the ability to nap anywhere, anytime. i now know that i am not alone:

in spain, anxious that their time-honored siesta tradition is under fire from modern life pressures, some wise guys (no tongue in cheek) organized a 9-day contest in the middle of a shopping mall to crown the champion napper.

my new hero is a 62-year-old unemployed ecuadorean security guard (any guesses as to why he's unemployed?) who dropped off for 17 minutes amidst the hue and cry of spanish commerce, complete with 70-decibel snores which are reported to have been the difference that won him the title.

it is confirmed to where i will retire.

the french are not like other people

they drive tractors into town to protest fast food, and they riot at the first whiff of eroded entitlements, but this one takes the cake, even for france:

10 people, including a 4-month-old baby (who died, btw--this is a tragedy, not a joke) "fell" out of a 3rd story window after one woman is reported to have "seen the devil", though french television news reports are of a 30 year old man removing all his clothes and then entering a room where everybody else was watching tv. the other guy, besides the 30 year old to get arrested was the one who jumped holding a 2 year old.

hello, social services?

juan more time

npr fired juan williams, ostensibly because he cozied too close to fox news and brought that whiff of imbalance to their airwaves, but nominally because he spoke out about his trepidations to see people in traditional muslim dress on airliners. juan's defense of his remarks centered around his work with the american civil rights movement, but as i've said before elsewhere, that's a total crock of BS and he needed to be called on that much at least. yes, npr's trumped up rationale for firing him is intellectually weak, but williams' bigotry is proven by his own remarks, so it's hard to feel sorry for him about that.

that which best betrays where we stand as a country, however, are neither the remarks nor the firing, but the number of complaints coming to npr from people who quite obviously never listen to the network in the first place. "when people say i'm never going to watch you again, that's an indicator," said npr spokeswoman dana davis rehm, "because npr isn't on tv". of course, this hasn't slowed a certain national figure from calling for the elimination of npr's federal funding, but we all could have predicted that was going to happen, couldn't we.

MUSIC!

two weeks ago, melvern played and played and played solo on the toad stage, and as much as it's always a loss to miss bob nash and dave livingston and matt berlin, (three of the best players you'll ever have the pleasure to see play), it's also a rare treat to hear melvern play his stuff just the way he hears it. tonight we get bob and dave and matt back. you just can't lose. (see you at 7:30!) for a bonus, tonight corey b prowls the bar at fortunato's after 9:30, which gives enterprising music fans plenty of time to catch both, and i have to say as it should go without saying that THAT is my kind of thursday. (if 31 main in ayer were walking distance from the condo i might consider the reverend jj and the casual sinners, but there are only so many places a guy can be at once and still get home in one reliable piece).

for the weekend, the big news from where i'm standing is that brian's ivy hall is putting live music on their stage on saturday night, complete with the WAAF street team and all sorts of other goodies and giveaways. for those who caught the live music at the "lowell will rock for food" benefit, you know that the room is a live music party just waiting to happen. word is that the guys (kevin, sean, eric and brian) got the house PA finished and installed, and there will be more of this in downtown lowell in the future. GREAT news!

beyond the weekend, it's also important to note that jen kearney and the lost onion is wrapping up their year-long residency at toad on monday nights this coming monday. if ever there was a must-see JKLO show, this one has gotta be it. it makes for a significantly long weekend after starting on a thursday like we all will be, (right?), but it's extremely well worth the effort. can't wait!

it's not schadenfreude when it's for a good cause

unlike a certain local editor who feels cheesed off that john henry isn't writing blank steinbrenner-esque checks for the benefit of his favorite ball team, i'm actually quite satisfied with the way this baseball season turned and is continuing to turn out. yeah, the #1 payroll yankees did indeed buy themselves another trip to the postseason, as did the #4 payroll phillies, but i'm up nights watching the #27 payroll in the league take on #1, and enjoying each and every pitch of it, and there's absolutely everything right with that.

the texas rangers are easy to get behind. so, too, are the giants. and they're each in the driver's seat in their respective series over far better-paid yet still on-the-scoreboard-inferior competition. i have no idea how i'll decide to go should they both succeed over the next few days in winning their fourth games, but i'm very much looking forward to the dilemma.

until then, new york and philadelphia, you can just suck it!

oh, now i get it

to me, the most egregious blunder of dubya's tenure was destabilizing iraq so as to leave iran virtually unchecked in its potential to behave badly. now, today, reading of a $60B sale of armaments to saudi arabia, i begin to get it--iraq wasn't buying enough from us, or, put another way: it's one thing to engage iran in a regular game of martial attrition, (which seems to have been good for everybody but the various iraqis and iranis who got killed as part of the great big geopolitical game), but it's another to do it on the cheap and without buying your goodies from the good old US of A.

the real news of this story is to me that, unlike in previous years when any such sale to arabs would send israelis into a conniption fit of biblical proportions, this time there's is only the muffled sound of construction equipment across the jordan as the craven opportunists finally figure out where their palestinian-free bread is buttered.

quote of the piece, from jane kinninmont from the economist intelligence unit, observing that untested gulf forces with expensive toys hardly inspire the sort of fear that changes much: "i would not be surprised if the iranians are pretty cynical about the armies here. to put it bluntly, they've fought a war". (that would be the 80-to-88 iraq war).

semantics

virginia thomas says "olive branch". anita hill says "hello, FBI?"

it never ceases to amaze me how astoundingly dull-witted many ideologues can be about the sensibility (or complete and utter lack thereof) of the basic tenets of their beliefs.

in this case, i think it's reasonable to say that virginia thomas simply cannot comprehend a world in which her husband might be guilty of making jokes about pubic hair to comely staffers. furthermore, i'm quite sure she'd be adamant to me about this rehash that i am having difficulty comprehending a world in which a comely staffer might be used as a political tool to accomplish a "high tech lynching".

but, see, here's my point.

he said. she said.

the one thing of which i'm absolutely certain is that neither anita hill nor viriginia thomas will ever publicly (or privately) admit that she might be wrong in her assumptions, memory, or past public pronouncements. for that reason, for either of them to behave as if the other might publicly (or privately) admit that she might be wrong in her assumptions, memory, or past public pronouncements is for that one of them to be an absolute and colossal idiot of the most sadly comical and pitiful kind.

