Happy Christmas

Time is short. Time is money. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana...

Not much time spent blogging lately, obviously, but I had to document that 13 year-old boy Matthew won a radio contest yesterday. Chip off the old block, unfortunately, as Lora is wont to point out. With a little help from 11 year-old Peter, he correctly answered the three "Brain Buster" questions on the Oldies station before going to school. (I was driving to work, and sadly, had a different radio station on.) They all related to "A Charlie Brown Christmas" which was on the tube again just a few days ago.

1: Who was the director of the kids' Christmas pageant?
2: How much does Lucy charge for psychiatric help?
3: What did Lucy want for Christmas?

So we have drive down to 120th and Howard to pick up whatever his prize was sometime in the next couple days... Pretty cool. They usually have decent sponsors, maybe it's some more free food. Who needs a "coveted" kitchen magnet or a right-wing bobblehead doll, anyway? (The answers, BTW, are "Charlie Brown", "five cents", and "real estate!")

A short bleat concerning everyone's favorite OS... It's always an "application" that has "caused" a fatal error, or something the user did not do "properly" that makes the blue screen appear. (Rumor has it that the next Windows upgrade will include a more pleasing optional shade of blue for the screen of death.) If it accuses you of not telling it to shut itself down "properly", you can save time by just killing power to the damn thing. (In an office environment, this has the added benefit of causing conniptions in the IT department.) The only other option is to reinstall Windows, which carries the risk of losing all kinds of drivers and BIOS extensions and fixes and crap that you may have installed in order to upgrade video, hard drive, CD burner or various peripherals since the machine was new. Not a task to be undertaken when sleepy. Most Windows error messages are completely meaningless and most diagnostics it does are a waste of time. My computer spends about a minute counting its RAM when it wakes up, and I'm pretty sure it gets it wrong all three times. Every time the kids install a new game, something that used to work doesn't anymore. "Solitaire" doesn't even work anymore, fer cryin' out loud. Half the time "Setup" claims to be updating some file for something that was installed a month ago, and a "Driver Memory Error" always comes and goes with no discernable useful information offered. The machine may be twice as dumb as the people who wrote its operating system, surely one of the significant achievements of the modern era...

I got a nice e-mail from somebody who found this blog Googling for a couple Cat Stevens songs that were in the playlist I posted a few weeks ago. She's evidently assembling a soundtrack CD for Harold And Maude. Cool idea. I gotta find that on video one of these days. Haven't seen it in many years and it's a great flick. I watched McCabe And Mrs. Miller a few years ago (another flick inextricably linked in my mind to sitting in a lecture hall in Madison on a Friday or Saturday night) specifically to marvel at a soundtrack with Leonard Cohen songs on it.

My favorite movie (even though I never saw it on a big screen) is still Truly Madly Deeply. Honorable Mention must go to The Royal Tenenbaums from last year, which, no big surprise, also has an astonishingly good soundtrack. Not just Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground, but Nico, Nick Drake and Emitt Rhodes as well!

A rhetorical question is one that requires no answer. It is a rhetorical device. Rhetoric involves debate, speechmaking, constructing logical and coherent thoughts and using them to baffle and irritate those unfortunate enough to be caught in one's general vicinty. The Phonograph, once known as a "Talking Machine" is not, strictly speaking, a rhetorical device. But it can be used as one, in a pinch. The pinch is a small unit of measurement used in Cooking. I'm not sure of the Metric equivalent. When the Music is Really Cooking, the musicians are sometimes Baked. The Birth Of The Cool is one example of this phenomenon.

Phrase Of The Day: "cork soaking iceholes"

Tip O' The Hat To Dawn!

Well, Aneb Jah Rasta Sensas-Utcha Nefer-I (of "The Rasta Movement" political party according to the ballot) came in dead last in the Wisconsin Gubernatorial Race. The atmosphere of the Capitol's smoke-filled back rooms would definitely have acquired a different character had he won.

Hey, I got on the radio again yesterday. I forget what the show is called on WHAD 90.7 in the afternoon, but they're talking to Gubernatorial Candidates all this week. Well, they had some Independent Candidate on yesterday who was just talking out of his ass. Conspiracy Theory Keeping The Black Man Down nonsense was just the tip of the iceberg...

So I decided to try to call, and got through on the second try. After waiting on hold for 5 or 6 minutes, I actually got on the air. The following is not a transcription since I haven't bothered to call the Public Radio Store to buy a cassette copy of the show, but to the best of my recollection I said:

"Hi Kathleen, I just wanted to call to thank you and all the staff of Wisconsin Peoples Radio for having this guest on your show today. He is singlehandedly making all the rest of the candidates seem sane, coherent and extremely well educated."

Kathleen Dunn, professional that she is, replied, "Okay." And went to the next caller.

Ha! As if making Ed Thompson seem well educated is anything to sneer at. At least he didn't make Jim Doyle appear to be a greasy dishonest *cough* career politician... Sorry about the redundancies, folks!

From Hunter S.Thompson's Generation of Swine: "The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason..."

This is often misquoted, and it does have a ring of truth in this variation. The punch line at the end lets us know that HST is a humorist, I guess... "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

Trivia from All Music Guide: "The London (Ontario) Werewolves, members of minor-league baseball's Frontier League, until recently featured a mascot named Warren Z. Vaughan."

Oh, in the unlikely event that anyone reading this wants to contact me, try " mrdrdave at yahoo dot com " until I get around to doing some HTML work on this template... I accidentally told my boss I'd get some work done this week...