Web Log January 9th through January 22, 2005
Saturday, January 22, 2005 Thirty-two years ago today, Lyndon Johnson died.
My big brother lives in Miami and works in "options trading". [OK...I only kinda know what that is.] Nearly every day, by email, I receive his Global Futures newsletter which invariably includes a quotation by some luminary. Sometimes, these snippets resonate. Sometimes they don't. Other times, one that doesn't mean anything to me at first, does later. An example is the following: "A man may fail many times but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else." Although most often attributed to J. Paul Getty, others have also claimed authorship. So what is it about this (apparently coveted) observation and insight?
To me, the quote only suggests that we take responsibility for ourselves. Of course, there are real victims. [Someone walking on the sidewalk when struck by an out-of-control driver comes to mind...or someone who has come down with ALS.] But Mr. Getty et al. did not write that there is no such thing as failure, defeat and death. Rather, that the moment of failure is not the moment of victimization (no matter how random, extreme or unfair the latter may be). For don't we all know someone whom we feel should be happy, but isn't? And haven't we all met some pitiable soul at whose upbeat mood we marvel? When we blame someone else for our mindset we are, in effect, giving up...and then we have been defeated and we have failed.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Last night was a milestone for me. I posted my first Pro Tools production. It's taken about two months for me to reconstruct my projects around this new, hard-drive recording system and away, at last, from tape recording. The differences are staggering...give a listen, please. I'd welcome some feedback on the mix. My first impression is that it's a bit bassy for "typical computer speakers". It sounds about right on a "typical home stereo", however. I'm still very much a novice, I know, with this software. I mean, I don't even know (yet) how to add a bit of "dither" to a final mix like everyone says yer s'posed to. To be really honest? I don't even understand (yet) what 'dither' is...as it pertains to recorded music. But soon I will, I'm sure.
From Lin comes this snatch of humor.
Overlook, for a moment, that the phrase "other alternatives" is redundant. Now, check out what I got in the mail this morning. Ya know? I hate to be a jerk, but for $116.00 I thought I was buying the no-frills-euthanasia plan for my poor old cat. She didn't need a GD pine box and a séance, but I couldn't get off on backing over her in my truck, either! Ooh! Maybe that was among Dan's dastardly "other alternatives now in practice"!
Thursday, January 20, 2005 Sad
to say...Inauguration Day
Monday night I got drawn into watching some of the singles match between Andre Agassi and Rainer Schuettler at the Australian Open. Andre didn't just win. He had his way with Rainer! Although the best-of-five-sets match started with (only) a 6-3 win for Agassi, Schuettler was to get only one more game off the soon-to-be 35 year-old American in the remaining two sets. Whenever there even was a volley (that is, not an ace by Andre or a double-fault by Rainer), Agassi just found a comfortable place to stand while he patiently made forehand returns cross-court to the younger (by almost precisely six years) man's backhand for as long as it took for Schuettler to commit one a them thar "unforced errors" (that's tennis lingo for screw-ups on routine returns). In other words, Andre never had to go for a "winner" (that's tennis lingo for an aggressive or risky shot). He just had to wait for Rainer to "put himself to bed", so to speak. After more than an hour of this, commentator Patrick McEnroe blurted out what was brutally obvious: this was hecka-boring!
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
"Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. Judge your success by what you gave up in order to get it." The Dali Lama
"We should accept misfortune not only in thanks, but in infinite gratitude to Providence which, by such means, detaches us from an excessive love for Earthly things and elevates our minds to the celestial and Divine." Galileo Galilei 1564 -1642
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Yesterday, on my walk (which I have returned to as a routine now that my sudden (and peculiar) lameness from Christmas morning has, at last, abated) I smelled the first blossoms of Spring.
"Whom
the Gods would destroy, they will first make angry."
"What anger worse or slower to abate than a lover's love when it has
turned to hate." Euripides
(485 BC - 406 BC)
Last Friday, I was lucky enough to catch an interview (conducted by Terry Gross on September 26, 2000) with the late F.X. Toole. It's not that Jerry Boyd said much that was particularly quotable ("...howling in the woods."). It's just that he seemed so alive and engaged...at age 70.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Today was supposed to be my first day w/o a paper paper but habits die hard, it seems, and there was one in the driveway this morning. Yawn.
Received a cool email from my ex mother-in-law. (Thanks, June!) I haven't checked all the assertions, but it sounds about right. Mixed bag, I think, but I challenge anyone to find something bad about advances in dentistry over the last century. My stepfather (born in 1889, shown here in 1927) enjoyed telling us how teeth were extracted way back then. A grim and bloody business, to be sure.
Sunday, January 16, 2005 Joseph McGuinness was born 59 years ago today.
Frank Rich writes that "...hidden agendas in the presentation of "news" metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism."
If your dog or cat hasn't moved much in the last week or two, then perhaps
it has died.
For more timely advice from veterinarian (and Miss
America, 1990) Debbye
Turner, click on this mutt. 
Saturday, January 15, 2005
I am, steadily, learning Pro Tools and Midi. Helpful to me is a
Yahoo! Group called, simply, pro_tools.