was she serious? did she think her phone call wouldn't be immediately in the news and on the daily show, and every other show, for that matter? (well, ok, not the daily show--jon stewart is on hiatus this week preparing for his rally to restore sanity, but you gotta know he's beside himself that he's missing the opportunity).

message to virginia thomas: you just proved to me that you're eminently capable of being a complete dupe to your husband and his alleged pattern of misbehavior, and my assessment of his "alibi", that he certainly would never, just slipped another few notches. (hey--the guy married a complete and absolute nut-case--where there's smoke and all that).

or was that your point?

meet me at wonderland

recent discussions of canceled newspaper subscriptions (yes, canceling the boston globe is like giving yourself a party each and every morning it fails to arrive on your doorstep) prompts me to reflect on the color of my financial parachute. i'm not sure if others make their purchasing decisions in the same manner, but i am always aware when i do frivolous things like maintain a cable television subscription of how quickly and surely i must cancel, should i experience financial armageddon, aka hard times. (such as are being experienced by an ever-increasing number of americans).

oddly enough, two of the more frivolous items from my relatively recent past, my cell phone and my internet, have become the two media investments deemed least easy to live without, and far ahead of the insult-to-injury that has become my lowell sun subscription. (that's first on the docket, even ahead of renting things like the uncut version of "get him to the greek" on amazon "on demand" for my tivo). close behind are things like comcast, my land line phone, and buying beer for people i don't know out in bars.

even without sweating or missing anything i really care about in the first place, i figure i could slice $300 off my monthly expenses without skipping a beat. more difficult would be the extra parking space for the convertible, not to mention the convertible itself, but let's not start talking crazy here. the short answer is that most all of us waste incredible amounts of money each and every month on things about which we hardly care, and this whole country would be better off if we were all to STOP IT right now and invest more wisely as part of our obligation towards being part of a better planet.

of course, politicians will gasp that we're not doing our part to keep the "stimulus" going, but i have to wonder whatever possibly could be "stimulating" about bankrupting the public treasury on wasteful spending (aka the government equivalent of a pay per view porn habit) as opposed to preserving our resources in favor of worthwhile investments like roads without potholes, bridges without rot, and government agencies without endless bureaucrats getting paid to make our lives miserable. or, put another way--it simply cannot be good for the world that the two staples keeping both our retail industry and our government finances afloat are beer and cigarettes, followed closely by gambling and gasoline. (if you followed the money, you'd realize the most patriotic thing you could possibly do is drive your car to the dog track while smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer).

meet you at wonderland.

FWIW

if i were translating for mom, (cuz you all know the text chat acronyms, right?), this'd be entitled "for what it's worth". if i were translating for the corporate owners of the lowell sun, it would be entitled "i'm so far past 'fire campanini' that there's nothing left to do but laugh when anyone else becomes aware of the notion. we're all there, believe me.

the "paper of record" (nods and quizzical looks towards the mr mill city boys who have gone unfortunately silent of late) publishes some of the least professional editorial content available outside of the supermarket checkout aisle. (i've been meaning to ask the folks at market basket, who are usually pretty organized about such things, why they insist on stocking the one bunch there by the registers, and the other nearby the entrance, but, hey, i'm not in grocery retail, so maybe there's something else i'm missing about that). the editorial news choices are all-too-often illiterate, ill-informed, and biased to the point of caricature, and the editorials are even worse. i told a friend the other day that i could read ann coulter's syndicated columns right there in my local paper, (he's a republican, even), and he cracked up for five minutes straight. when i mentioned that the complete set included kathryn jean lopez, i thought he was going to pee his pants laughing. "are they [meaning the paper] serious?" (that's a direct quote).

i save face only by telling him and other people i know that i read the sun like most folks read publications like mad magazine. (unfortunately, there's no fold-in, though when you crumple it all up it does just as good a job in the packing box as most other actual newspapers). want to know why i read the sun, really? rob mills. lisa redmond. (i'm guessing there are more writers there that i like, but i can't think of any off the top of my head, since the others i knew by name all got fired recently so they could afford to continue publishing peter lucas' nonsense columns three days a week).

yeah, i know i should cancel. i really do. for now, though, i satisfy myself by simply talking other people out of bothering to start their habit in the first place. (it's surprisingly easy to convince them--i just show them my paper, and when they stop laughing, they tell me they get it, and by "it" i don't mean the paper).

"evidently" was an adverb offered in today's editorial to sum up an 8-paragraph screed against everything and everybody who isn't charlie baker, used to explain the "dead heat" in the massachusetts gubernatorial contest. except, when i go to actual news sites to corroborate the "facts", i find out things like, for example, "patrick's lead steady, up 5 over baker" (WBUR, citing a rasmussen telephone survey), or "latest poll shows patrick widening lead over baker" (WHDH in cahoots with suffolk university from their latest joint poll), and i'm wondering exactly who is zooming whom here. (note the proper use of object pronouns, examples of which are far less likely to be found in the editorial copy of the lowell sun, but, hey, there i go piling on...) the evidence, as far as i can interpret, is simply that the lowell sun will, as a function of its questionably literate and highly-biased editor in chief, print anything it pleases regardless of fact, and leave us wondering whether it's intended to be comedy, or self-satire.

i'm still pulling for comedy, but, well, you know about me and my judgment...

2.0

my mother is catching on once again to the breakneck pace of technological change, to finally realize that email is passe. (this just after she became comfortable with using it). to reach her great grandchildren requires text messaging at the very least, though my youngest (13) doesn't even bother with that. (don't ask me how to get in touch with her--i'm 50, remember?) mom's fallback position? usps. (good luck with that).

i'm put in mind of all this because of a de facto facebook stalker i seem to have acquired along the way, while i've been blithely recounting my many musical sojourns and making plans for the next. somewhere in their infinite wisdom and fascist ideals to become all things to all people, FB implemented their very own proprietary (i.e. decidedly NOT 2.0) chat widget, which can then be used to FB users to chat each other up should they happen to intersect with each other "on line".

great.

the effective result is that every time i go "on line" to get the latest word on who is playing where, (information i cannot live without if you must know), it seems that i get a chat message thrust at me that begs civility to respond, and i'm getting powerfully tired of all of it.

want to know the next thing?

i'm going to turn it off, and we'll be on the inevitable road to whatever becomes 2.0 to this decidedly 1.0 experience. yeah, some people from whom i LIKE to hear aren't going to be able to reach me via FB chat, but, well, they've got my cell number, and i still remember how to use that, as, hopefully do they.

maybe my kids feel this way when they get a text message from dad--who knows. i try to be good and respect the interest on the part of the recipient to receive, and i'm sure i've erred egregiously on the side of "but dad wants to say hi and tell you he loves you", but, well, see, i further figure that's that is also my job, too, so there you have that.

but i surely know that the moment a communication tool becomes intrusive, it becomes pariah, and it's just a matter of time before something better (aka self-controlled, kinda like opening an envelope if you feel like it, or tossing it on the pile of you don't) comes along.

