Web Log Archive, December 11th through December 24th, 2006

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

"After Katrina, it began to seem that Bush's actions and policies were nothing more than the result of drunken bar bets. In fact, the very reputable National Enquirer posited that W was back on the bottle. That would explain [the] nomination of Harriet Miers: Watch this, this'll be funny - the next person that walks in here, I'm naming to the Supreme Court."
From Barry Crimmins' year-end-summary column...this year entitled, "The Bonfire of The Inanities".

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

John Milton (1608-1674), from Paradise Lost, 1667.

Thursday, December 22nd, 2005

Newpeep, my young-but-long-time cyber-friend, is refreshing for her uncloned and un-clone-able points of view. She sports the literary talent---the rhythm, the sense of irony, the casual mastery of grammar and syntax---to hold down a column in a newspaper or magazine. It is with her permission that I here reprint her Blog entry from Monday, December 12th:

Four o'clock in the morning and I'm sitting here in the campus computer lab like a big goober.

When I was a kid, my dad ruined Christmas for everyone, every year. He hates Christmas tree lights and yelled at me when I plugged them in one Saturday morning. He'd be in a mood for weeks so that the rest of us had to tip-toe around him.* He's just a selfish asshole. Earlier this year my mom revealed that when my dad was a kid, he was sent to California to spend Christmas with his dad, step-mom, and two half-siblings. The half-kids got presents but my dad didn't. That blows, it really does. I mean, what the fuck were his dad and step-mom thinking? But it doesn't, in my opinion, excuse my dad's adult behavior; it doesn't justify his desire to fuck Christmas for everyone else.

I don't celebrate Christmas. I'm not a Christian; I hate the commercialism and the obligation to buy presents for people that they don't need and that I can't afford. I think it's stupid to string up electric lights everywhere and being in a store with Christmas music piped in overhead is enough to make me want to slash my wrists. Awright, that's me. Other people want to celebrate and enjoy Christmas, that's fine. But I'll stay away from the malls until well after the holidays. But I hate malls no matter what time of year.

Shit, am I a crank or what? Is it inevitable that we turn into our parents? If so, it gives me yet another reason to be glad that I never had kids -- I wouldn't want to make anyone else as miserable as I was.

*My mom pisses me off. She made me her confidante of sorts when I was a kid, telling me her marital problems and griping about her husband. Wrong! Parents should never do that to their kids! Anyway, she said once, "It makes me so mad that we have to walk on eggshells around him." But she would never say anything to him directly, then or now. My attitude is, you married him and put up with his shit all these years, you're as much to blame.

PLEASE don't let me get depressed this year. Three Christmases ago I had dinner by myself at IHOP. That was awful. After my separation when I was such a mess, my mom said, "I don't want you to be alone and depressed at Christmastime," and I replied, "So why should it be different from any other day of the year?"

Anyway. I'm wearing some new canvas cargo pants that I liked at first, but now that they've been washed a couple of times, they're too short. :-E

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005                 The shortest day (and the longest night) of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

"The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish, and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown." 

News junkie that I be, I say that the 'mainstream news outlets' (the ones reflexively called 'liberal' by Alfred and his gang) have got a long way to go before offering the news-browsing public the 'real stories' which often lurk behind predictable and perfunctory (read: 'boring') coverage. Check out, for a good example, this 'under-the-radar' account of Cheney's 'surprise' Iraq visit last weekend. While it is only fair to concede that the real story has been reported (the Boston Globe is not the Berkeley Barb, after all)...it has not been featured. 

Monday, December 19th, 2005

Is there anyone who gives a bloody stool about whom it is that Time Magazine has named to be 'Person(s) of the Year'? Give us this day our daily break! I say, if you've got forty (or fifty) billion dollars, then you should not find it difficult to be generous!

