There is much to say, but little time to say it in. Busy at work, but customer orders are still slow in coming...

The last of my dad's siblings died last Friday. Aunt Margaret was less than a month shy of her 95th birthday.

"A major problem with cooking a golden goose, repeatedly over many years, is that one day it might no longer lay golden eggs. But perhaps this is not a prime concern for battery farmers." - Robert Fripp - Wednesday 8th January 2003

Battery Farmers? Sounds like a great name for my new math-rock / ambient-drone / spazz-jazz / jam-band / psychedelic-folk / new-wave / sew-age / roots-rock / drip-hop combo...

For no good reason, apart from the fact that I've been trimming and arranging this playlist over the last few days, here's 4 hours, 3 minutes and 29 seconds of the music I've been marinating in over the last month or so... Not as schizo as ever, but it does cover a few bases...

Moody Blues - Never Comes The Day
The Rolling Stones - She Smiled Sweetly
Pearls Before Swine - Uncle John
Serge Gainsbourg - L'abominable Strip-tease
John Cale - Dead Or Alive
Nick Cave - By The Time I Get To Phoenix
R.L. Burnside - Hard Time Killing Floor
Professor Longhair - Ball The Wall
Armegeddon - Buzzard
Abba - Ring Ring Swedish Version
Jeff Lynne & Roy Wood - Me And You
Ace Kefford Stand - Gravy Booby Jamm
Acid Gallery - Dance Around The Maypole
Roy Wood - Polythene Pam
Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour - Flying
Nice - Get To You
Beatles - Across The Universe
Arthur Prysock - EbbTide
Dr Hook - Who If Not You
Captain Sensible - Wot
Sharks - Doctor Love
Clash - Police and Thieves
Go-Betweens - By Chance
Go-Betweens - Part Company
Matching Mole - Beer As In Braindeer
Matching Mole - Instant Pussy
Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band - 21st Century Schizoid Man & Bubbles In The Wine
Giles Giles & Fripp - Tremelo Study in A major
Sharks - Snakes And Swallowtails
Steamhammer - Junior's Wailing
Surfaris - Hey Joe Where Are You Going
Tee Set - She Likes Weeds
Suzanne Vega & John Cale - So Long Marianne
White Willow - Anamnesis
Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts - Queen & Soldier
Armageddon - Silver Tightrope
Toto - Africa
Buffalo Springfield - Sad Memory
Chris Hillman - Tomorrow Is A Long Time
Sam Bush - Big Mon
Shane MacGowan - Mama Lou
Kate Rusby - Our Town
Chris Hillman - Morning Sky
Lucinda Williams - Still I Long For Your Kiss
Flatlanders - Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go D
Kate Rusby - Dark Eyed Sailor
White Willow - Elvenking
Jimmie Dale Gilmore - One Endless Night
Sharks - World Park Junkies
Spooner - Cruel School
Abba - What About Livingstone
Hot Tuna - Hit Single # 1
Sharks - Driving Sideways
This Mortal Coil - Kanga Roo
Spooner - Eyes Of The World
Standells - Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go
Human Beinz - Pied Piper
Spooner - Tomorrow Never Comes
Tom Rapp - After The Gold Rush
White Willow - Snowfall
Spooner - Wildest Dreams
Tom Rapp - Blind

Happy New Year!

Been mostly offline for the last two weeks, so I'm just catching up on a few blogs and comics before getting into the Seriously Productive part of my day...

Finally nabbed Harold And Maude from the library last week. A classic cult movie. Perhaps not as great as it may have seemed in memory, but I was watching it by myself (snoozing Lora by my side) and the state of the art in black humor has advanced somewhat in the last 32 years... I did enjoy it though, especially the Cat Stevens songs on the soundtrack. I may have to CD-R Tea For The Tillerman and Mona Bone Jakon soon. Probably Teaser And The Firecat to complete the triptych, as well... "How Can I Tell You?" indeed...

Had a lot of time off work and rested up pretty good over the holidays. Quite busy, though, lotsa parties, multitudes of Gluckstein relatives in town, lots of good food and drink. Won another darn radio contest (Forgotten Oldie = "Concrete And Clay" by Unit Four Plus Two), but the prize was a pair of New Years Eve tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters, so we never went to pick them up and went to see The Two (not "Twin"!) Towers instead. Then back home to watch Red Green and Fawlty Towers. Lit some sparklers and bottle rockets with the boyz, woke up Lora at midnight and we all went to our beds, saving the champagne for the next day.

I should make entries here more often if I'm going to type so many irrelevant details. So it goes. And now there's several hot projects which should command my attention...

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.