FB is yesterday.

edited to add that i hadn't realized this was going to be a serial, but i guess i ought to have known better. rule of thumb: if you initiate 100 out of 100 "chat" conversations, you will (apparently) eventually be sending an inquiry to the effect of "are you on chat? i don't see you there..."

the answers are "no", and "on purpose".

philly cheez

yes, it's cheez whiz on those "famous" philly cheese steak sandwiches, and how this could possibly become considered to be a "good" thing you like to brag about your city, i have no idea. of course, just a moment ago, when i went to find out which team in history lost the second-most number of baseball games behind the '62 mets, i discovered, on the list of the 25 worst showings in major league history, that the city of philadelphia has hosted no fewer than 9 of them. yes, we're talking about a very "special" place. it's no wonder the folks living in it have such a low bar when it comes to braggables.

did you know, of the 16 pre-expansion major league baseball clubs, the philadelphia phillies have, hands-down, the worst historical record of all of them? they were the first--and only so far--to "earn" their 10,000th loss, (they got it done all the way back in 2007), and their closest "competitor", the chicago cubs, are still years away from coming close to that sort of ignomy, even though they ARE the cubbies, and even though they're 7 years older as a franchise.

i'd feel more guilty about piling on, but, well, have you met a philadelphia sports fan?

i'll leave you with this link to the nbc new york's list of the top moments in philly sports fan history. (did you know they actually had to finally put a jail INSIDE veterans stadium? who knew!)

oh! and one last thing (not really, but bear with me) about that mine

the things you learn when you go looking:

when they drilled the rescue hole, they were simultaneously experimenting with three different techniques, and three different holes hoping that one might work. the one that "won" the race to the miners started with an extremely narrow shaft, and then continually widened it to finish it--not a digging machine at all, but a boring and widening machine.

the consequence of that proven superiority, is that, essentially, almost entirely all the rock from that incredibly long almost half-mile long hole wound up down in the same mine space being used for survival by the miners, and the only way to complete the job was to leave the men at the bottom responsible for trucking it all away as the hole was widened. we're talking over half a ton of material every hour. non-stop. with wheel barrows. the estimates i found were anywhere between 800 and 1600 tons in total. welcome to your "rescue", huh.

hats off to these guys. if i'm starting a mining company, i'm hiring chileans. not to own it and do the safety inspections and top management stuff, no. but to run it. do the real work. these guys are amazing.

and, by the way, i'd make a lousy hawaiian

you've probably never noticed, (i never did), but the way those ukulele strings get knotted at the the bottom of the bridge can be a thing of beauty when done right by someone who knows right, (thanks music guy mic!), but its awfully hard to reproduce no matter how hard the amateur tries. (yeah, i suck).

not only is every twist and tie so GD perfect and even and identical to all the others, but who knew even the ends of the loose ends of the strings get tucked underneath the knot from the next one so even THEY all look perfect and beautiful. (this i know from looking wistfully at the ends of the little kala toy uke i keep in my living room just for fun).

well, the short version is that i finally broke a string on my main rig last night after all this time (amazing when you think about the way i hit the things, and you can ask around--i'm not exactly a light touch) and i knew perfectly well that it'll take days until the next strings can hold pitch for even a few seconds at a time, but i had no idea how embarrassing the tie-job at the bottom was gonna look while i and the strings get used to it.

and i tried so hard! i read up on it, and reviewed a BUNCH of online instructional videos from hawaiians even, and took my time, and did everything the way i was supposed...

there is no substitute for a true artist's touch. i'm learning it every day the hard way while i endure my own inarticulate stumblings while listening to real musicians just effortlessly get tone, nuance and balance out of every random strum. and i'm learning that i'm likely to have to break a whole store-full of ukulele strings before my bridgework begins to look anything like it did when i first took my baby out of the box. and, maybe then, even never.

want to know if you're buying "lightly used" in a gen-yoo-wine hawaiian ukulele? just look at the knots on the end of the strings. if they look like they were put there by angels, and not a loose end in sight, you're looking at a rig that's on its first set of strings. if they look, well, like they were put there by a mainlander, well, who knows what other indelicacies are hidden behind that tangled mess.

mine might not be so pretty anymore, but, thanks to aquila and a few more days, at least she'll sound good again. (is that the musical instrument version of a "nice personality"?)

i don't care--i'm still in love.

"the last one out"

i don't mean to quibble, and, believe me, luis urzua deserves FULL PROPS for being the last of "los 33" to get his little ride, but, best i can tell, there may be as many as 5 other guys down there VOLUNTARILY to help out with the rescue from the wrong end of the shaft. (i haven't been doing tv today, so if you already know this stuff, fill me in).

i've seen lists as long as five of guys who had the choice about being down there, in the dark, and took it to help the other 33 who didn't get all that much of a choice about it, get back to the surface. can you even imagine? at any moment, the rocks can shift and jam the capsule, and hang up the ENTIRE process, trapping all those below, both accident victims and rescuers, for unknown time until something could be figured to fix it. and, hey, lots can happen underground, as the original collapse proves, and there's no guarantee about anything until you're all the way up and out.

so these five guys say, "yeah", i'll go down to help out.

i'm saying that i believe that THAT is courage. surviving 70 days underground? that is some incredible strength and resilience. and faith, too, by all accounts. but strapping yourself into a capsule barely wider than you are for an hours decent into hell, with reasonable expectation that you may not be coming back? i'm saying that i think that takes some brass balls, and all the best of humanity right there.

hats off, guys. it's all about EVERY last one out, and i'm not celebrating NUTHIN' 'til i see 'em all.

