I wanna provide the link now to that Florida kid's Web site that I mentioned a couple of days ago. It's real well done. This kid has a precocial capacity for writing and story-telling. Keep at it, Zach!

By now we all know that Scott Peterson's a creep...but his own half-sister, Anne, has come out with a book that can only be regarded as a malodorous bit of "piling on". In the book, she airs the family's "dirty Lyndon" (as Hubert was wont to say). Not coincidentally, Anne is represented by the same attorney who represents Amber Frey who (it is alleged in this new tome) is routinely referred to as a "bimbo" by Scott's loyal mom. Now...are we surprised? Yes, it is an ill wind indeed that blows nobody good. Remember America's favorite house guest: Kato Kaelin? 

Remix of LYT just posted.

Quite interesting NYT article about Dennis Rader, the BTK dude from Kansas. Turns out that Kato and Dennis have the same birthday! [March 9th]

Friday, March 4, 2005

Just When You Thought It Was Safe Department: 

Professor Mary Anne Case, of the University of Chicago, observes that "Very few spaces in our society remain divided by sex. There's marriage and there's toilets, and very little else." OK...so I hadn't looked at it that way! (Maybe that's why she's a law professor and I'm a schmo!) Turns out that the Queer Action Campaign for Gender-Neutral Bathrooms has successfully petitioned the campus facility managers to set aside 10 single-use gender-neutral restrooms. And I say, "Good for them!" It was easier, we must suppose, for the the University to set aside these rooms than to confront the clearly unclear policy (read: 'no policy at all') as to who is entitled to use which open, multi-user same-sex "traditional" restroom. I smell a Republican proposal for a Constitutional Amendment on this one!

Thursday, March 3, 2005

Posted 'nother production last night. I b'lieve I be improving...if slowly. 

Interesting Web site I got to check out yesterday...done by a kid in Florida. I won't link it just now but what right-away got my attention was his almost offhand reference to merging Ebonics into "The King's English". I, personally (as someone obsessed with words throughout my life) love (and am drawn to) several of the Ebonics constructions! I realize it's hard for an old bald white guy like me to write something like that last sentence without having it come-across as patronizing. But I like language that sings! To my ears (and just for example), the Ebonics "I be..." is both more pronounceable and more intelligible than the "Standard" "I've been...". I even feel happier when I speak the former.

Here's a good one from my buddy Skip who, though busier than the proverbial one-arm paper hanger, managed to find time to share his thoughts about what awaits us all: "When I die, I want to die like my grandfather, who died peacefully in his sleep...not screaming like all the passengers in his car."

"I think that's how Chicago got started.  Buncha people in New York said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.'"--Richard Jeni

OK...pretend your last name is "Kass"...and you have a son. What're you gonna name him? Jack?

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Have still not finished my "Song Index" page. Maggie's play opens next week.

It HAS happened. My right hand, from using a mouse, is aching. In the last few weeks I've made extensive use of a great program (that I've mentioned here before): Print Music. Because I'm such a skinflint, I haven't yet traded up to the premium version of the program, but the version I DO use has been invaluable (or is it valuable?...one of those words like flammable and inflammable) in my setting up MIDI files for Pro Tools recordings. Unfortunately, Print Music is very mouse-intensive. The area between my right thumb and forefinger is troubled. Sure, I can use my left hand instead...but that calls for patience that I don't usually possess. I have lots of work to do...both in Print Music and in reconstructing this Web site. If there IS a God, she has not designed the human hand for mouse-ing.

"If you chase two rabbits, both will escape."

Tuesday, March 1, 2005    Bob Weir is fifty-nine. 

Yesterday I was too busy to think of something to blog about today. Life is good and I'm sure glad I'm not Michael Jackson.
I must put some time and energy into reworking this little Web site. But, as Samuel Johnson once so rightly noted, "Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else."  
By tonight, I hope to have added a "Song Index" type of page.

Monday, February 28, 2005

My big sister (shown with our stepfather in 1960) continues her creative writing class and has graciously permitted me to "publish" her latest creation. Mary Kelly was my mother's mother. She arrived in New York, from Ireland, in 1914 at the age of forty three. I understand that she had stayed in Ireland to care for her father (my great grandfather) who lived into his nineties. When he died, she left her homeland with nothing (and no expectation of return). Ireland was desperately poor. By American measures, it still is. Mary had her first (and only) child when she was forty-four years old. It is fascinating to ponder Mary's views (assumptions, really) about gender roles.  
Siblings! Do we have any photos of the old bird?

Sunday, February 27, 2005

In a display of efficiency, Dennis Rader was arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced & hung yesterday in Wichita, Kansas. CNN's been interviewing everyone who ever so much as waited in line with the dude at a KFC drive-through! I mean, they had this one guy (a former neighbor) calling him an "unpleasant person". Gee. I tremble to think of what someone might say about me to the press if I were charged with some high profile crime. Someone'd be sure to pipe up with, "Yeah, ya know, I always knew there was something weird about that guy!"