One of the many great things about the Internet is that, for virtually any
subject you set out to learn, there is a List
somewhere with fellow learners. In the early days of online-ness, these lists
often (if not usually) took the form of the so-called "Usenet"
or "News Groups". AOL got into the pile with its (often anarchic)
Discussion Groups and Chat Rooms. Now, there are countless such services from
which to choose. My daughter's high school has an "etree",
now hosted on bytes2know.com. A very good
thing.
So far, in the Yahoo! Group for Pro Tools students, I have not posted anything.
That's because, up until maybe just a few days ago, I didn't feel that I
understood the subject well enough to formulate an intelligent question. I just
patiently read the questions/posts, taking it all in. . .comforted by the fact
that I'm not the only one struggling to catch up with this new way of doing
things. I'm hoping that, by this time next week, I'll start posting songs that
I've recorded on Pro Tools...with some help from Midi. I'm especially gassed by
the prospect of being able to carefully write out a whole piano score and then
have my Midi program play it all for me...perfectly! In spite of all that's so
wrong about our world today, was there ever a more exciting and wonderful time
to be alive?
Friday, January 14, 2005
Spencer Dryden died Monday. Though best known as the Jefferson Airplane's drummer in their prime, Spencer also put in several years with the New Riders of The Purple Sage in the mid 70's. Recording with the Riders (on MCA in 1976), he played drums on a novelty tune of mine. In digging a bit deeper, I found my full name listed with that very tune under Wacky (but hip) actual C&W Song Titles! Praise God! Maybe somebody owes me something! :-+))
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Patrice sent me the Bob Dylan autobiography, "Chronicles". I started reading it last night and, I can't say how anyone else might take it in but...for me it's riveting. Turns out that my favorite singer/performer of all times, Dave Van Ronk, was a mentor to Dylan in Bob's early days in Greenwich Village. A personal note: I bought Dave Van Ronk's Gibson J-200 (photograph in the last hyperlink) from his wife in 1969 for only $300! This was (and is, I hope) a very famous instrument, for it was the one Dave used to record virtually all of his best known renditions. My heart aches as I recount the sad fact that I sold it (traded it, actually) only a few years later for some electric gear worth less than $1,000.00. Oh well...it wasn't the first (or the last) dumb thing I've ever done. I actually saw (and heard) Bob Dylan play that guitar one summer night in 1963 at the Gaslight Cafe in NYC. He had just written "Only A Pawn In Their Game", about the murder of Megdar Evers in Mississippi. In words attributed to Robert Schumann upon first hearing Frederic Chopin play the piano in nineteenth century Paris:
Hats Off, Gentlemen! A Genius!
Thanks, Patrice!
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Nothing, so far today, worth blogging about...except I'm still respiring.
By the time I was old enough to store memories, whenever I'd notice an old person (anyone over 21) who was grumpy...and especially if they were being mean to a kid, I'd promise myself that when I got old (and I never didn't think that I would), I'd somehow manage to remember what it was like to be a kid...and then I'd try not to be grumpy or mean to one.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Safeway is real. There was this elderly woman standing squarely before the vat of green beans...picking them out to put in her plastic bag...one-by one. At $1.99 per pound, she musta felt she was entitled to gather only clean, uniformly green beans...no rust and no hitchhiking caterpillars. Of course, I felt no impatience.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Thirty five years ago today, me and she set sail from Southampton for Lisbon. Seasickness (with its remarkable way of making one forget about any and all worries that had consumed one before) struck within hours of the start of the two-day voyage.
And a mere twenty-two years ago today, my favorite cat of all time (Ruby) 
succumbed.
From the sparseness of my Blog entries, you might not be surprised to learn that much of these last several days has been spent working with my daughter to complete her Science Project. She did good and we be done!
You want scatological on the 'net? Tough to be outdone is www.constipated.com. NOT a comedy site!
OK. Couldn't resist. I watched a swatch of Amber Frey (who has been surgically attached to Gloria Allred) being interviewed by Greta Van Susteren on Fox. Now, all of this is precisely none of my business but...it should no longer baffle anyone that Scott quite reasonably assumed that Amber would never "catch on", so to speak. I mean, I'm thinkin' he musta thought...even though his mug (at the end of December 2002) be on every TV news show and the story was covered to saturation on radio and in the newspapers...that she simply would never put two-and-two together (and get four). As it turned out, or so the story goes, she never DID, actually, get four until a friend called her (almost a week after Laci's disappearance) to ask if she could turn on her TV and find a news station. Within hours, Amber did both of those things and right-away noticed the similarity between Laci's grief-stricken husband and the dude whom she'd been mixing it up with for six weeks. Or is all that not true? Is somebody just trying to give dumb blondes a bad name? Who's read the book?
Sunday, January 9, 2005 Richard Nixon was born ninety-one years ago today.
If you can keep your head about you when everyone else is losing theirs and blaming it on you, then perhaps you have misappraised the situation.
Interesting article about the QWERTY keyboard here. Worth a read, I believe.