yep--$450 oaklies

never mind that it's an estimated $40M PR boost, oaklies got it right and sent their best stuff to chile for "los 33"--$450 polarized radar range sunglasses with black iridium lenses for 100% UV protection. (how's that--they've even got me shilling for them, huh).

all ya gotta do is spend a couple months underground and a pair can also be yours, free.

sunglasses at night

who remembers corey hart? (dead, or canadian?) no, not the twinkies yet-again-failed outfielder (again, twin cities? seriously?) but the guy who wrote "sunglasses at night" ("don't switch the blade on the guy in shades, oh no"--i'm not asking because it was some kind of genius, just askin') and then went where all the other guys who wrote "punk" in their press packs and didn't know the first damn thing about it?

wow, that's a pretty wordy digression, even for me...

so i'm thinking this morning that the lucky part of florencio avalos' ascent to the surface a few hours ago was not just being first (can you IMAGINE?) but being one of the guys who gets to come out to only man-made glare in that classic chilean desert. sunglasses at night, baby, and i'm betting they were some extra special nasa-grade beauties for sure.

69 days is a long time. if you told me i had to stay in any one place for 69 days, even with my own personal choice(s) for companionship and adequate ventilation, (32 other guys and near total humidity?--you've got to be kidding me), you could write the commitment papers on me right up front. and among the many physiological changes and adaptations that would take place over that time, if you added total darkness to the puzzle, i'm quite sure there'd be little pain quite like that exquisite pain of finally having real light shined in your eyes at the top of the tunnel to freedom.

OUCH!

so, yeah, "it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses"

"Hit it!"

"did you have a flu shot?"

no, i did not have a flu shot. not this year and not any other year. and, yeah, i probably have/had something these past few days that quacks like the flu duck, but that in no way makes me regret my decision.

flu sucks. trust, me, it sucks. the flu took a lucky 13 pounds off me since sunday, most of which you know was water, (we engineers can be on the verge of dying, but still need to know such things), but, yeah, even so, you know that can't be good. on sunday i made it to the couch for a few hours (ok, i played soccer in the morning, but that's because i'm crazy, and had a morbid compulsion to prove to myself that i could, not because i should have) but i was back up in bed by 7, and didn't get out of it for 12 hours, and only moved back down to the couch because i thought i was feeling like a change of scenery, and by the time i realized i wasn't feeling like much of anything at all, there was NO WAY i was going to move again before i had to, so there you have the story of my monday. (and i was back up in bed by 6pm for the duration).

today i'm a bit better. the ginger ale and saltines i had for dinner yesterday stayed down, and this morning i managed toast and a cup of tea with honey and lemon (on top of the flu i have a sore throat and some swollen glands) and the only reason i'm telling all of you all of this is for two reasons:

first of all, being sick makes you appreciate not being sick more than anything else in the world, and more than can be said. a friend of mine is having surgery today for most decidedly not being not sick, and it's impossible not to feel like one of the luckiest people in the world that all i've got today is an extremely minor in the grand scheme of things life inconvenience. (the best news? my friend understands even being actually sick still isn't reason not to feel affectionate towards this grand joke we call life, and that alone makes me quite sure he's going to be ok, even if he's not currently ok--optimism being treatment requirement number one for anything that ails us).

second of all, about that flu shot, i'm continually flabbergasted at the lengths to which human beings will go to rid themselves of truly inconsequential life circumstances, as if that in any way improves theirs. flu is the ultimate inconsequential inconvenience. it's perhaps not as frequently experienced as the common cold, but it makes up in intensity for what it lacks in frequency, and enjoys, by that coincidence, far clearer experience. (i'm quite sure you recall far fewer of and far less clearly your past headcolds than you do your past bouts with the flu). they publish "mortality" statistics for it, which obviously gets people's attention, but if you subtract the extremely vulnerable, (i.e. the extremely young or extremely infirm/old), let's call this spade a spade and agree that you don't die from the flu, even while you're tempted to wish it at its worst. you just feel like crap, get better, and then go back to all the best parts of your life. so from what, exactly, is the flu shot saving you? a day or two in bed?

i have to believe that the side effects of flu vaccines are out there, much like the side effects of our societal hair-trigger with antibiotics, and that can't be good. our immune systems are beautiful machines, and you have to know that everything we do to spare them the effort of getting over inconsequential crap actually impairs them in the long run.

i don't know about you, but when i'm old and infirm, and finally at risk for bad consequences from this now-inconsequential flu thing, i'd prefer to know that i've done everything i can to be ready for it.

and i still won't get a flu shot, because, well, you know, when it's that bad, and something like the flu can finally do you in, you know it's bad enough not to be too worked up about the potential. (yeah, yeah, you'll ask me again then how i feel, and totally expect to get a different answer, and i'm just as curious as you about that, but make your bets now, cuz i'll take them all).

for those facing larger and more real threats, this glass of hot tea with lemon and honey is for you. get better, GP.

keeping up with the changes

the show tonight in peterborough isn't tonight in peterborough, it's tomorrow night in peterborough, and it's not the peter/arte/carl experience, it's the arte/carl experience. (long story involving dyslexic club personnel and a lucky catch by an inquisitive friend).

short answer is that arte k and carl johnson (and maybe justin beaulieu, i haven't heard the ultimate details) are running through a set from among the beautiful catalog they share between them on stage at harlow's in peterborough, nh, at 9pm.

you should be there. and even if you can't, you should put thanksgiving eve on your calendar cuz the music is coming to voices rock club and you can definitely make it there.

rock on!

just thinkin...

one thing is consistent from every major political party candidate this year, (as has been the case in most all the past years of recent memory), and that is that EVERYTHING has been the fault of all the members of the OTHER major political party, and the only way to fix things is to vote against them.

want to know what i think? (i know you don't, but it's my blog and i can blather on if i want to, and that's not a mal-formed infinitive, but a cultural reference, so there).

first of all, i think that if your best qualification for office is that you don't belong to some may-or-may-not-be of-the-devil political party, then you have absolutely no reason to be running for office.

second of all, i think what is clearly missing here is an expression of how we are going to solve all our problems, not who we do or don't think is to blame for them.

listen--the boat is sinking. we can bail or we can row or we can patch holes or we can do all three, but what we really need to agree upon is what WE will be doing, not how we became adrift and in significant danger of drowning. WE, as in all those of us in the boat, not just who may or may not have a D or an R on their political party name badge, need to decide this. WE.

so, here's my plea. if you're running for office, say why. (and, if it's because you're not of the "other" party, then, thanks for playing, but you're a horse's ass). and then, trust us to sort out who we want/need to have in charge of our leaky national and state and local boats.

or don't you respect the electorate enough to play it that way?