Remember Richard Jewell? That link is from October 29, 1996! I remember the press at the time running interviews with his grade school teachers. People saying he was a fat loser and, furthermore, they always suspected that he was a miscreant...a shitball. The poor bastard was living with his mom and working a horrible security gig for the Summer Olympics in Atlanta when he happened to be stationed near the scene of the bombing on July 27, 1996. He tried to help. Was at first called a "hero" and then...the FBI couldn't just come out and admit they didn't have a suspect! It got ugly. Eric Rudolph, I believe, has since been charged with that bombing.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they
came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

Today is the sixth day of the sixth week that I have gone without a newspaper. The change in my life is profound. Although I can feel it, I don't quite feel able to describe it . I wonder/speculate as to why, for virtually my whole adult life, I have been a "news junkie". I remember now that my mother and stepfather were never without a delivered-newspaper and I myself, as a lad, more often than not, had a paper route.
The curious thing continues to be that I don't at all miss the newspaper! I can't even remember, now, what I was getting out of it! And, in parallel, I'm changing the ways I interact with my computers. I don't, necessarily spend any less time online. It's just that I do so now more in what we used to call a "batch mode". I used to always have the machine on and would respond to email nearly in "real time". Now I "save it up" and think about how many other things I likely do...automatically...out of habit...long after I can even remember the original reason for the behavior. Deep!

Friday, February 25, 2005

I have never understood why "an open mind" is connoted to be a thing of virtue. It has been my consistent experience that, when your mind is open, people fill it up with nonsense! I mean, I had an open mind once...but then I found myself believing in Santa Claus!
During my aimless remembrances of Art Linkletter over the last few days, I did not realize that the old trout is still out there flappin' his gills. Well, I DID see him a few months back on Larry King and he was still, even at ninety-two years old, "as sharp as a beach ball", as the saying goes. Actually...that's not fair at all! It's not hard to understand how and why this man has been so successful. He clearly IS a very intelligent person (and not just by comparison to that pea-brain, Larry King, a man who "couldn't find his own face on a sunny day"...as the saying goes). But given Art's brown-shirt world-view, this very intelligence is what makes him dangerous! I mean, Pat Boone is every bit as politically and socially retrograde as Art, but (and there's no nice way to say this) Pat's dumb..."as dumb as a box-a-rocks", as the saying goes.
So now...in his dotage, Art's been recruited as a spokesperson for another one of these Republican front groups. This particular Swift Boat Veterans For Truth is called "USA Next" or something equally awful. They giga-bash the GD American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) for the love of  Jesus! Shoot me! I was unaware that the AARP'ers are a buncha  buggerin' Commies! This strategy is all part of Alfred E.'s goal to privatize Social Security. Now, maybe I was born yesterday but it wasn't last night and so OK I don't know Thing One about Social Security but I can sure see who's fer somethin' and who's agin somethin' and it don't take me too long to decide that if Alfred E.'s fer it, then I'm agin it. Life is THAT simple, anymore! I gotta figure that Alfred E. didn't all-of-a-sudden start worryin' about poor folks and old folks. But I DO assume that among the folks who wanna privatize Social Security are wealthy stockbrokers and large financial institutions...groups that will surely benefit from a new source of investment capital.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

All around me, I see only opposites. Nothing makes sense, but for its absence.

Art's 20 year-old daughter, Diane, leaped to her death from her sixth floor apartment on the morning of October 4, 1969. Urban legend, before there even were urban legends, had it that she was on LSD and "thought she could fly". Art did what any one of us might do when faced with this gravest of all gravities: he blamed someone. How else to make sense of the senseless? We everyday, just-walkin'-around people are quite accustomed to not having things "our way", even at Burger King. So I imagine tragedy wounds those of wealth and influence all the more deeply...for it mocks them. Helpless is what they are NOT used to feeling. For all his money...for all his celebrity...for all his righteous indignation...Art could not reverse the irreversible. Please check out The Scarlet Linkletter. 

Where I worked for so long, Fernando, a 25-year employee stayed all Tuesday night in his office. At first light, on August 29, 2001, he found a site bike and casually pedaled it to the parking garage where, with no visible hesitation (as captured on security cameras) he rode the elevator up and pitched himself off the fifth floor of that garage to the pavement below. People just arriving for their day's confinement were met with his lifeless form outside the ground floor elevator lobby. We speculated (rather idly, I confess) that he wanted very much to be found promptly and that's why he chose to land near a path well-traveled. It never made the local news. Any one of hundreds of us "troublemakers" coulda phoned it in, I suppose. But not one of us did. There was something far too (fwoabw) "serious" about what Fernando had done.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 

Y'ever have a day when ya can't decide which is yer  favorite Art Linkletter book? 

Tuesday, February 22, 2005  My maternal grandmother would have been one hundred 'n thirty-five years old today.

It turns out that Queen Elizabeth and I have have something in common! Neither of us will be attending Prince Charles' wedding this Spring. 

Not for the first time, I steal my brother's quote of the day: 

If you wanna be seen, stand up!
If you wanna be heard, speak up!
If you wanna be loved, shut up and sit down!

Monday, February 21, 2005   Spring is but a month away.

Who the HELLLL!!! would go and name somebody "Ruud"? Especially when the last name is already "Lubbers"? And watts in a name? Well...the dude just resigned over allegations that he has, indeed, been rude in his search for lovers!

I posit that, by the time someone is five years old, he (or she) has endured every possible joke about his (or her) name.
My father's brother named his first-born "Anita". (Get it?)

We usually know what we want but we seldom know what will make us happy. So often, to lose is to win.

Sunday, February 20, 2005   Patty Hearst is fifty-one today.

Remixed LYT with restructured bridge vocals.  

"At the dawn of feminism, there was an assumption that women would not be as severely judged on their looks in ensuing years. Phooey. It's just the opposite. Looks matter more than ever, with more and more women spending fortunes turning themselves into generic, plastic versions of what they think men want, reaching for eerily similar plumped-up faces and body shapes." Maureen Dowd