Sunday, December 18th, 2005

"...in order to get a red light at [an] intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident."  Jack Anderson (1922-2005)

Among the (breathtaking) features of Pro Tools is its ability to memorize settings for a given track. They call this 'automation' and I'm just now learning how to use it. Let's say a song has fifteen individual tracks. One by one, while playing it back, you decide (i.e., you 'write') when a given track comes in (un-mutes), goes out (mutes), goes up, comes down, pans right or pans left. (I'll call these six selectables: 'activities'.) So, for the mix at hand, I've set all but the acoustic piano, one synthesizer keyboard and the solo acoustic guitar to  fixed levels and then, one take at time, I've written the activities for these three tracks. On the next playback after the write, the software will 'read' what I wrote! So now, I can build upon this mix by writing activities for one or more of the other tracks (that had initially been set to fixed levels). All this can make for a lively mix...and one which can be refined over time. 

Saturday, December 17th, 2005

Every year at this time, I must field requests from dozens of people (yeah, right)...asking me what it is that I want for Christmas. I suppose I'm finally (about fifty years) too old to say "a new butt, mine's got a crack in it" so, this year, I've decided to make it easy. For me, there are only three acceptable gifts and they are
1) one pair of decent woolen, athletic socks...costing $7.50 or less, or 
2) one pound of decent coffee...costing  $10.00 or less or 
3) one decent coffee cup...costing $5.00 or less.
Please...for those of you for whom Christmas wouldn't be Christmas if you didn't buy a gift for me, I ask that you confine yourself to one...and only one...of these three choices.
And...and for those of you who can, somehow, make it through this Wondrous Season without buying me anything at all: thank you.

Friday, December 16th, 2005              The 24th anniversary of my first day of servitude.

"...others have posited that its novelty and showiness simply made it more attractive to those seeking mates." Say what?

Thursday, December 15th

Mine is a superior nature and so I don't, of course, watch television. But last night there was a quite-entertaining-infomercial hosted by a crazed, bushy-haired-thirty-something-Ban-Lon-button-shirted dude who goes by the unassuming moniker "The Health Man" ['Considered by many to be the healthiest man alive!']. While he held forth on a Hawaiian beach, a white-on-black ticker patiently scrolled left-to-right over and behind his head...informing any (whose hearing aids might be off) and every that John Wayne's colon weighed 45 pounds at autopsy (and Presley's wasn't much lighter)! 
Check out the Web site if you need a yuk! It's a cyber bottom-feeder! Here's an excerpt from a 'testimonial': "...My father was 85 years old and did not wake up one morning. Instead of calling an ambulance and taking him to the hospital we kept him home, ...and I would administer a colon irrigation...shortly thereafter he woke up." Yeah! I'll bet he woke up! Wouldn't you...if someone was pushing a garden hose up yer ass?
Another testimonial begins with the no-less-shocking, "I am 23 years old and had not had a bowel movement in almost a month!" and ends (with a flourish) by describing "a huge stale slimy very black stool" from which "the smell was unbearable"! ...and me without a spoon!

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

There is our opinion and
there is our reaction. 
Our opinion is what we think and 
our reaction is what we feel. 

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005

I ventured out yesterday to buy some strings for a newly-un-mothballed Guild F-50 (circa 1970) that has been graciously loaned to me and (at the local Guitar Center) I ran into the (nearly legendary) Marc Silber. Quite a flash! I had always thought of Marc as a premier technician, collector and trader in fretted instruments, but I was unaware of how well he plays! Check out his Web site, MarcSilberMusic.com. It's got plenty of history, a well-itemized list of his local inventory and, most surprising of all to me (like I say), a couple of posted MP3's from his CD, " Test Tracks 1 ". 

And, meanwhile, I keep screwing with "Can't Believe". Now that it's got about twenty actual tracks (though eight are sub-mixed into one stereo track), it's become quite 'interesting' to mix. I got the levels pretty hot without distortion and, after spending a few hours tuning my (nothing-to-brag-about) acoustic grand piano...I've even mixed that in with the two synthesizer tracks to what I think is good effect. What with the dither plug-in on the master fader, it's now a pretty full sound.

Monday, December 12th, 2005

"I'd love to ask President Bush and Vice President Cheney whether they have urged their daughters to enlist for duty in Iraq, and if not, why not."
 Richard Rosenthal

Sunday, December 11th, 2005

Each of us has good days...and dreams: 

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