(i didn't think so).

unenroll.

sapere aude

who do you...

bo diddley is my vote for the single guy who invented rock and roll, ("just 22 and i don't mind dyin" predates "hope i die before i get old" by a decade for one thing), and though he wrote it backwards for me today (it's not who do i love, but who that i don't love that's got me going) it's still written in the right rock-sneering tone of voice.

actually, if you ask it of newt and the paycheck purloiners, (aka the republican party), the lyric fits.

who do you love, newt?

who do you love?

paycheck earners? of course you do. we provide the votes. we pay the taxes. and you and your party political cronies keep right on looting the treasury and giving us the proverbial pork up the poop shoot. but is that love? that's not love. that's something else for which the guilty normally get 8 to 18 years. (the us federal government sentencing guideline for rape, aka "standard criminal sexual abuse" is 97 to 210 months).

yeah, the democrat party is guilty, guilty, guilty, too. (yes, that's my point). but, from where i'm sitting, "but he raped you too" isn't legal grounds to earn an acquittal, and the republican guilt is just as, if not more so, proven, and should require just as strong a rebuke and repudiation by the electorate.

but newt, of course, thinks he's got the answer to that. he's going to tell paycheck earners that their enemy isn't the republican party, the architects of the "war on drugs", and the "war on terror", and the joint clusterfucks in iraq and afghanistan, and the wall street bailouts, and the complete capitulation from budget surpluses under clinton to record deficits under dubya, but, rather, he's going to tell paycheck earners that their enemy are all those who lost their jobs in the financial collapse caused by republican party political profligacy, (along with the democratic contributions to such--that's my point), and are forced to subsist on food stamps.

YES, 1 out of 7 americans lives today below the poverty line. YES, the democrat party political machine has successfully [sic] extended republican party platform planks (the "war on drugs", and the "war on terror", and the joint clusterfucks in iraq and afghanistan, and the wall street bailouts, etc.) during their time in power to the exact same result as before, and need to be given the boot for it.

but if all we do is keep the revolving door spinning, the result will always be you and me (the paycheckers) getting stiffed with the bill. not newt. not the career politicians who make such a game of manipulating our emotions.

our enemy is not those who fell before we will. (because, make no mistake, if the twin towers of party political malfeasance are allowed to continue, we are going to fall, too--how are your family finances doing?). our enemy are those who created that poverty in the first place, and continue to screw us as if there's no reason to stop.

yes, our enemy is party politics "as usual".

is that so hard for folks being told to hate their fellow bottom-98-percenters by the top 2 percent to understand?

i have to tell you, i'm not optimistic this morning.

party of paychecks

i'm still pissed.

newt's "party of paychecks" rants has me over the edge. does anyone recall the recent brouhaha over "bush era tax cuts"? you know, the one in which the scurrilous doctor D, head dem barack obama, took the position, for which he was, of course, excoriated by the republicans, that tax cuts for people making less than 250,000 per year ought to be differentiated from the tax cuts provided to those americans making more money per year than 98% of the others, so that the additional revenue might be used to mitigate the long-term tax burden created, among other things, but giving 1.5 TRILLION dollars to the wealthiest of the wealthy (have you read who gets and how much the bonuses on wall street, among those firms for which the 1.5 trillion in bailouts, aka financial foodstamps, were given?) and foisting the bill upon the paycheckers?

that's right.

the party who would call themselves the party of paychecks is actively working to ensure that paycheck earners, (i.e. those not wealthy enough to be wealthier than 98% of their fellow americans, i.e. those not wealthier than their fellow americans the wealthiest of whomn own fully HALF the assets in the either country, even though they are only 2% of the population), end up paying the lion's share of the tax burden in this country, while the wealthiest continue to enjoy their tax loophole-rich existence in which many of them pay less than $5000 per year in federal income tax (do you remember bush sr's tax return?) while the middle class pays several times that amount???

if someone really wants to be the party of paychecks, they'll find a way to put the tax burden of those 1.5 trillion dollar bailouts back onto the weathiest bankers and financiers for whom the benefit accrues. i don't know about you, but i got screwed in the financial collapse caused by that void of $1.5 trillion in looted big bank equity (the reason those firms needed to be bailed out was because somebody made that amount of money, took it out of those firms, and left them bankrupt--it doesn't just evaporate, people, despite what they'd prefer you to believe) and the insult to injury of me being given an ADDITIONAL tax bill of that same 1.5 trillion dollar amount to put that stolen money back into the big banks, and not my pocket, or my children's.

john mccain, a republican, spearheaded the drive to deregulate the investment banks who made the bubble, took our 1.5 trillion dollars (that has now become 3 trillion when figuring in the tax debt, which doesn't count the interest we'll be paying, but i can only add numbers so fast) and then held up the taxpaying supporters of the federal treasury by sticking us with the tax bill. YES, barney frank and the democrats were necessary for fannie and freddie to be deregulated so they could create all that inflated paper which the bankers used to steal all the money, but THAT'S THE POINT.

there is no party of paychecks. the paychecks are yours and mine, and we're being robbed of a huge portion of ours to pay for political pork, financial bailouts, and burgeoning federal debt.

we are bankrupt.

we ought to tell the major political parties that their spend spend spend paycheck party is over. BOTH of them. however, newt is telling you to look the other way, and just vote republican, cuz, baby, what could possibly go wrong. i say, if you do vote for any party-affiliated national politician, you're both dumb, AND stupid.

but it's your vote.

i say unenroll.

sapere aude

alright, now i'm pissed

newt is now advising republicans running for election this fall to characterize democrats as the "party of foodstamps", while republicans are the "party of paychecks", and i can't think of a clearer definition of an asshole than anyone who prefers to render the picture of a very difficult economy (1 out of 7 americans now live below the poverty line) in terms of "us" and "them".

or, put another way: there is no food stamp larger than the one our most recent republican president awarded to wall street for robbing the rest of us blind, and, yeah, it absolutely SUCKS to be one of the dwindling number of working americans who will be taxed for the rest of our lives to pay it off, but the full truth is that NEITHER party cares about us paycheck-earners any further than our political utility as voters and taxpayers, and newt's blame game is about the most craven example of attempting to exploit that that i believe i have ever heard.

yeah, i work for a living, and, yeah, i pay taxes, but, no, i'm not stupid. you put that 1.5 TRILLION in financial bailouts next to the annual budget for foodstamps and other assistance progams and i still will have no confusion over which burdens me more, and which is the greater evidence of partisan-political criminal enterprise.

what we have are TWO parties of proven, unrestrained, usurous and relentless taxation, and NO parties representing the interests of working americans to reduce the deficit and roll back the burgeoning bloated buffoonery of our own government.

kiss my ass, newt--you are part of the problem, not anywhere near part of the real solution.

what's in it for she?

so the other side of this cooking-based gender interaction also has me a bit distracted. on the one hand, as i tried to say earlier, (or next, if you're reading for the first time in blog order), there seems to be an emotional dimension to a woman cooking for a man that rarely gets properly evaluated, if the implications of wrangham's book and my own present interpersonal self-actualization are to be believed. in the case of my ex, the extent of any potential evaluation was based solely upon the premise of "cooking as a chore", and, let's just say, from firsthand experience, and for both of us, i can tell you that nobody wins at that game. cooking can and will be a chore if you approach it that way, and let me be the first to inform any of those wrestling with this premise as part of a new marital relationship that, yes, there are going to be some gastronomical speed bumps ahead.

the other premise i instinctively (and through experience) reject is "cooking as a quid pro quo for hunting", because, quite literally, this is based upon the "cooking as a chore" premise, (otherwise why would anyone need a pro quo?), and that's always going to end you up in the very same place.

look--if pre-historic men had to hunt or else women wouldn't cook for them, and if pre-historic women had to cook or else men wouldn't hunt for them, then i can't possibly see how we would have survived as a species. (disagree? try telling a child to clean up their room for any reason at all and tell me what you find out). my gut tells me (hehehe--didja get it?) that the reason we all, all us genders, evolved to do what we do, is because somewhere, deep down inside us, there's a genetic and instictive hard-wiring that results in our LIKING to do what we did and do to survive. otherwise, being stubborn and contrary creatures, we wouldn't do it.

yeah, sure, pain reflexes evolved, too, to drive us to seek food in order to resolve hunger and such, (and, oh, don't we love to exploit such things while "teaching" our young), but i have to believe that positive drives and emotions are what really get us going, (teenage sex being case in point numbers one through infinity), and it's not so hard to believe that there's something deep down inside each and every one of us in our various gender specifications that survives to motivate us in very pre-historic (and positive) ways.

(i know you want to disagree, and i want you to, too--please discuss!)

so, to answer my ex and everybody else with their genetic blinders on, there is no answer to "what's in it for she" (that's a play on "me" folks--catch up) that doesn't start with the word NOTHING. i am quite satisfied, both from failed marital experience as well as reading wrangham's book, that there is NOTHING in it for a woman who wants to cook for a man--at least other than what's in it for herself. if you're a woman, and if you don't enjoy cooking for a man, i don't know what to tell you, other than to say that all this hokum here is exactly that, and you should have stopped reading it long ago, not to mention cooking, cuz it's only going to give you indigestion.

what i do mean to say is, if you DO enjoy cooking for a man, i'm suspicious that society's suggestions that you get anything else back for it from him are likely sending you down a blind and dead-end evolutionary alley. (back to the "cooking as a chore" thing). if it's all about his response to you and your cooking, then, set your watch, because eventually you're going to become disappointed and disillusioned with how little he really appreciates it. (think about it--if he is, as i am, selfish enough to be psyched to sit down to a nice home-cooked meal without any pro quos involved, then he is, as i am, selfish enough to eventually forget to give you sufficient positive feedback about it).

so, what's in it for him/me, if not his expressed appreciation for being cooked for? (that's not a preposition with which to end a sentence, by the way, but some sort of mal-formed infinitive). first of all, i know first-hand there's a whole lot of satisfaction to be gained from winning the hunt. heck, i even successfully deluded myself into taking satisfaction from winning the fantasy baseball pool again this year. i like to (and literally cannot help myself from doing it) regard my ex wife and all her "independence" as the illusion she maintains so as to retain her delusions of self-respect in the face of the larger truth that *I* and my alimony are what support her, even now, and her being divorced cannot refute the fact that she is, still, though untouched as she may be in the carnal sense, kept. don't know how much of the joke is on me, that she may be running around in thong underwear and dispensing favors to other guys not doing her "hunting" for her, but it's a pretty good joke nonetheless.

want to know what i think? i really don't think about that (the enjoyment of eating a meal cooked for me) side of things. I just like to win and succeed and know my family is provided for. (there's that infinitive thing again). and i do. and i couldn't be more satisfied. ESPECIALLY after consuming a well-cooked meal.

yes, i'll ask you to keep it on the QT, but i kinda find myself compelled to want to provide for ALL the people i care about in my life. i'm feeling better about myself today because i think, in some small way, and maybe mr. wrangham will or won't agree with me on this one, it's what makes me a man.

what's for dinner?

the way to a man's heart

a friend loaned me richard wrangham's "catching fire" the other day (subtitled "how cooking made us human") and it's a fascinating iconoclasm of a book that confronts our sacred cow "hunter gatherer" notions of human pre-history with a fuller analysis of the cooking side of the equation that has previously been missed.

on the one (scholarly) hand, it provides ample scientific references, analyzing brain size and other physiological characteristics of primates, pre-humans, proto-humans, and, if we can claim the title, humans ourselves, to satisfy anyone's inner and well-fed geek. its reasoned and well-substantiated premise is that it was cooking that enabled the greatest part of our physical evolution, not to mention our sociological evolution as well.

fascinating stuff.

but it's the interpersonal ramifications that have me most distracted this particular lunch hour.

having experienced a failed mating partnership, and been supplied with an endless litany of "reasons" for it, from my ex, my ex's therapist, (won't call him mine, even though i attended for a couple years), and everybody else in my family and most folks beyond, i consider myself a pretty rich repository of human interpersonal theory. but i'd never been given this particular perspective on things, and, i have to say, i feel myself quite a bit the poorer for it. (if only!)

paraphrasing (likely quite inaccurately, but it's the best i can do) from mr. wrangham's analysis, one could derive an opinion that it was the cooking element of the human inter-sexual division of hunter gatherer labor that really put the evolutionary stamp on our interpersonal instincts. (there's much, much more to the book, but i'm off on a tangent here, so please bear with me).

the first problem with this conclusion is that it flies in the face of conventional "civilized" preference for symmetrical, egalitarian and "politically-correct" gender wisdom, and leaves an unfortunate sort of asymmetrical impression about our historical gender politics. never mind that we all can agree that humanity's history is rife with gender political asymmetry--we've just become somewhat uncomfortable to face any accusation that such asymmetry survives somewhere deep inside our human hard-wiring. "who says a woman's place is in the kitchen!"

the archeology and anthropology of our historical and pre-historical record is that most all past humans did, males and females alike, and our present discomfort with that isn't ever going to change that. (blame wrangham, not me--i'm just recapping the book, y'all).

anyway, the thing that has me fascinated today is the reflection that my failed marital relationship contained the practical equivalent of zero traditional cooking roles, and my most successful non-marital relationships of the current day contain the practical equivalent of total traditional cooking roles. (though i will, on my own, cook anything and everything i care to, and would be in no danger of starving, especially while thwaites market still trades in scotch eggs). yeah, i threw that last parenthetical bit in because i was too worried about how it might sound, that i actually have and enjoy companionship with and from women who take care of me via my and their kitchens.

and here's the thing:

i LIKE it. i respond to it. i EAT IT UP, as it were. i don't feel compelled to reciprocate, and i don't feel guilty to be indulged.

know why i think why?

i think it's because it's not done as part of a transaction. (i.e. "you hunt for me, i cook for you"). rather, it feels like it's part of a joint expression of who i am, as well as who i am with. it's as if the women are saying "i cook therefore i am", and i'm saying "i very much like who you are" and the whole thing is beautiful. (i'm not saying all women do or should say that--i'm just saying it about the few with whom i'm happily consuming cooked comestibles).

of course, i have many many friends for whom interpersonal inter-gender relationships are successfully based on nothing like this. again, that's NOT what i'm saying.

i'm just sayin', that there seems to be a lot more of that "through his stomach" thing for me that meets the eye.

just sayin'.

please discuss.

extra, extra, read all about it

tony over on the dick howe site provides a link to both tewksbury and chelmsford "patch" sites, (there's one for north andover, too) where local freelancers (such as the lowell sun has now started desperately to try to recruit since they've fired so many of their other reporters) provide truly local news content, free of ideologically corrupted (and semi-literate) editorial bias. you can read the "about" blurb about the foundation behind the idea here.

read the bios on all the sites--these are journalists with resumes (another thing in which the sun claims to have interest) and proven ability (lisa redmond, we love you) who are doing for our communities what our local dinosaur apparently will not.

patch insists on community sizes between 10,000 and 100,000 residents who are under-served by their existing media, meaning that the city of lowell is just beyond the cut-off point for population, but right square in the middle of the sweet spot for need. (a downtown neighborhood patch, anyone?)

fantasy hockey update

yes, i was relatively quiet this year about the baseball, but it's not polite to brag, so there you have that. however, since it's literally the verge of hockey season, and everybody starts even, let me tell you about my not one, not two, but three fantasy hockey teams. one, in my keeper league, returns me bryz and tuukka, so life is going to be very, very good, while in the other two (not drafted yet) i'm going to see if i can't duplicate at least a portion of the magic. can't wait.

the deepest wrinkle this year is that i've joined one league in which PIM (penalties in minutes) are NOT a scoring category, as neither are PPP. (power play points--keep up!). it's not too late if you'd like to get in on it, as there is currently one remaining team slot up for grabs in advance of tonight's draft. it's also lean on goalie categories, rewarding only for wins, GAA and shutouts. (you can look GAA up, ok?). i'm always intrigued by unique ways to score a fantasy league, since such rewards those knowing the game and the players at a depth beyond just reading the same old fantasy or otherwise hockey analysis. case in point: i joined a league a couple years ago that counted face-off wins, in which i dominated from the very first day, because nobody else bothered to look up the history on face-off studs like rod brind'amour, who rank nowhere in anyone's analysis, but who absolutely rule whenever a puck is dropped. i have to admit, this no PIM/PPP league is a bit outside my best areas of expertise, (you know how i like the rough stuff), but i'm thinking i'll be able to adapt quickly enough. (drop me a line if you want in).

the other league is a straight-up standard configuration, in which PIM and save percentage are given their usual due. yeah, the whole thing's a time-waster, and, yes, i am indeed a geek as well as a nerd for it all, but, what of it? i like hockey. (didja catch the riverhawks opening exhibition match this past weekend at the tsongas?)

which reminds me... gotta see where carter hutton is gonna fit into my draft day plans, observing that nabby is back to mother russia, and those finns they got over there in san jose are anything but consistent...

UP

we'll forget that peter gabriel missed the entire point with his pointlessly entitled and thoroughly forgetful album of that name, and get right to the point: rock and roll is about UP, not down, (sorry, pink floyd), and those who get it go right to the head of the class.

i've always been fascinated by tempo when it comes to the hardest rocking songs i know, and struck by how hard it truly is to capture that lightning in a bottle. while seeking out representative clips of joan jett doing "bad reputation" yesterday, i ended up choosing a lip-sync'd version of a studio recording because it did on record what was so hard to recreate on stage--get UP. if you troll through the "suggestions" in youtube looking for something else that gets that part of the soul of the song, you'll find all sorts of awesome, but you won't find another that gets THERE.

the first time i got the point was off of a little feat record, hoy hoy, that contained, FINALLY, something that caught not only the anarchy, but the light speed of, a teengage nervous breakdown. i had wondered sometimes if it was dependent on ritchie hayward being able to get there, (check out the edge he's on all the way through the song), but the stories also point out that lowell could only surf that wave of sound so long and so often, and it was a special night indeed when he felt it and dealt it. (here's another). in this case, unlike joan's bad reputation, it was the studio version that couldn't keep up (please pardon the video's accompaniment) but the contrast is the same.

zep's rock and roll. (please pardon the ads, but the clip is worth it, and, yeah, tell me if you don't hear him singing "open your thighs" at one point in the middle of the mayhem, too). rancid and the ramones tag-teaming 53rd and 3rd. it doesn't even take amps when it's the right song done right--here's iggy pop and some unplugged punkers doing no fun. (ok, i cheated--those unplugged punkers are rancid again). i could go on all day. (but i can't, cuz sometimes i gotta work, and that ain't rock and roll, but what can i say).

i gotta get into that pile of vinyl upstairs... i just gotta.

the runaways

first of all, let's all agree that dakota fanning ain't rock and roll. granted, a 15 year old giving that hard of an old school try playing a 15 year old rock and roller is pretty remarkable, but she still ain't rock and roll. better, way better, is kristen stewart as joan jett, whose vocals and performance run true to the very source. ("do you want to touch me there?"). but any fascination and appreciation for the film, beyond loving the music, which i loved from the first moment i heard it all the way back when, is to contemplate how many shortcuts a filmmaker has to take from reality to even manage the briefest semblance of it. lita ford? hel-LO! lita ford???

floria sigismondi would clearly prefer us to believe that somehow joanie and cherie were all there were to the runaways, but that's like filming a movie about the rolling stones consisting entirely of scenes of mick jagger and ron wood and pretending to call it even. of course, the metaphor breaks immediately down because cherrie was never mick, and joan was so much the songwriting heart and rock-screaming soul of the band that she was all of mick, ron and keith all put together, but lita ford was the one who could really PLAY where it counted, and without her on guitar (and sandy west on the drums), even joan would have had a mighty hard time pulling the group out of novelty act status. the stones never needed a lita ford, and they wouldn't have known what to do with one even if they did.

or, put another way: joan jett, both solo and with her blackhearts, has NOTHING she ever needs to prove to anybody these or any other days. period. but these days aren't 1975, and in those days there was NO SUCH THING as a girl with an electric guitar, and even being one of the greatest rock and rollers who ever spit in an audience's face wasn't going to save joan or anyone else with a vagina from remaining a remarkable curiosity until someone like lita came along to RIP IT UP on the other side of the stage. i found this little nugget of lita and tony iommi (from black sabbath) doing a little tag-team shredding, and at least it gives a little idea, if you hadn't already had one. lita could PLAY.

lita's playing gave the rebuttal to every butt-head who wanted to deny that the runaways were something awesome and amazing and here to stay. oh, sure, the butt-heads could retreat to spluttering about page and clapton as they felt desperate need, but punk metal was already afoot (slade put "mama weer all crazy now" onto vinyl in '72, and the runaways kicked its ass YEARS before quiet riot went through its motions as they spiraled into obscurity in the joke years later) and it wasn't any longer just about how fast you could noodle--it was getting to be all about how hard you could sledgehammer the anthem chorus, and there's no coincidence that all sorts of ramones were falling all over themselves to play backup on joan's first solo record in 1980. lita GOT IT.

i can certainly respect the iconic significance of cherie currie in lingerie singing "cherry bomb", but joan had no trouble pushing it where it needed to go whenever she cared to push it there, as any good songwriter will with their own stuff, and it's hard for me to reconcile the omission of joan's guitar-mate in favor of the girl hand-picked, not because she could sing, but simply because she could look sexy doing it. (not to mention turning the bass player into an anonymous composite, though i guess that's what you do when the bass player grew up into a harvard law degree...)

if you loved the music, it's there, so enjoy. if not, don't go watching this movie and think you're getting any more than just the narrowest slice of a very large rock and roll pie. and here's the real cherry.

it also bears to mention that out-rocking gary glitter is never anything for the faint of heart, (all the more these days, huh, gary?), and here's exhibit A as to why cherie currie was NEVER what the runaways were all about.

oktoberfest

today i'm enjoying the personal good fortune of being able to enjoy my friend's annual oktoberfest extravaganza, to which this year i'll be bringing the entire day's stock of thwaites market's scotch eggs (i called ahead--don't bother going down today looking for any more, cuz they're all MINE!!!) and a bunch of harpoon ipa, along with the proverbial "female companion of one sort or another".

life is good.

the un-independent

back in february i took a few pot-shots at timmy cahill, his erstwhile political opportunism, as well as both of his erstwhile political opponents (among which being this one of my favorite personal rants: "some of us here without party political affiliation would sincerely like to find one candidate who isn't a two-faced sack of lying partisan political BS") along with expressed resignation that the one thing timmy had going for him was his repudiation of his party badge.

well, i have to say, having your hand-selected choice for lieutenant governor toss you over for one of the other two miscreants in the race happens to be one of those things that both puts paid to the deeper truth that you're just another one of the same, as well as more or less proves that there never was a true independent choice out there at all. (simply being for "anyone but deval" is not what the electorate needs--that's just being a republican, yo).

no doubt charlie woke up with a good stiff woodie this morning, and deval is just as happy because his party-political death wish for timmy the two-timer just came true. but i have to say, this only makes the whole thing all the more clear: we're going to get four more years of what we've endured for the past 40, (foster furcalo, where are you?), and nobody but nobody is a candidate for anything but the status quo, which is, nothing but D's and R's as far as the eye can see through the tears.

or, in the case of timmy cahill, the tears of laughing so hard your sides ache.

harpers???

harpers ferry is to be no more.

i always liked harpers best. when i came of age to follow the bands through the bars of boston, i had gladstones and bunratty's and great scott (juliana hatfield is playing there coming up!) and the rat and ed burke's and it was all so very, very good. but it was always harpers i loved best. it was a bigger room than most, and also more comfortable and pleasing in its indestructibility (wide plank wood flooring and walls instead of black-painted what-have-you). it also brought in the national blues and r&b acts that the others wouldn't or didn't, and from bo diddley to buddy guy, there was only one place to have it all. harpers.

gladstone's was done early, and bunratty's not so long after that, and though ed burke's came back for a time after bankruptcy, the rat is now an upscale martini bar, and you just can't go home again. the lessons learned, besides declining to indulge armed patrons, (right, bunratty's?), include the immutable truth that you really want to own your own place. (harpers is losing their lease).

never gonna be the same.